Contributor Dossier
Alden Nagel is a Master’s candidate in Literature Studies and Teaching at Central Washington University (United States), where his research focuses on contemporary literature, literary theory, and media studies. His work explores autofiction, electronic literature, and the intersections of literature, philosophy, and technology. Alongside literary criticism, he investigates climate collapse as a philosophical condition, engaging with ecological thought, philosophical pessimism, and contemporary critical theory. He has collaborated with a range of international experimental writers and has edited and published works on xenopoetics and posthumanism, establishing himself as an emerging voice at the intersection of literary criticism and speculative thought.
Substack: https://substack.com/@aldennagel
X: @AldenNagel
Instagram: @alden_nagel_
Science fiction has frequently imagined time travel as a technological problem. Less frequently has it imagined time travel as a technology of kinship capable of reorganizing intimacy, family, and historical belonging. Reading Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Another Story, or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea” and Ellen Klages’ “Time Gypsies” through Laboria Cuboniks’ xenofeminism reveals that temporal technologies do not merely transport subjects through history; they actively reconstruct the social relations through which gender, sexuality, and kinship become intelligible.
Technology occupies a central role in xenofeminist politics because it enables the reconstruction of social relations rather than merely extending existing ones. Rather than a polemic on the advantages and disadvantages of various social models, of interactions, relations, and flows between individuals and conceptions of groups as socially interactive and autonomous organic beings, the Xenofeminist Manifesto speaks to the liberatory power of technology through means of gender, sexual, and interior individual liberation. Although only one part of the multifaceted manifesto, the following largely encapsulates the ideals of Xenofeminism. Laboria Cuboniks writes,
Why is there so little explicit, organized effort to repurpose technologies for progressive gender political ends? XF seeks to strategically deploy existing technologies to re-engineer the world. Serious risks are built into these tools; they are prone to imbalance, abuse, and exploitation of the weak. Rather than pretending to risk nothing, XF advocates the necessary assembly of techno-political interfaces responsive to these risks. Technology isn’t inherently progressive. Its uses are fused with culture in a positive feedback loop that makes linear sequencing, prediction, and absolute caution impossible. Technoscientific innovation must be linked to a collective theoretical and political thinking in which women, queers, and the gender non-conforming play an unparalleled role.
Here, the manifesto is putting forward a technology-relation wherein not only do women, queer people, and the gender-nonconforming play an integral role, but where it is shaped by and for them. This conceptualization has been put forward in a number of science fiction narratives as they relate to technology’s direct correlation with gender and sexuality. Through them, an understanding can be established as to not only how individuals relate to themselves, as well as to time as a concept, but to time and traversing it as a means of gender and sexuality-based liberation, points of revelation which as apparent in these narratives, would not be made realized elsewhere given the specificity of the narratives.
Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Another Story, or A Fisherman of the Inland Sea” demonstrates this logic particularly well. While the narrative itself predates Xenofeminism by decades, its central concerns nonetheless set the stage for these ideas to take hold on the theoretical front by way of Laboria Cuboniks. Here, one of the more obvious points of contact between Xenofeminism and Le Guin’s narrative is the how the story interweaves ideas of kinship, technology, embodiment and temporality, and how these aspects within the story are recursively reconstructed, rather than simply inherited. More specifically, the short story features extensive usage of kinship as an inherently engineered social technology. The protagonist of the story originates from the planet O, whose four-person “sedoretu” marriage system fundamentally reorganizes and reframes conceptions of intimacy, domestic life, and reproduction. Notably, it also reframes traditionality itself, given that, as a parallel with contemporary American ideals of traditional marriage which only allows two people at one time, monogamy, and heterosexual marital relations (that between a cisgender man and a cisgender woman) there is nonetheless an undoubtable conservativeness to this, and a lack of options both for personal and kinship realization and flourishing connections.
As a parallel, in “Fisherman of the Inland Sea”, Le Guin interrogates this exact traditional conception of marriage and kinship relations by, instead of treating the two-person dualism conception of marriage as right, ideal, or natural, Le Guin frames kinship as something that is designed, maintained, and set through historical conditioning of social relations. This dualism, of having a dual-lead household of a mother and a father (and, more importantly, a husband and a wife) as something that is normal, natural, ideal, and the true path not only to personal and social enlightenment for oneself, but also for the family unit as a whole, and, by extension, the large swath of immediate society, is wholly interrogated here. In turn, xenofeminism rejects the naturalism of these family structures, putting forward the ideal that family structures should be reorganized towards emancipatory principles, rather than traditional or biological principles. Xenofeminism as a framework wholly rejects appeals to biological reproduction as the privileged foundation of kinship, but instead, acts as proponent to treating reproductive technologies and alternative family formations as equally legitimate means of producing social life. Returning to the narrative of “Fisherman of the Inland Sea”, we can understand the story’s conceptualization of family not as a promotion of comparatively more alternative family structures or kinship relations, but rather, as a way through which to understand the inherent plasticity of these structures. Thus, family becomes plastic rather than natural.
