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‘Don’t agonize, organize!’

Flo Kennedy, 1971¹

What a time to dare to take on the present, defined as the record of what we are ceasing to be, and the seed of what we are in the process of becoming!

Flashback to 1992: at the physical site of the watershed art exhibition Post Human (Deitch, 1992), a giant female figure of an Armani-clad business woman confidently welcomed visitors to the show. This cutting-edge exhibition displayed multiple variations of the new micro-femininities being constructed at that moment in technological culture. The curator Jeffrey Deitch captured the avant-garde spirit of the age by foregrounding the role of technology in blurring the binary boundaries between subjects and objects, humans and non-humans. The exhibition showed that body improvement and the embrace of artificiality were becoming the norm: plastic surgery, dieting, exercises, mind-altering drugs and other practices enhance the humans beyond their dreams. The Post Human showed also that art assumed a much more central role as it merged with science, computerization and biotechnology in further re-shaping the human form and perfecting a flair for the artificial. The message was clear: the pleasures of the inorganic have become second nature, producing a deeper intimacy with technological artefacts. And the contradictions surrounding the female bodies were at the heart of this very first exhibition on the posthuman.

Fast forward to 2013. During her ‘Mrs. Carter Show World Tour’, American singer Beyoncé flashed the word ‘Feminist’ in shining letters across the stage and sang her feminist anthem ‘Flawless’ from the hit album Lemonade. Throughout this performance, Beyoncé repeated, like a mantra, the following definition, taken from the work of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie: ‘Feminist: a person who believes in the social, political and economic equality of the sexes.’ Simple and to the point, who could quarrel with that?

Well, some actually did. Celebated black feminist bell hooks, for instance, voiced critcism of celebrity media culture and of the explicitly sexualized nature of Beyoncé’s performances (hooks, 2016). This stirred quite a controversy (Gay, 2014c; Plate, 2019). But what is striking is that a mega-star like Beyoncé is actually entering the feminist debate at all. She is defending the equality-minded feminist agenda and interrogating her own politics of locations as a black woman, a sexed female and a passionate professional. And she is not alone. Media mogul Oprah Winfrey is also up there while other feminist celebrities today include Hillary Clinton, Emma Watson, Michelle Obama, Ellen de Generis, Caitlyn Jenner, Laverne Cox, Lady Gaga and many more (Hamad and Taylor, 2015). There is no aspect of contemporary popular culture where feminists, emancipation-minded, anti-racist and LGBTQ+ people have not made their mark. What was blasphemy thirty years ago is banality today, livestreaming from our home screens.

In this book I unravel the deep imbrications between the two ‘isms’ that are so dear to my heart: feminism and posthumanism. The claim of this book is that mainstream posthuman scholarship has neglected feminist theory, while in fact feminist theory is one of the precursors of the posthuman turn. Posthuman Feminism aims to fill that missing link and argues that they are two sides of the same coin. This intellectual endeavour is urgent because we live in times of what I have called the posthuman convergence in the two predecessors to this book, The Posthuman (Braidotti, 2013) and Posthuman Knowledge (Braidotti, 2019). The present book builds on and expands from the two previous volumes, exploring the consequences for feminism of thinking through and with posthuman theory. In keeping with my approach, I refer to the posthuman as both a marker of present conditions and as a navigational tool. In both cases the term aims to assist in reaching a more adequate understanding of the challenges confronting us in today’s world and in steering a course across them. More specifically, I want to detect and assess emergent trends in contemporary feminist theory and practice.

Feminism is by now an established social movement, greatly diversified across multiple constituencies and locations. It is therefore not easy to give a comprehensive definition, other than pointing to a broad range of feminist positions. The spectrum includes the quest for equality between men and women, the recognition of multiple genders, the abolition of gender identities altogether, the intersectional connections across gender, race and class, and more. Feminism is the struggle to empower those who live along multiple axes of inequality. It involves empowering the dispossessed and impoverished, not only women, but also LGBTQ+ people, people of colour, Black and Indigenous peoples. In that sense, feminism is not just an egalitarian movement for the mainstream, but also a transformative decolonial and radical struggle to affirm positively the differences among marginalized people(s). These differences of material location express different life experiences and also multiple ways of knowing. The radical spark of the feminist project for me lies in its subversive politics. It means creating the alternative visions of ‘the human’ generated by people who were historically excluded from, or only partially included into, that category. It means creating other possible worlds. This transformative edge assumes that no emancipatory process, however partial, is ever completely subsumed or incorporated into the dominant socio-economic life conditions, to which it is attached by critical opposition. Margins of intervention remain available, albeit as virtual potential. The trick is how to activate them.

