Toward a Decolonial Feminism (María Lugones, Hypatia, 2010)

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Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Cambridge University Press, Wiley and are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Hypatia This content downloaded from 134.74.20.15 on Sun, 05 Jul 2020 16:37:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms === [PDF page 2] === Toward a Decolonial Feminism MARÍA LUGONES in "Heterosexualism and the ColonialflsAodern Gender System1 (Lugones 2007), I proposed to read the relation between the colonizer and the colonized in terms of gender, race, and sexuality. By this I did not mean to add a gendered reading and a racial reading to the already understood colonial relations. Rather 1 proposed a rereading of modern capitalist colonial modernity itself. This is because the colonial imposition of gender cuts across questions of ecology, economics, government, relations with the spirit world, and knowledge, as well as across everyday practices that either habituate us to take care of the world or to destroy it. I propose this framework not as an abstraction from lived experience, but as a lens that enables us to see what is hidden from our understandings of both race and gender and the relation of each to normative heterosexuality. Modernity organizes the world ontologically in terms of atomic, homogeneous, separable categories. Contemporary women of color and third-world women's critique of feminist universalism centers the claim that the intersection of race, class, sexuality, and gender exceeds the categories of modernity. If woman and black are terms for homogeneous, atomic, separable categories, then their intersection shows us the absence of black women rather than their presence. So, to see non-white women is to exceed "categorial" logic. I propose the modern, colonial, gender system as a lens through which to theorize further the oppressive logic of colonial modernity, its use of hierarchical dichotomies and categorial logic. I want to emphasize categorial, dichotomous, hierarchical logic as central to modern, colonial, capitalist thinking about race, gender, and sexuality. This permits me to search for social organizations from which people have resisted modern, capitalist modernity that are in tension with its logic. Following Aparicio and Blaser,1 I will call such ways of organizing the social, Hypatia vol. 25, no. 4 (Fall, 2010) © by Hypatia, Inc. This content downloaded from 134.74.20.15 on Sun, 05 Jul 2020 16:37:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms === [PDF page 3] === María Lugones 743 the cosmological, the ecological, the economic With Aparicio and Blaser and others, I use these ways are not premodern. The moder premodern ways. So, non-modern knowledges logical, economic, and spiritual practices are lo with a dichotomous, hierarchical, "categorial" I. The Coloniality of Gender I understand the dichotomous hierarchy between the human and the nonhuman as the central dichotomy of colonial modernity. Beginning with the colonization of the Americas and the Caribbean, a hierarchical, dichotomous distinction between human and non-human was imposed on the colonized in the service of Western man. It was accompanied by other dichotomous hierarchical distinctions, among them that between men and women. This distinction became a mark of the human and a mark of civilization. Only the civilized are men or women. Indigenous peoples of the Americas and enslaved Africans were classified as not human in species - as animals, uncontrollably sexual and wild. The European, bourgeois, colonial, modern man became a subject/agent, fit for rule, for public life and ruling, a being of civilization, heterosexual, Christian, a being of mind and reason. The European bourgeois woman was not understood as his complement, but as someone who reproduced race and capital through her sexual purity, passivity, and being homebound in the service of the white, European, bourgeois man. The imposition of these dichotomous hierarchies became woven into the historicity of relations, including intimate relations. In this paper I want to figure out how to think about intimate, everyday resistant interactions to the colonial difference. When I think of intimacy here, I am not thinking exclusively or mainly about sexual relations. I am thinking of the interwoven social life among people who are not acting as representatives or officials. I begin, then, with a need to understand that the colonized became subjects in colonial situations in the first modernity, in the tensions created by the brutal imposition of the modern, colonial, gender system. Under the imposed gender framework, the bourgeois white Europeans were civilized; they were fully human. The hierarchical dichotomy as a mark of the human also became a normative tool to damn the colonized. The behaviors of the colonized and their personalities/souls were judged as bestial and thus non-gendered, promiscuous, grotesquely sexual, and sinful. Though at this time the understanding of sex was not dimorphic, animals were differentiated