This idea is strengthened by Wendy Pearson’s observations on the place and utilization of sexuality within science fiction narratives. In their essay “Science Fiction and Queer Theory”, they write:
“Queer theory has only just started to provide new ways of looking at sf, one which suggests that sexuality is not merely peripheral, but absolutely central to potential futures we may invent, as well as to our reflection on the present.”
In this sense, science fiction narratives as encapsulating and picturing potentials for the future of mankind, as well as our relationship to its divisible components; the individual, the relationship, the family. Further, as these components, as well as the whole of mankind can be thought of and organized into these components, so too can variously different futures can emanate from the action taken today, including but not exclusive to, the work done in turn to invert these structures and to envision them for future understandings of the world around us and these smaller components, altered so as to not only best fit their social and liberatory means, but also their ideals of how to relate to technology so as to better not only the future, by the present. In this sense, the truism of changing the present so as to enact change upon the future has a necessary inverse; to alter how we conceive of the future, we therein can conceive of the present quite differently as well.
Technology in “Another Story, or Fisherman of the Inland Sea” is not merely a mechanism through which liberation becomes possible, but itself becomes constitutive of kinship. One of the more subtle implications of Laboria Cubonik’s manifesto is that technology ought not to be used as a neutral instrument whose potential significance lies solely in its application, but rather, that technologies themselves reorganize the conditions under which subjects relate to one another, thus transforming not only what individuals are capable of doing, but what forms of sociality thus become imaginable. While xenofeminism frequently emphasizes technological intervention as a means of overcoming both social and biological naturalisms, in turn, Le Guin’s narrative extends this proposition by demonstrating that technologies themselves become relational structures. If Le Guin imagines kinship itself as technologically engineered, Klages in turn asks what happens when history becomes equally susceptible to engineering. Rather than redesigning family, “Time Gypsies” redesigns historical belongings.
Whereas Le Guin reimagines kinship through this speculative anthropology, Ellen Klages relocates xenofeminism’s emancipatory project into history itself. In the short story “Time Gypsies”, queer temporality is expressly at hand. The basis of the short story is that of a woman named Carol working on a time machine in the story’s contemporary present who time-travels to their relative past, and falls in love with another woman scientist, named Sara, and does not want to go back to their own time. In this story, queer temporality is expressly abstracted in relation to our own time and sense of being. Whereas Le Guin reconstructs kinship through speculative anthropology, Klages reconstructs history itself through queer temporality. Queer temporality is often framed and understood of a concept relegated to the contemporary present, affecting and being a facet of queer lives, whose life-time is spent not in relation to that of “straight” time, that of a life marked with goals organized by age and time and space of that regarding the traditional family structure. Organizing one’s own life around marriage, a family, various investments and job positions organized around the benefit of the aforementioned marriage and family, saving up for the children’s higher education tuition, retiring, planning to die, and final rites. In queer life, this is often abstracted, given that many queer lives don’t organize themselves around ideas such as the family, marriage, or the aforementioned economic goals. Time is spent more in pursuit of ancillary activities such as recreation, leisure, and artistic goals. The entire concept of queer domesticity enables the proliferation of living with mutual dual incomes and no children is entirely based around queer temporality in this sense.
Returning to “Time Gypsies”, the short story which Carol and Sara exist in is itself a variation of queer temporality in which they can live in Carol’s time and, relatively, Sara’s present. This is idealistic, and escape certainly for Carol from her relative past (note, also, the temporality of their names; Carol being more associated with previous generations of women, and Sara without the “h” presents a much more contemporary styling and relation to names themselves). In this sense, xenofeminism allows us to see that these alternative temporal architectures can offer radical understandings of queer life, and how queer domesticity and relationships exist in relation to the past. The author Ellen Klages makes this clear with the very ending of the short story and the characters’ final decision to stay in the same time period and to affect time so that they can stay together, thus coexisting in their own, mutually-shared queer time. As Klages writes,
“Sara and I decided that even sending back an incomplete version of her paper was dangerous. It would give Chambers enough proof that his tempokinetic experiment worked for him to get more funding and try again. So the only thing in the case is an anonymous, undated postcard of the St. Francis Hotel that says: “Having a wonderful time. Thanks for the ride.”
Taken together as a mutually-supportive duality of science fiction narratives, Le Guin and Klages demonstrate that xenofeminism’s investment in technology extends beyond the redesign of bodies or reproductive systems. Furthermore, both stories imagine technology as an infrastructure of relationality through which kinship, memory, and queer futures are themselves continually reconstructed for their own means. Rather than simply anticipating Laboria Cuboniks’ ideas, these narratives both expose an aspect of xenofeminism that remains critical to discreet, domestic inquiry; technologies both emancipatory and speculative, such as that of time travel, do not merely produce new sociopolitical possibilities by themselves, but instead, they actively participate in the formation of intimacy and the realization of the intimate relationship itself. Time travel does not merely reveal itself as a technology for traversing temporalities, but of engineering kinships through queer time.
