Coloniality of Gender: María Lugones' Decolonial Feminism

In “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System” and in “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” the late feminist philosopher María Lugones examines the sociality of decolonial thinking and politics as it concerns the limits of feminist projects that have the human at their center. Broadly speaking, her understanding of the coloniality of gender reveals that the introduction of race in the 16th century, as a global social classification, rendered the colonized genderless. Thus, contemporary feminism faces the challenge of having subjects that are both women and non-women.

This course seeks to introduce the notion of the coloniality of gender as developed by Maria Lugones. To this aim, it examines the core components of her theorizing as follows:

1. US women of color feminism, coalitional politics, and intersectional thinking.
2. Coloniality of power, the heterosexualism of the coloniality of power, and violence against women of color.
3. Decolonial feminism, Coalitional and Communal Selves.

This course is interdisciplinary in its scope and reach. It appeals to students who are interested in engaging decolonial thinking across the arts, narratives, histories, philosophies, ethnographies, performances, and pedagogies. It also relies on their critical commitments to plural, contradictory, realities. Specifically, it assumes that students are familiar with social theories that emphasize the interweaving of race, class, and colonization. It also asks students to focus on the analysis of resistance to the coloniality of gender, a way of undoing or unlearning the education of embodiment, gender, and desire.
Three questions guide our engagement with Lugones’s oeuvre: a) What major shifts in feminist theory explain the strengths and limitations of the notion of racialized gender? b) What contributions enable feminist thinkers/activists to bracket, as it were, the coloniality of gender? and c) In what ways does feminist praxis pursue decolonization across social, cultural, and political sites?