Reimagining Human-Technology entanglements: Technomaterialism, Xenofeminism and the Affective Politics of Digital Materialism in “Cat Pictures Please” and “An Evening with Severyn Grimes”

Abstract

Informed by Helen Hester’s technomaterialist paradigm, this paper investigates the intersection of technology, labor, and embodiment in Naomi Kritzer’s “Cat Pictures Please” and Rich Larson’s “An Evening with Severyn Grimes.” The paper foregrounds the material infrastructures and power relations that sustain digital culture. Kritzer’s AI, driven by affection for cat images, personifies algorithmic systems that emulate care work and reproduce human biases within concealed circuits of emotional and computational labor. Larson’s vision of technological self-enhancement exposes the corporate control, bodily commodification, and stratified access to innovation that define techno-capitalist modernity. Through Hester’s technomaterialist and xenofeminist insights, these stories demonstrate that contemporary technologies remain governed by social, economic, and gendered hierarchies, dismantling the illusion of disembodied digitality. Foregrounding the interlinked economic and ecological costs that technology conceals, both narratives elevate speculative fiction into a critical ecology of thought—an imaginative counterspace that resists the mythic purity of techno-utopian optimism. This paper presents such narratives as laboratories for rethinking technological politics, embodiment, and futurity.