Posthuman Feminism. Rosi Braidotti

2 The story of Odysseus’ encounter with Polyphemus and the Cyclops can be found in book 9 of Homer’s Odyssey.

      3  3 It is significant to remember that Beauvoir herself experienced discrimination in that she was not allowed into the elite ‘Grandes Écoles’ of the French education system, though she was allowed to attend the Sorbonne university.

      4  4 The first Greenham Common Women’s Peace and anti-nuclear Camp in the UK began in September 1981.

      5  5 In the early 1970s several fascist dictatorships still existed in Europe, notably Spain (1936–74), Portugal (1933–74) and Greece (1967–74).

      6  6 Source: European Commission. 2018. The Gender Pay Gap in the European Union, https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/aid_development_cooperation_fundamental_rights/equalpayday-eu-factsheets-2018_en.pdf

      7  7 Source: ILO. 2019. Global Wage Report: How Big Is the Gender Gap in Your Country?, ILO.org, https://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/multimedia/maps-and-charts/enhanced/WCMS_650829/lang--en/index.htm

      8  8 Laurie Anderson, Home of the Brave, 1986.

      9  9 The subindex Power of the Gender Equality Index 2017 of the European Institute for Gender Equality gets a score of 48.5 per cent, which is the lowest score of all domains. https://eige.europa.eu/sites/default/files/documents/mh051704enn.pdf. The Global Gender Gap Index of the World Economic Forum has a gender disparity gap of 77.1 per cent worldwide. http://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_GGGR_2018.pdf

      10 10 Source: EIGE. 2017. Gender Equality Index 2017: Power indicators in EU-28: Data table, eige.europa.eu, https://eige.europa.eu/gender-equality-index/2015/domain/power

      11 11 Statistics on the exact rate of female ownership of wealth and assets are widely divergent. The 10 per cent figure was suggested by Oxfam in 2019.

      12 12 With thanks to Premesh Lalu for our ongoing dialogues.

Chapter 2 The Critical Edge of Posthuman Feminism

      A wild patience has taken me this far.

      Adrienne Rich, 1981

      The overview and assessment of feminist traditions critical of humanism that were presented in the previous chapter indicate that the feminist movement has produced dominant subjects functional in the management of potestas, the dominant and restrictive face of power. But it has also engendered transformative subjects, driven by potentia, the transformative and subversive face of power. In both cases feminism combines critique with creativity, politics with the imagination, and material cartographies of the present with speculative anticipations of the future. In the posthuman convergence today, the feminist strands can also be coded in terms of different modes of relation to power in their ‘neo’ appearances. A majoritarian corporate branch – neoliberal feminism – is by now subsumed into the political economy of advanced capitalism, which its neo-socialist counterpart opposes dialectically.

From a posthuman perspective, neoliberal and neo-socialist feminisms share some specular similarities and striking resemblances despite their manifest differences. Both variants are aligned on dominant humanist ideas of ‘Man’ as the motor of human history and evolution. This positions women firmly as the second sex and feminist emancipation as the project that seeks equality, by adjusting or overthrowing power relations within this dominant paradigm. Moreover, they are both anthropocentric, though in different ways: neoliberal feminists because they tend to naturalize capitalism and universalize liberal individualist exceptionalism,¹ and neo-socialist feminists because they do not grant political agency to environmental non-human factors and translate them back into socio-economic inequalities indexed almost exclusively on the needs of humans. Thus, an active environmental awareness is dimmed in the neoliberal frame by universalizing the individual and in the neo-socialist mindset by an entrenched bias in favour of the socio-cultural pole of the nature–culture divide.

      Of course, their strategies differ: the neoliberal’s unshakeable belief in the self-regulating force of the capitalist market economy is echoed by the neo-socialist’s equally passionate conviction that the capitalist system is destined to break down because of its deep contradictions. While they are both single-minded about identifying capitalism as the defining feature of the current socio-economic model of the state, they react to it antithetically. Where the liberal feminists rush to embrace it, the socialist ones labour to eliminate it.

      In a posthuman feminist perspective, however, both variants of feminism fail to tackle the specific features of contemporary, cognitive and technology-driven capitalism. The opportunistic boundary-breaking nature of capitalism is a crucial feature if we want to understand its power. All the more so as a residual form of humanism has returned with a vengeance through the influential transhumanist movement. I will discuss transhumanism critically in the last part of this chapter. But first I will tackle aspects of advanced capitalism that humanist forms of feminism fail to address, such as the neo-colonial order of migration, innovative technologies and biopolitics of life as capital. As capitalism has mutated into an information-processing system, to miss or underestimate that mutation is a cartographic and political error of great consequence for the future of feminist humanisms. In this chapter I argue that posthuman feminism offers firstly a relevant critique of neoliberal and neo-socialist versions of feminism today, and secondly a more adequate reading of the fractures and paradoxes of the posthuman convergence. It is therefore both urgent and necessary.

The Contradictions of Neoliberalist Feminism

      Political contradictions

Although it claims to build on the legacy of its distinguished classical liberal predecessors, neoliberal feminism is quite a distinct and more pernicious phenomenon. Liberal feminists have a distinguished political pedigree, which neoliberalism takes quite some liberty with (Brown, 2015; Rottenberg, 2018). Classical liberalism bases its political faith in emancipation on a utilitarian view of humanity as a collection of individuals bound by common interests and ambitions. Neoliberal feminists are ‘wealth supremacists’ (Reich, 2021: 3) who identify human nature with capitalism. By extension, an egalitarian evolution under the aegis of capital market economies is for them not only desirable, but also possible without disrupting the existing market economy and its democracies.

      Neoliberalism accomplishes a wilful reduction of the social ideal of equality into a hyper-individualistic form of personal empowerment. It replaces a political process with the instant gratification of financial success, self-pampering and conspicuous consumption. These are the ambivalent outcomes of mainstream integration, accompanied by selective adjustments to the system (Fraser, 2013). Neoliberal feminists are less concerned about solidarity and thrive on the glorification of economic success and the opportunities afforded by the fourth industrial revolution.

In so far as it aligns the emancipation of women within the frame of the market economy, neoliberal feminism has entered a ‘dangerous liaison with advanced capitalism’ (Eisenstein, 2005: 511). To give an example, the ethos of capitalist individualistic self-empowerment is supported by many female CEOs, also known as ‘She-EO’,² ‘girlboss’,³ ‘fempreneur’,⁴ ‘mompreneur’ or ‘momtrepreneur’,⁵ who have come into their own over recent decades. Overwhelmingly successful on multiple scores and seemingly perfect in their performance (McRobbie, 2015), neoliberals make everyone else feel like a bad feminist