Hog raising technological revolution which opens up the twenty-first century. Pursuit to productivity and adaptation to environment. Present state and future direction of breeding and improvement of pig.

Today, a new vein of queer Marxist-feminist family-abolitionist theorising is reviving contemporary feminists’ willingness to imagine, politically, what women's liberationists in the 1970s called ‘mothering against motherhood’. Concurrently, the jokey portmanteau ‘momrade’, i.e. mom + comrade, has circulated persistently in the twenty-first century on online forums maintained by communities of mothers and/or leftists. This article asks: what if, in the name of abolishing the family, we took the joke entirely seriously? What makes a ‘mom’ a ‘momrade’, or vice versa? In what ways does the work of reproduction, conceivably, actively participate in class struggles, producing new worlds (and un-producing others)? How do the collective arts of mothering unmake selves? And how does the verb ‘to mother’ work to abolish the present state of things? The chosen point of departure for exploring these questions is the concept of xenohospitality; a term I borrow from Helen Hester – one of the authors of the Xenofeminist Manifesto – who defines it as openness to the alien, a definition I link closely to ‘comradeliness’. Further, the meaning of the term ‘family abolition’, here, is aptly summed up by the formula ‘xenofam ≥ biofam’; to abolish the family is not to destroy relationships of care and nurturance, but on the contrary, to expand and proliferate them. Reflecting on the conditions of possibility for such universally xenofamilial – that is to say, comradely – kin relations, this article implicitly argues for utopia(nism) in feminist kinship studies. It grounds this utopianism, however, in first-hand experiences of informal ‘death doula’ labour. The labour of mothering one's mother is offered as a potential practice of un-mothering oneself and others. In fact, the argument pivots on these auto-ethnographic observations about maternal bereavement, because the event of the author's mother's death interrupted and intruded upon the feminist theorising involved.

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Holy Motors

10.1093/oso/9780190095345.003.0009 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 173-188

Author(s):

Ohad Landesman

Keyword(s):

New Technologies ◽

First Century ◽

Technological Revolution ◽

Digital Cinema ◽

Twenty First Century ◽

The Impact

Holy Motors (2012, dir. Leos Carax) is a film that poses many challenges for the viewer. It proceeds without any narrative logic, embraces a fragmented and disorienting structure, provides unmotivated character behavior, and produces epistemological confusion. This chapter argues that Carax’s film should be understood primarily as a metacinematic work about both the death of cinema and its concurrent rebirth, and that it represents and complicates cultural and critical anxieties about the impact of new technologies on cinema’s development in the twenty-first century. Holy Motors is used as a rich case study for evaluating the merits and limitations of mourning cinema’s passing era in the midst of the technological revolution. The film, it is argued, invites us to re-evaluate today the early rhetoric of crisis, death, and rupture, prevalent in the early days of digital cinema, and to trace not only what has been arguably lost in the transition, but also what could be ultimately gained from it.

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Conclusion

Dismantlings ◽

10.7591/cornell/9781501746413.003.0009 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 160-178

Author(s):

Matt Tierney

Keyword(s):

First Century ◽

Technological Revolution ◽

Technological Possibility ◽

State Agents ◽

Twenty First Century

This chapter concludes that unbridled technology is catastrophic to man's future. But it is equally obvious that what man has learned about the uses of technology should not, cannot ever be lost. Yet acknowledging the need to be wary is not the same as using caution to found a politics of dismantling in the present. In the twenty-first century, a time and place far from the Maine conversations of the Boggses and Paines, there must be a willingness to lose the machines. To decide in advance not to lose them is only the least objectionable version of the ambivalent formula that technology should not be unbridled, and that people want something other than a technological revolution, but the value of certain machines cannot ever be lost. It was a powerful ambivalence in its moment, because it called out unbridled exploitation but held firm to technological possibility. But at this late date, when tech firms and state agents hold all the codes, something still more urgent is required: to sweep past noncommittal logics, to risk relinquishing any use of any machine, and to move in groups toward more concrete practices of technological responsibility through dismantling.

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