Initially emerging in the 1960’s and 1970’s as part of the “Second Wave” of feminism, Radical Feminism reinterpreted women’s liberation through a Marxian lens and configured the conflict as a form of primordial class struggle. This approach was embodied by groups such as the Redstockings, who approached the issues of housework and reproduction from the perspective of class relations and called for a “female class consciousness” in opposition to patriarchy. In the past few decades however, the banner of radical feminism has been grabbed and mangled by crypto-reactionaries whose primary agenda has been the reification of sex roles and pinkwashing the patriarchy. The idea that those who want to defend trans people must cede the domain of radical feminism to these rightists is a mistake of the highest order, especially considering any serious examination of the history of radical feminism demonstrates that following through with the core ideas of the movement not only entails a trans inclusive feminism, but a feminism that centers the radical possibilities of “transitioning” in a number of forms and breaking away from the conventional existence of biological sex.
Looking back on feminism’s “Second Wave,” Valerie Solanas stands out as the most obvious example for the kind of violent boogeyman of a feminist conjured by the 1990’s “Political Correctness Gone Mad!” culture war that hasn’t run out of steam yet, between her infamous assassination attempt against Andy Warhol and her authorship of the SCUM Manifesto, calling for the establishment of female supremacy and abolition of capitalism and the male gender. While her primary claim to fame is as a would-be assassin, it is worth paying attention to a few of the key points from her manifesto, such as when Solanas writes that “if men were wise they would seek to become really female, would do intensive biological research that would lead to men, by means of operations on the brain and nervous system, being able to be transformed in psyche, as well as body, into women.” To the trans-exclusive disciples of Solanas, this is a decided impossibility due to their beliefs in a rigid gendered psychology. But the eternal gendered mind is the opposite of what Valerie Solanas foresaw. The ultimate goal of the revolution envisioned by SCUM was “the cessation of the production of males and, ultimately… the cessation of the production of females.” Solanas was rallying for what was not just a matriarchal society, but a post-capitalist, post-gender society (though she certainly relished describing the reversal of fortunes in the transitory stage). This particular vision was not unique to SCUM, but rather was the defining feature of the original Radical Feminisms of the late mid-20th century.
Compared with Solanas, a more grounded radical vision with a similar ultimate goal is put forward by Shulamith Firestone in her Dialectic of Sex, explicitly drawing on the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels. One of the founders of the Redstockings, Firestone identified the elaborated on a dialectical materialist conception of feminism by incorporating elements of Freud’s insights into psychology. In her view, the primary and oldest social contradiction was between the patriarch set against women and children, who are rendered dependent on the former. Firestone identifies the source of this contradiction as biological reproduction, the first division of labor which was an inevitable result of nature. However, Firestone also believed that this biological division and system of exploitation would become through the development of technology and the advent of a socialist feminist revolution would resolve this contradiction by abolishing reproduction as a biological process, ending the oldest division of labor, and by extension the sex-class system of gender itself, as well as replacing the antiquated nuclear family with networks of social partnerships and childrearing units that allow for the increased independence and safeguards from abuse on the part of children. In summary, Firestone’s vision of feminist revolution is the abolition of capitalism, gender, the family, and biological reproduction - a less visceral and more reconciliatory counterpart to the ideas expounded in Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto. While self-proclaimed “gender critical” trans-exclusionary feminists might try to claim Solanas and Firestone as their intellectual forebears, a more direct line of influence is traced through feminisms which emphasize the possibilities of technological developments to abolish biological reproduction and the gender system itself. With the emergence of personal computing in the 1980’s, feminist scholars would begin considering the potential relations between their movement and new technologies.
The dream of artificial wombs in Firestone’s post-gender utopia, in which women use technology to overcome the tyranny of nature, is the kind of vision which would inform the emerging “cyborg feminism” of the late 20th century. Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto makes explicit from the outset that it intends to “build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism,” centered around the concept of the cyborg. Haraway’s cyborg is the product of both nature and artifice, existing between animal and machine, which in turn rejects the imposition of woman as “nature” and the earthmother-archetype that binds the “female” to reproductive labor. The human being, in their role as homo faber, has been a cyborg for a long time as physical and social technologies transform them, and blur the distinction between nature and artifice. Furthermore, the cyborg is Haraway’s solution to the kinds of identity politics which attempt to taxonomize individuals into discrete categories that flatten and divide. Women have very little in common with regards to “universal experience:” a single framework of “being female” does not exist due to the diversity of circumstances and social factors. Instead, cyborg politics center on associations based on affinities instead of shared essential natures: the cyborg political coalition is created by the shared “utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender” instead of taxonomic qualifications for membership. The possibility for such a coalition is located in the emergence of the personal computer during the 1980’s when Haraway wrote her manifesto, with the possibilities created by this technology multiplying as their development accelerated.
