Rosi Braidotti - Posthuman Feminism

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For Anneke

Rosi Braidotti

polity

Copyright © Rosi Braidotti 2022

The right of Rosi Braidotti to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2022 by Polity Press

Polity Press

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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1807-4

ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-1808-1 (pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL

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This book would not have been possible without the loyal support of my publisher John Thompson; I truly thank him for his friendship and his enduring commitment to my posthuman project.

I had the honour and pleasure of completing the research for this manuscript at the University of Cambridge, where I was invited as Diane Middlebrook and Carl Djerassi Visiting Professor in Gender Studies in the Autumn term 2019. My sincere thanks to Jude Browne, Lauren Wilcox and Holly Porter for their warm and collegial support during my stay. My heartfelt thanks to Joanna Bush for all her precious professional assistance. In the same period I was honoured to be a visiting fellow at St. John’s College, Cambridge. My sincere thanks to my sponsoring fellow, Ulinka Rublack for her friendly advice and mentorship, to the interim President of the College, Steve Edgley, and the deputy master Tim Whitmarsh for their warm welcome.

During the research phase of this book, I also greatly benefited from the discussions with colleagues from several academic institutions I had the honour to visit. My special thanks to Eléonore Lépinard and the Gender Studies Programme at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, and to Marianne Hirsch of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality at Columbia University in New York.

Sections of this book were published in my chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory (eds. Lisa Disch and Mary Hawkesworth, 2016) and in Anthropocene Feminism (ed. Richard Grusin, 2017). I acknowledge them warmly here. Some earlier drafts were also published in the Posthuman Glossary that I co-edited with Maria Hlavajova (2018).

My sincere thanks to Genevieve Lloyd and Donna Haraway for their unflinching support and enlightening criticism. They are precious multi-species travelling companions of my writings. Thanks to Simone Bignall and Matthew Fuller and for their generous insights and theoretical advice.

I am much indebted to Emily Jones for her generous and informed reading of the manuscript and her rigorous comments. Warm thanks also to Beth Lord, Celia Roberts, Djurdja Trajkovic, Maureen McNeil, Christine Daigle, Nina Lykke and Maurita Harney for their comments and support. Thanks also to Premesh Lalu, Sarah Nuttall and J. Halberstam for lively and necessary conversations. Thank you Linda Dement for the stunning image for the cover.

I am grateful to Marlise Mensink and Mischa Peters for their warm friendship. I also wish to thank my personal research assistants Gry Ulstein, Evelien Geerts, Lauren Hoogen Stoevenbeld and especially Onessa Novak for their unfailing logistical and organizational assistance.

Finally, my gratitude to my life partner Anneke Smelik for her intellectual, emotional and moral support, and for the joy of our life together.

‘Don’t agonize, organize!’

Flo Kennedy, 1971 1

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.