By posthuman convergence I mean to indicate the present historical condition of the Anthropocene – not a utopian future – that is marked by three momentous and interconnecting changes. First, at the social level we witness increasing structural injustices through the unequal distribution of wealth, prosperity and access to technology. Second, at the environmental level we are confronted with the devastation of species and a decaying planet, struck by climate crisis and new epidemics. And third, at the technological level, the status and condition of the human is being redefined by the life sciences and genomics, neural sciences and robotics, nanotechnologies, the new information technologies and the digital interconnections they afford us.

The COVID-19 pandemic that is raging as I am writing is emblematic of the posthuman convergence. It is a human-made disaster aggravated by undue interference in the ecological balance and the lives of multiple species. The pandemic foregrounds the importance of human/non-human interaction and its destructive, as well as generative, potential. Paradoxically, the contagion has resulted in an increased use of technology and digital mediation, as well as enhanced hopes for vaccines and bio-medical solutions. It has thus intensified the humans’ reliance on the very high-tech economy of cognitive capitalism that caused the problems in the first place.

Living with these internally contradictory developments is part of our historical deal. Thinking adequately about them is an urgent task for feminist thought, all the more so because the posthuman turn is marked by fundamental disruptions of received understandings of what it means to be human. The blatant inequalities exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic such as the disproportionate loss of lives among women, LGBTQ+ and ethnic minorities and socially underprivileged people, brings home a reality that feminist, postcolonial and race thinkers had already voiced: that the ‘human’ is neither universal nor neutral but shot through with power relations organizing access to privileges and entitlements (Hammonds, 2020).

Advanced capitalism is at the core of the disruptions that characterize the posthuman convergence, its advanced technologies barely concealing the brutality of the social injustices it enforces. The combined pressures of these power mechanisms are simultaneously uniting humanity in the threat of extinction and dividing it by controlling access to the resources needed to meet the challenge. The economically dispossessed and impoverished are missing out on the advantages and profits of advanced capitalism and are in fact the most exposed to the lethal effects of ecological depletion and global pandemics. The posthuman convergence thus makes for polarized socio-economic divergences, as well as manic-depressive swings of moods and emotions. Excitement and exhilaration in view of the advanced technologies and automation that drive the ‘Fourth Industrial Age’ (Schwab, 2015), alternate with exasperation and fear at the thought of the damages inflicted by the ‘Sixth Extinction’, the potential mass extinction of both human and non-human inhabitants of this planet (Kolbert, 2014). The affective economy of the posthuman convergence is characterized by suffering interchanging with hope, fear unfolding into resilience, and anxiety flipping into action.

A pandemic on the scale of COVID-19 brings home to the Western world an ancient truth, carried by Indigenous philosophies and cosmologies: that ‘we’ are all in this planetary condition together whether we are humans or others. It is high time for this heterogeneous and collective ‘we’ to move beyond the Eurocentric as well as humanistic habits that have formatted it, and to dislodge the philosophical anthropocentrism they entail and enforce.

This shift of perspective underscores the need for posthuman feminist theory. In this book I will address questions such as: how do emancipatory political movements position themselves within the posthuman convergence? How do these already complex intersections between advanced technology and accelerating environmental crisis affect the feminist agenda for intersectional social justice, transnational environmental justice, and women’s and LGBTQ+ people’s rights?

In a concomitance of events that marks the extraordinary period we are going through, the voices, experiences and perspectives of multiple others are bursting all around us. The power of viral formations has become manifest in the pandemic, stressing the agency of non-human forces and the overall importance of Gaia as a living, symbiotic planet (Lovelock and Margulis, 1974). At the same time a global revolt against endemic – and indeed viral – racism took off in the fateful year 2020, led by the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement. The feminist mass mobilization epitomized by the #NiUnaMenos and #MeToo movements continues to fight globally. As these multiple crises unfold, the politics of sexualized, racialized, naturalized minorities – the ‘others’ – are moving centre stage, pushing dominant ‘man’ (or Anthropos) off-centre.

Posthuman feminism is thus a critical intervention in some of the most controversial and urgent contemporary debates about the ongoing transformations of the human. The feminist agenda of the posthuman convergence is the analysis of the intersection of powerful structural socio-economic forces, led by technological development, in combination with equally powerful environmental challenges, centred on the climate crisis. These multiple factors join forces in dislocating the centrality of humans and require new definitions and practices of what being human may mean.

Posthuman feminism revives the radical tradition by offering an updated analysis of advanced capitalism – not only its sophisticated technologies but also its brutal environmental deterioration. In this book I argue that posthuman feminism offers a more adequate analysis of contemporary relations of power, because it has relinquished the liberal vision of the autonomous individual as well as the socialist ideal of a privileged revolutionary subject. Whereas liberal feminism is perfectly attuned to capitalism and socialist feminism dialectically opposed to it, posthuman feminism attempts a more nuanced position while keeping a critical distance from both. Building on the radical insights of ecofeminism, feminist studies of technoscience, LGBTQ+ theories, Black, decolonial and Indigenous feminisms, posthuman feminists stretch in multiple, rhizomic and tentacular directions. A posthuman feminist framework encourages a different notion of political subjectivity as a heterogeneous assemblage of embodied and embedded humans.