as males and females, the male being the perfection, the female the inversion and deformation of the male. Hermaphrodites, sodomites, viragos, and the colonized were all understood to be aberrations of male perfection. This content downloaded from 134.74.20.15 on Sun, 05 Jul 2020 16:37:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms === [PDF page 4] === 744 Hypatia The civilizing mission, includin the ideological conception of co for their deficiencies from the enormous cruelty. I propose to the civilizing perspective as ju "man," the human being par e mative understanding of "wom point of view, colonized people human-as-not-men, and coloni Consequently, colonized female they were not men-like, and we understood to be lacking as not as the "feminization" of coloniz attributing to them sexual pass tween hypersexual i ty and sex masculine subjection of the colo It is important to note that o nized societies, the search for t of the gender distinction result each sex. In so doing they affir teristic mainly of earlier femi introduced arguments for the c lier version, sex grounded gend sex, you will see gender and vice gender, in the distinction betw stand alone. Gender and sex cou Sexual dimorphism became the of gender, the human characteri the sex that stood alone in the gendered. What is important to the characterization of the colo research that takes coloniality meaning of the relation betwee The colonial "civilizing mission to people's bodies through unim control of reproduction, and sy making pouches and hats fro females, for example). The ci dichotomy as a judgment, thou for the colonized was not the the colonized into human be of imagining this as a goal ca This content downloaded from 134.74.20.15 on Sun, 05 Jul 2020 16:37:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms === [PDF page 5] === María Lugones 745 this transformation of the colonized into men and women would have been a transformation not in identity, but in nature. But turning the colonized against themselves was included in the civilizing mission's repertoire of justifications for abuse. Christian confession, sin, and the Manichean division between good and evil served to imprint female sexuality as evil, as colonized females were understood in relation to Satan, sometimes as mounted by Satan. The civilizing transformation justified the colonization of memory, and thus of people's senses of self, of intersubjective relation, of their relation to the spirit world, to land, to the very fabric of their conception of reality, identity, and social, ecological, and cosmological organization. Thus, as Christianity became the most powerful instrument in the mission of transformation, the normativity that connected gender and civilization became intent on erasing community, ecological practices, knowledge of planting, of weaving, of the cosmos, and not only on changing and controlling reproductive and sexual practices. One can begin to appreciate the tie between the colonial introduction of the instrumental modern concept of nature central to capitalism, and the colonial introduction of the modern concept of gender, and appreciate it as macabre and heavy in its impressive ramifications. One can also recognize, in the scope I am giving to the imposition of the modern, colonial, gender system, the dehumanization constitutive of the coloniality of being. The concept of the coloniality of being that I understand as related to the process of dehumanization was developed by Nelson Maldonado Torres (2008). I use the term coloniality following Anibal Quijano's analysis of the capitalist world system of power in terms of "coloniality of power" and of modernity, two inseparable axes in the workings of this system of power. Quijano's analysis provides us with a historical understanding of the inseparability of racialization and capitalist exploitation4 as constitutive of the capitalist system of power as anchored in the colonization of the Americas. In thinking of the coloniality of gender, I complicate his understanding of the capitalist global system of power, but I also critique his own understanding of gender as only in terms of sexual access to women. In using the term coloniality I mean to name not just a classification of people in terms of the coloniality of power and gender, but also the process of active reduction of people, the dehumanization that fits them for the classification, the process of subjectification, the attempt to turn the colonized into less than human beings. This is in stark contrast to the process of conversion that constitutes the Christianizing mission. II. Theorizing Resistance/Decolonizing Gender The semantic consequence of the coloniality of gender is that "colonized woman" is an empty category: no women are colonized; no colonized females are women. Thus, the colonial answer to Sojouner Truth is clearly, "no."6 This content downloaded from 134.74.20.15 on Sun, 05 Jul 2020 16:37:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms === [PDF page 6] === 746 Hypatia Unlike colonization, the colonia the intersection of gender/class/ system of power. Thinking