Coloniality of Power and Gender

In an effort to zoom out a bit and begin to answer Alexander and Mohanty’s questions on epistemic rights to knowledge production, I now turn to Argentine lesbian theorist and activist Maria Lugones. Lugones situates herself among contemporaries of decolonial studies — primarily women of color in the United States and women of the global south — to create a transnational dialogue about how race, gender, sexuality, and class are entangled across borders. She also derives from an Andean context and Aymara feminisms to consider potential liberatory avenues for feminist coalitions. 

 In her 2008 essay, “The Coloniality of Gender,” Lugones analyzes the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality emerge through coloniality in Latin America. Centering intersectionality in her theoretical framework here, Lugones builds on Peruvian Sociologist Anibal Quijano’s theory of “coloniality of power” to argue that gender formation is not merely an additive category, but one stringently interlocked with other subordinated categories in the interests of the Iberian empire. Theorizing it as the “modern/colonial gender system,” Lugones analyzes the ways in which dominant Western ideology has positioned gender through an understanding of biological determinism. Within this logic, gender oppression is viewed as the subordination of women to men — with women of color situated at the lower ring of this hierarchy — which as Lugones argues, is limiting and risks reinforcing eurocentric formations of gender. Instead, she urges to think beyond the subordination of women as a framework for feminism. 

Lugones takes considerable space within her essay to cite various precolonial societies arranged by nongendered, intersex, and gynecentric communal ways of living. She argues, “understanding the place of gender in pre-colonial societies is also pivotal in understanding the extent and importance of the gender system in disintegrating communal relations, egalitarian relations, ritual thinking, collective decision making, collective authority, and economies” (Lugones, 2008, 12). In doing so, she visibilizes the subordination that the modern/colonial gender system imposed on societies that otherwise had no prior conception of gender. For instance, colonized women have often been casted through the “innocent/savage” binary, seen as either passive beings or as epitome of sexual abberation and excess (Lugones, 2008, 14). In both cases, the female body is relegated to the status of “non-human” object, animal, or nature, and ultimately a site for exploitation and domination. What would it look like, then, to consider gender beyond the colonial sexual dichotomy? What openings for cross-cultural coalition could this create in theorizing and situating gender across the Americas? 

It’s important to note that Lugones’s writing on black feminisms remains somewhat undeveloped, giving more priority to indigenous feminisms. Still, Lugones helps me approximate a firmer understanding of the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality emerge in differing contexts across the Americas that cannot be homogenized under blanketed statements. It’s particularly salient to consider as oftentimes — as I’ve outlined through Alexander and Mohanty above — North American frameworks of racialized gender formation are exported elsewhere around the globe, creating fractured and misrepresented analyses of specific geographical histories. Lugones is important for me to draw on as I study artists based within Latin America, navigating particularly fraught realities of coloniality, extractive capitalism, and U.S. imperialism. In other writings on decolonial indigenous feminisms, she urges us to consider the importance of coalition-building across borders and cultures. She warns against the harm in translating across cultures, and instead urges us to center the multiplicity of cultures and experiences within decolonial feminist praxis.

Works Cited

Lugones, Maria. 2007. Heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system. Hypatia 22: 186–219. 

access file here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4640051?seq=1

Lugones, Maria. 2014. Indigenous Movements and decolonial feminism. Seminario de grado y posgrado, Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, The Ohio State University.

access file here: https://wgss.osu.edu/sites/wgss.osu.edu/files/LugonesSeminarReadings.pdf

Lugones, Maria. 2010. Toward a Decolonial Feminism. Hypatia 25: 742-759

access file here: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40928654?seq=1