The British philosopher Sadie Plant, who would found the prominent Cybernetic Culture Research Unit in 1993, demonstrated that the metaphor of the cyborg was particularly apt in her history of the central role played by women in the development of computer technology, Zeroes and Ones: for centuries going back to Ada Lovelace, women (and queer men such as Alan Turing) have been cultivating the cybernetic environment which now surrounds us. Not only has this vast network been transforming us into cyborgs, according to certain infamous internet sects it has been the instrument subtly carrying out the aims of the SCUM Manifesto. To elaborate on this perspective, let’s turn to our own modern day Valerie Solanas (not that I’d accuse her of any assassination attempts she didn’t want to take credit for), Nyx Land, and her Blackpaper on Gender Acceleration. In the perspective of Gender Accelerationism, also known by the shorthand G/Acc, the computer system and the internet are dissolving “masculinity” - they aren’t just the kernel of the post-capitalist economy, instruments of a cybernetic economy and class abolition, they’re also the kernel of the post-gender world. Land observes that in the past few decades, lots of men in late capitalist societies have been either “dropping out” or forced out of reproductive patriarchy, a phenomenon first seen with the boom in Japanese “herbivorous” men after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and later brought west with the emergence of “incels” after the 2008 Great Recession. These young men compose a newly-formed frustrated, unwitting and largely unwilling “third genders,” having been trapped outside of the social performance of being “male” and following in the same cyclical path as their fathers and now constitute a sort of reactionary, downwardly mobile gender-class of their own. As it stands, these “incels” want to turn back the clock to some past where they still had access to the relative social power that guaranteed them “manhood,” longing for a world that has no place in the future. Land points to widespread trends such as declining testosterone, decreasing sperm count, and the decay of the Y chromosome and concludes that humanity is on a trajectory of male extinction - the only solution to this lack of future being to join the winning team and complete the exit from masculinity with the total assimilation into the feminine, taking the “pink pill” and completely severing any allegiance to male identity, and continue accelerating the pace of the ultimate female project: Artificial Intelligence.
Gender Accelerationism and the ideas of Nyx Land have clear connections and parallels to “cyborg feminism,” but Land’s particular ideology rejects major aspects of Firestone and Haraway. At the end of the day, G/Acc still sees “Nature” as in control, a desirable force that brings about the movement’s goals, which is why it must be “accelerated.” Nonetheless, the ideas in the Blackpaper bear a closer relationship to the radical feminism of Valerie Solanas and the SCUM Manifesto, applied to contemporary circumstances, than most of the self-styled successors to the original “Second Wave'' radicals. The ideas of G/Acc are an attempt to realize a pathway to abolish the gender system using ongoing technological developments, which is not an approach completely unique to Land. Let us consider the Radical Feminism of the 21st Century: the direct successor to Firestone’s anti-naturalist feminist thought informed by Haraway’s insights, is Xenofeminism, the ideological movement which aspires to abolish gender, race and class. Developed by the collective Laboria Cuboniks, the simple credo of Xenofeminism, “if nature is unjust, change nature,” consolidates the core ideas of Firestone and Haraway into a single phrase. Xenofeminism rejects any injustices which are justified using the construct of nature, something which human beings have already broken away from since the emergence of homo faber. “Progressive” political movements all too often will attempt to mount their defenses of sexuality and gender identity with appeals to “naturalism,” which are ultimately concessions of defeat to rule by a “natural order” that can be used to justify any oppression. Instead, developing technologies show the possibility to transform and reshape “nature” and move beyond the old structures imposed by it. Certainly, technology in of itself isn’t inherently liberatory. Any passing observation of the internet and related developments can show how social media and cybernetics have been used to reinforce existing networks of hegemonic power. At the same time, massive systems like the internet and the technologies which it enables and spreads also create opportunities for subversion, such as developing the already existing building blocks of reactionware and other biohacking resources into “a platform for free and open source medicine.” Capitalist institutions have historically served as the crucible for the forces that oppose them: just as the factory system provided the nucleus for trade unionism and militant proletarian organization, the near-universal presence of the internet enables the organization of networks of aid and affinity for the alienated and dispossessed.
The purpose of this historical overview of radical feminism and its development into Xenofeminism and Gender Accelerationism has been to reject the false dichotomy presented between the toothless liberal feminism which accommodates capitalism and the self-proclaimed radical feminism that twists “women’s liberation” into a lapdog of patriarchy. 21st Century Radical Feminism, to paraphrase Marx, is the real movement which abolishes the system of gender, and this movement should center those who both disrupt this order by not playing the roles of “man” and “woman” that perpetuate the gender-class system and who also recognize their affinity with others who disrupt this system - not just trans people, but anyone who consciously “drops out” of patriarchy and recognizes their solidarity with queerness and otherness. Such a movement has both long term and short term goals: the long term being the abolition of gender, race, and class as meaningful social distinctions of course, but the short term being the creation of survival networks. Talk of gender abolition is all well and good, but this talk doesn’t mean much for people struggling with dysphoria, unwanted reproduction, and other gendered problems in the immediate present. If the movement cannot even secure health and safety for the base of their movement, there is no hope for it. Therefore, the central project of immediate importance a contemporary radical feminist movement must be the platform for open source medical care, enabled by the possibilities of the internet, to serve as a bulwark against the capricious forces of the state and capital which restricts access to such vital services to those who need them most, as well as the nucleus for further revolutionary organization.