abo of historical beings only one-si such beings as colonized women resist the coloniality of gender as I have suggested, only parti through the coloniality of ge non-colonized construction of g There is no such thing; "gender Resistance to the coloniality of When I think of myself as a th resistance as the end or goal of p possibility. I am interested in th liberation, as both adaptive a tension between subjectification active subjectivity, that minim sense of agency of the modern subject (Lugones 2003 ).7 Resistant subjectivity often expresses itself infra-politica politics of the public, which has an easy inhabitation o Legitimacy, authority, voice, sense, and visibility are de jectivity. Infra-politics marks the turn inward, in a politic liberation. It shows the power of communities of the opp resistant meaning and each other against the constitut social organization by power. In our colonized, racially existences we are also other than what the hegemon m infra-political achievement. If we are exhausted, fully micro and macro mechanisms and circulations of powe much of its meaning or ceases to be an intersubjective a bility of an identity based on politics (Mignolo 200 de-coloniality loses its peopled ground. As I move methodologically from women of color fem feminism, I think about feminism from and at the grass the colonial difference, with a strong emphasis on grou incarnate intersubjectivity. The question of the relation resistant response to the coloniality of gender and de-col here rather than answered.8 But I do mean to understan loniality of gender from the perspective of the colonial di Decolonizing gender is necessarily a praxical task. It is racialized, colonial, and capitalist heterosexualist gende transformation of the social. As such it places the theorizer This content downloaded from 134.74.20.15 on Sun, 05 Jul 2020 16:37:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms === [PDF page 7] === María Lugones 747 in a historical, peopled, subject ive/intersubjec ing < To a significant extent it has to be in accord with the subjec subjectivities that partly construct and in part are constructed It must include "learning" peoples. Furthermore, feminism d an account of the oppression of women. It goes beyond oppre materials that enable women to understand their situation w to it. Here I begin to provide a way of understanding the op who have been subalternized through the combined processe colonization, capitalist explotation, and heterosexualism. My on the subjective- intersubjective to reveal that disaggregating gregates the subjective-intersubjective springs of colonized w call the analysis of racialized, capitalist, gender oppression gender." I call the possibility of overcoming the coloniality of feminism." The coloniality of gender enables me to understand the op tion as a complex interaction of economic, racializing, and g in which every person in the colonial encounter can be foun ical, fully described being. It is as such that I want to unders being oppressed by the colonizing construction of the fract coloniality of gender hides the resister as fully informed as nities under cataclysmic attack. So, the coloniality of gender ingredient in the resisteros history. In focusing on the resi difference I mean to unveil what is obscured. The long process of coloniality begins subjectively and int tense encounter that both forms and will not simply yield to c colonial normativity. The crucial point about the encounter tive and intersubjective construction of it informs the resist ingredients of colonial domination. The global, capitalist, c system of power that Anibal Quijano characterizes as begin teenth century in the Americas and enduring until today me formed, a world of empty minds and evolving animals (Qu Rather, it encountered complex cultural, political, economic, ings: selves in complex relations to the cosmos, to other selv to the earth, to living beings, to the inorganic, in product erotic, aesthetic, and linguistic expressivity, whose knowledg longings, practices, institutions, and forms of government wer replaced but met, understood, and entered into in tense, viole and dialogues and negotiations that never happened. Instead, the process of colonization invented the colonized full reduction of them to less than human primitives, satani fantile, aggressively sexual, and in need of transformation. This content downloaded from 134.74.20.15 on Sun, 05 Jul 2020 16:37:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms === [PDF page 8] === 748 Hypatia to follow is the oppressing < colonial difference. That is, I want to follow subjects in inte oration and conflict, fully informed as members of Native A societies, as they take up, respond, resist, and accommodate who mean to dispossess and dehumanize them. The invasive them brutally, in a prepossessing, arrogant, incommunicat way, leaving little room for adjustments that preserve their ow community and in the world. But, instead of thinking of th colonial system as in every way successful in its destruction ledges, relations, and economies, I want to think of the pro