Laboria Cuboniks member Helen Hester contends that Xenofam praxis contributes to the feminist multiverse. It aims to ‘create the conditions whereby the [biological] family stops being the centre of the way we conceive of what’s possible for social reproduction ... by creating cultural spaces for alternatives’

"0x15 From the street to the home, domestic space too must not escape our tentacles. So profoundly ingrained, domestic space has been deemed impossible to disembed, where the home as norm has been conflated with home as fact, as an un-remakeable given. Stultifying ‘domestic realism’ has no home on our horizon. Let us set sights on augmented homes of shared laboratories, of communal media and technical facilities. The home is ripe for spatial transformation as an integral component in any process of feminist futurity. But this cannot stop at the garden gates. We see too well that reinventions of family structure and domestic life are currently only possible at the cost of either withdrawing from the economic sphere—the way of the commune—or bearing its burdens manyfold—the way of the single parent. If we want to break the inertia that has kept the moribund figure of the nuclear family unit in place, which has stubbornly worked to isolate women from the public sphere, and men from the lives of their children, while penalizing those who stray from it, we must overhaul the material infrastructure and break the economic cycles that lock it in place. The task before us is twofold, and our vision necessarily stereoscopic: we must engineer an economy that liberates reproductive labour and family life, while building models of familiality free from the deadening grind of wage labour." (Xenofeminist Manifesto, 2015). If womanhood = motherhood, and motherhood = the ability to nurture, and all of this is grounded in a very particular image of dichotomized reproductive bodies, then there seems to be precious little opportunity for challenging (let alone abolishing!) hegemonic gender roles. Like all manifestations of nature, gender must not be confused with a pure and timeless structure – which is not to dismiss the centrality of gendered and reproductive embodiment within lived experiences or cultural constructions of the natural world. The challenge is to acknowledge the importance of, say, the gendered division of labour and the histories of familial forms without discounting the diversity of ‘feminine’ engagements with ecology or providing further discursive support for the idea of a binary gender system marked by inherently feminine or masculine practices and abilities. This is, of course, a very delicate balance to strike, but could perhaps be broadly characterized by a shift away from naturalized identities towards an appreciation of mutable, historically and geographically situated processes (of re/productive labour, for example) as a basis for xenofeminist solidarities. [...] In this world, ‘Kin relations can be formed at any time of life, and so parents and other sorts of relatives can be added or invented at significant points of transition.’ Such imaginaries suggest a potential process of making babies that is also a matter of making kin – of bearing children without bearing the Child or investing in the social reproduction of white, cishet, patriarchal values. Perhaps a new variation of Haraway’s slogan is required here – one which recognizes that the affective bonds we assemble within and against capitalism can take various forms, and need not perpetuate the replication of the same. ‘Xenofam ≥ biofam’ – the idea that families hospitable to otherness and synthesized across differences match or exceed those built on genetic coincidence alone – heads in the right direction, so long as we add the explicit caveat that so-called ‘blood relations’ can themselves become xenofamilial through an ongoing orientation towards practical solidarity. If such a formulation still appears unduly dismissive about the possibilities of some forms of parental care, we might be forced to reach for something like ‘xenofam > synofam’, a formulation correctively favouring outward-looking solidarity with the alien, the foreign, and the figure of the stranger, over restrictive solidarity with the familiar, the similar, and the figure of the compatriot. We must, in a sense, defamiliarize the biological family, whilst refamiliarizing alternative networks of solidarity and intimacy in such a way that they can become both generalizable and maximally accessible, without falling into the trap of reproducing the same. Indeed, it is worth noting that reproductive futurism diligently neglects the alternatives to replication embedded within its procreative imaginary. As Rebekah Sheldon remarks, ‘it is not just the case that the child retro-reproductively forecloses the future but also that the figuration of the child as the self-similar issue of the present, the safe space of human prosperity and a return to a manageable nature, forecloses the mutational in the reproductive’. It is, in part, within the mutational that the xeno resides – in the perpetual possibility that repetition might enable the emergence of difference." (Xenofeminism, 2018)