The posthuman turn is about the becoming-otherwise-human of feminist and critical theory. The converse is equally true: those who do not fully occupy the position of human subjects, in the fullness of the rights and entitlements that notion entails, have a unique vantage point about what counts as the unit of reference for a re-definition of the human. My argument will remain what it has been all along in my work on critical posthuman theory: the posthuman turn can result in a renewal of subjectivities and practices by situating feminist analyses productively in the present.

It may be difficult for people who have never been considered socially and politically fully human to adopt an affirmative relation to the posthuman predicament. Women, LGBTQ+ people, the colonized, Indigenous peoples, people of colour and a multitude of non-Europeans who historically have had to fight for the basic right to be considered and treated as human, have at best an ambivalent relationship to the humanity they were and continue to be denied admission to. But my point is that this dominant, exclusionary notion of the human is precisely what is challenged by the posthuman convergence. While multiple new scenarios are circulating about the transformation of the humans, it is crucial that the voices of the marginals should be heard. The insights and critical knowledge of those who are considered less than human is urgently needed in the debates on the posthuman, both for their own sake and for the common good. The vital and more democratic project is to combine social justice and bottom-up, community-based experiments with transforming the ways in which we are becoming (post) human. These processes imply dense webs of interaction with and through the new technological universe, but also demand awareness of their environmental groundings and responsibilities.

My argument cuts both ways: first, feminist theory and practice are a major factor in defining the contemporary posthuman predicament. Some strands of feminist theory – not always the more dominant ones – are generative hubs that have inspired critical posthuman insights. I want to urge contemporary feminist theory to engage more actively with the public debates on the posthuman convergence and with mainstream posthuman scholarship. I will highlight throughout the book the original contributions of feminism to the making of distinctly posthuman ways of understanding the world and redefining politics.

Second, mainstream posthuman scholarship must make an effort to move beyond its self-referential insular tendencies and engage openly with feminist theories, including the minoritarian strands that may not be as central to the canonical Anglo-American tradition. Posthuman critical theories cannot continue to indulge in their masculinist and Eurocentric solipsism. It would be mutually beneficial if feminist theory and posthuman theory would exchange and dialogue more systematically.

Feminists working on the posthuman convergence have to confront another fundamental tension: ‘we’ feminists may well be confronting the threats and challenges of the third millennium, together, but ‘we’ are not One or the same. We are differently positioned in terms of the very historical conditions of power, entitlement and access that define us: not only are we not the same as Man, but ‘we’ feminists have never been a homogeneous, unitary notion among ourselves: we are otherwise others. This book does not take the feminist community for granted as a pre-constituted and institutionalized entity; instead, I formulate the ‘we’ as: ‘we’-are-not-one-and-the-same-but-we-differ.

The context points to the necessity of rethinking subjectivity as a web of interconnections, acknowledging that ‘we’ – all living entities – share the same planetary home, though we differ in terms of locations and access to environmental, social and legal entitlements, technologies, safety, prosperity and good health services. The materially embedded differences in location that separate us do not detract from our shared intimacy with the world, our terrestrial milieu. ‘We’ are in this together. This leads me to the sentence I developed in Posthuman Knowledge (2019), and that will recur throughout this book as well: ‘“we”-who-are-not-one-and-the-same-but-are-in-this-together’.

Posthuman feminists aspire to nurture and implement the ongoing process of unfolding alternative and transformative paths of becoming. We need to work together to reconstruct our shared understanding of possible posthuman futures that will include solidarity, care and compassion. We need to do so while rejecting universal and fixed notions of who ‘we’ are, respecting differences of locations and power. The politics of immanent locations allows for a non-oppositional mode of critique and enables affirmative engagement.

To those who fear that emphasizing the ‘post’ in the posthuman may result in short-circuiting the process of emancipation of the devalorized others who were not considered fully human to begin with, I reply that I share their concern. But I would add that it is becoming painfully clear that those who are marked negatively as the dehumanized and marginalized ‘others’ are currently missing out on the profits and advantages of the fourth industrial revolution, while being excessively exposed to the ravages of climate change and pandemics. Mindful that 50 per cent of carbon emissions are produced by the wealthiest 10 per cent of the population, one can only concur with Greta Thunberg that ‘the people who have contributed the least to the crisis are the ones who are going to be affected the most’ (2019: 24). This is the cruel imbalance that posthuman feminism wants to address. In other words, the posthuman condition is neither post-power nor post-injustice. The emphasis on ‘post’ in the posthuman rather implies a move forward, beyond traditional understandings of the human, so that the analyses of contemporary power and knowledge become an essential part of the feminist posthuman project.