resisted, and being resisted today. And thus I want to think neither as simply imagined and constructed by the colonize accordance with the colonial imagination and the stricture colonial venture, but as a being who begins to inhabit a fr structed doubly, who perceives doubly, relates doubly, wher locus are in tension, and the conflict itself actively informs the colonized self in multiple relation. The gender system is not just hierarchical but racially differ racial differentiation denies humanity and thus gender to t Silverblatt (1990; 1998), Carolyn Dean (2001), Maria Esth Ledezma 2006), Pamela Calla and Nina Laurie (2006), Sylv Paula Gunn Allen (1992), Leslie Marmon Silko (2006), Fel de Ayala (2009), and Oyeronke Oyewumi (1997), among oth affirm that gender is a colonial imposition, not just as it impo lived in tune with cosmologies incompatible with the moder omies, but also that inhabitations of worlds understood, co accordance with such cosmologies animated the self-among tance from and at the extreme tension of the colonial differ The long process of subjectification of the colonized toward nalization of the men/women dichotomy as a normative co social - a mark of civilization, citizenship, and membership was and is constantly renewed. It is met in the flesh over a tional responses grounded in a long history of oppositional as sensical in alternative, resistant socialities at the colonia movement toward coalition that impels us to know each othe thick, in relation, in alternative socialities, and grounded in habitations of the colonial difference. I am investigating emphasizing the historicity of the oppressing < resisting relation and thus emphasizing concrete, live coloniality of gender. In particular, I want to mark the ne ple reading of the resistant self in relation. This is a conseq imposition of gender. We see the gender dichotomy opera This content downloaded from 134.74.20.15 on Sun, 05 Jul 2020 16:37:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms === [PDF page 9] === María Lugones 749 the construction of the social and in the col jectification. But if we are going to make an relation, we need to bracket the dichotomo gender system that is constituted by the hi for European colonials + the non-gendered, mi makes clear, a colonizing reading of t dichotomy into the Yoruba society, erasing tion of a multiply oppressive gender system. T careful with the use of the terms woman and essary to weave the logic of the fractured sources woven into the resistant responses t and woman into the very fabric that constitut we erase the resistance itself. Only in brack ferent logic that organizes the social in t multiple perception and inhabitation, the f or multiple consciousness, is constituted in p fractured locus includes the hierarchical di ject ification of the colonized. But the lo presence, the active subjectivity of the colon of self in community from the inhabitation roring of the multiplicity of the woman of co I mentioned above that I was following Ap between the modern and non-modern. They tinction clear as they tell us that modernity their existence, the challenge of the existen ontological presuppositions. It denies their ex ity and of co-evalness. This denial is colonia modernity. The difference between modern the modern perspective - a colonial diffe which the non-modern is subordinated to th modernity is not premodern (Aparicio and B to see that a framework may well be fundame essentialist logic of modernity and be critica and man, and even of the dimorphism betw ing coloniality or the colonial difference. S and may exclude the very possibility of res gender system and the coloniality of gende multiply through a fractured locus at the col In thinking of the methodology of decolon from the cosmologies that inform it, rather reading of cosmologies informing and co embodiment, and relation. Thus the mo This content downloaded from 134.74.20.15 on Sun, 05 Jul 2020 16:37:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms === [PDF page 10] === 750 Hypatia different from one that reads g understand the organization of tion of the gender imposition koshskalaka, chachawarmU and chotomous, heterosexual, racia meaning to the gender distinc through colonial translation an coloniality of gender and resista In a conversation with Filome between the Aymara qamaña an complex answer t related utjaña land. She told me that one can standing, those who do not ha Though she lives much of the t she maintains utjaña, which is year she will govern with her sis thus she will be chacha twice, sin Filomena herself will be chacha stead in a chacha community. warmi as man and woman does through utjaña. Filomena trans tary opposites. The new Bolivia the indigenous movements of A ophy of suma qamaña (often tr qamaña and utjaña indicates the arability from communal flou balance. Chachawarmi is not sep is rather of a piece with it. Thu ible with suma qamaña.11 I am certainly not advocating n the human/non-human, man/ w struction of everyday life, as if coloniality of gender, and it wo ing - the tense inhabitation of it. As I mark the colonial trans aware