As a collective lineage of literature-as-theory, and also, of literature-becoming-theory, we can see how the work of Klages and Le Guin, in their prosaic meditations on technological interrelationships with characters and their relationships, and the kinships both material and abstract that these technologies bring about, form a proto-xenofeminism. These short stories, written decades before Laboria Cuboniks’ Xenofeminism Manifesto, offer not only a point of departure for liberatory thought in the context of the emancipatory machinic, but of futures wherein technology itself operates as a vector for real, material freedom and liberation among women and queer individuals, and communities moreover. They are not merely arguing for situations much like the ones they depict, but in imagining them, they are manifesting them so as to prevent any lost future from merely being lost time. The future and its innately intertwined liberatory potential of individuals, and kinships, may yet happen. In time yet unwound, the potentials are limitless, and these stories posit only some form of liberatory situations in which technology operates as a purely liberatory mechanism. These situations do not need to be merely fictionally imagined; they can become palpably real and truly lived. We need not a time machine for this work, in spirit and practice, to begin.
Archival Note
Before the consolidation of capitalism, historical forms of domination such as patriarchy and authoritarianism already existed. These power structures did not emerge with capitalism; they are embedded in various civilizational projects and fulfill specific functions depending on the material and historical conditions of each era.
With the development of capitalism, these forms of domination do not disappear, but are restructured to facilitate the reproduction of the system.
Patriarchy, for example, has historically contributed to organizing social reproduction and the gendered division of labor, facilitating the extraction of surplus value and the accumulation of capital. However, this relationship is not static. As different technological paradigms replace living labor with dead (objectified) labor and transform the organization of production, the roles assigned to men and women also change.
What was long presented as an unalterable biological or cultural truth begins to become more flexible when it no longer meets the needs of capital valorization.
It is therefore not surprising to observe that, today, capitalism partially incorporates feminist, LGBT+, and other dissident agendas. This incorporation does not necessarily imply a structural transformation of power relations. In many cases, it constitutes a strategy through which the system itself expands its spheres of value creation, absorbing demands that were previously marginalized and turning them into new markets. Pinkwashing, for example, is one of the most obvious examples of this dynamic.
In this context, technology has a dual nature—but it is never neutral. It is a tool, yes. But it is human beings who control it; to that extent, its purposes will always depend on human agency.
In this sense, technology improves people’s well-being and quality of life. But it can also become a tool for highlighting the contradictions of the system itself and opening up possibilities that the system cannot fully control. As Ursula K. Le Guin (2005) points out, technology expresses the way a society confronts its physical reality; it constitutes the interface through which we relate to the material world and, ultimately, that which restores a certain humility in the face of Gaia and her limits.
From this perspective, movements such as xenofeminism are essential. Their contribution lies not only in challenging rigid frameworks of sex and gender, but also in demonstrating that many of the categories presented as natural are, in reality, historical constructs that can be transformed. Imagining and (un)thinking alternative configurations allows us to push these categories to the limits of their own contradictions, revealing the contingent nature of numerous biological and cultural dogmas. In this process, the proliferation of identities and categories may ultimately reveal the very fragility of that which sought to establish itself as an essence. Perhaps it will then become clearer that, above all classifications, we share a common condition: we are human beings.
The political significance of these currents is by no means insignificant. They retain the transformative potential that Marx attributed to the revolutionary subject and that Deleuze and Guattari transferred to the notion of the war machine. Indeed, Guattari stated in Plan on the Planet (2004) that Integrated World Capitalism (IWC) “has equipped itself with the means to forge new weapons to confront the upheavals engendered by its restructuring and its new segmented nature.” Precisely for this reason, emancipatory struggles cannot be limited to confronting the system on its most entrenched ground. They must also recognize the points of escape that emerge wherever new forms of relationship with labor, the environment, culture, the body, or desire arise.
To think that the CMI constitutes an absolutely impregnable fortress is tantamount to accepting one of its own fictions. Its capacity to manage large economic and political structures is considerable; however, its control over molecular transformations is always partial. It is precisely these everyday, scattered, and minority mutations that continually overflow its mechanisms of capture. Hence Guattari insists on the need to recognize the traps through which the CMI inserts itself into the social body, without losing sight of the fact that every form of capture inevitably leaves lines of flight open.
Works Cited
Laboria Cuboniks (Collective). (2018). The Xenofeminism Manifesto: A Politics for Alienation. Verso.
Pearson, W. G., Hollinger, V., & Gordon, J. (2008). Queer Universes, pg. 59. Liverpool University Press.
VanderMeer, A., & VanderMeer, J. (2014). The Time Traveler’s Almanac. Macmillan.
Works Cited by Critica Acelerada
Guattari, Félix [2004], “2. El capitalismo mundial integrado y la revolución molecular”, Plan sobre el planeta. Capitalismo mundial integrado y revoluciones moleculares, Madrid, traficantes de sueños, pp. 57-74, https://traficantes.net/sites/default/files/pdfs/Plan%20sobre%20el%20pla…
Le Guin, U. K. (2005). A rant about “technology”. Ursula K. Le Guin. https://www.ursulakleguin.com/a-rant-about-technology