“For Laboria Cuboniks, the universal is synthetic – it’s a political category. It’s not something that is discovered, or progressively unearthed, but represents a ‘we’ that is collectively built, and which can be rebuilt in more emancipatory forms. Again, this can be understood as an effort to construct vectors of unanticipated and constructed solidarities. I see this as being in direct opposition to the bloated particularity that has conventionally been passed off as the universal and which has largely cornered the market on popular understandings of the generic since the Enlightenment. Xenofeminism doesn’t want to reject universality – though I totally understand the impetus – but instead wants to contest and re-engineer the universal.“

Helen Hester interviewed at The Quietus. I kinda missed xenofeminism the first time round, mired as I was in specifically thesis-pertinent theory at the time; looks like it would be well worth my addressing that oversight.

(And can I just say how good it is to see a music-and-culture organ like The Quietus covering theorists as if they were an important part of the culture? Because it is very good.)