of the use of man and w including in interracial discour introduced with colonization th of gender has turned this colonia tance to the coloniality of gen of the colonial wound. The polit moving between ways of liv This content downloaded from 134.74.20.15 on Sun, 05 Jul 2020 16:37:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms === [PDF page 11] === María Lugones 751 man/woman constitutes loyalty to the coloniali tory of resistance at the colonial difference. F living in the past, only in the chachawarmi w utjaña today depends, in part, on lives lived in colonial difference. III. The Colonial Difference Walter Mignolo begins Local Histories/Global Designs by telling us that "The main topic of this book is the colonial difference in the formation and transformation of the modern/colonial world system" (Mignolo 2000, ix). As the phrase "the colonial difference" moves through Mignolo's writing, its meaning becomes open-ended. The colonial difference is not defined in Local Histories. Indeed, a definitional disposition is unfriendly to Mignolo's introduction of the concept. So as I present some of the quotes from Mignolo's text, I am not introducing them as his definition of "the colonial difference." Rather, these quotes guide my thoughts on resistance to the coloniality of gender at the colonial difference from within the complexity of his text. The colonial difference is the space where coloniality of power is enacted. (Mignolo 2000, ix) Once coloniality of power is introduced into the analysis, the "colonial difference" becomes visible, and the epistemological fractures between the Eurocentric critique of Eurocentrism is distinguished from the critique of Eurocentrism, anchored in the colonial difference.... (37) I have prepared us to hear these assertions. One can look at the colonial past and, as an observer, see the natives negotiating the introduction of foreign beliefs and practices as well as negotiating being assigned to inferior positions and being found polluting and dirty. Clearly, to see this is not to see the coloniality. It is rather to see people - anyone, really - pressed under difficult circumstances to occupy demeaning positions that make them disgusting to the social superiors. To see the coloniality is to see the powerful reduction of human beings to animals, to inferiors by nature, in a schizoid understanding of reality that dichotomizes the human from nature, the human from the non-human, and thus imposes an ontology and a cosmology that, in its power and constitution, disallows all humanity, all possibility of understanding, all possibility of human communication, to dehumanized beings. To see the coloniality is to see both the jaqiy the persona, the being that is in a world of meaning without dichotomies, and the beast, both real, both vying under different powers for survival. Thus to see the coloniality is to reveal the very degradation that gives us two This content downloaded from 134.74.20.15 on Sun, 05 Jul 2020 16:37:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms === [PDF page 12] === 752 Hypatia renditions of life and a being r being lies in its full inhabitation contradictory and from such co [The colonial difference] is t venting and implementing g the space in which global de rejected, integrated, or ignor [The colonial difference] is, f inary location where the colo confrontation of two kinds of ent spaces and times across t the historically unavoidable r frontations of two kinds of Christian and Native Amer Amerindian cosmologies, C Christian and Confucian cosm dichotomies where you look you compare them in the geo colonial world system, (ix) Thus, it is not an affair of the p It is a matter of how we produ racialized female and male ener that energy to be used toward t own possibilities. Our possibilit tion; they do not lie in parity wi the coloniality. That constru through by its intimate relation The colonial difference creat ations in which a fractured e subaltern perspective as a res and perspective. (Mignolo 20 The transcending of the colo from a perspective of subalt therefore, from a new epist thinking works. (45) I see these two paragraphs in te had with the modern man, his his redemption but also his self colonial difference but necessary This content downloaded from 134.74.20.15 on Sun, 05 Jul 2020 16:37:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms === [PDF page 13] === María Lugones 753 and intermingled locals. So, indeed, the trans the perspective of subalternity, but toward a n Border thinking... is a logical conseque difference.... [T]he fractured locus of subaltern perspective defines border think the colonial difference, (x) It is also the space where the restitution of is taking place and where border thinking i The colonial differences, around the pla where border epistemology dwells. (37) I am proposing a feminist border thinking, wher a ground, a space, a borderlands, to use Gloria A not an infinite repetition of dichotomous hiera of the human. Often in Mignolo's work the colonial differe than the subjective/intersubjective. But when "border thinking," as he interprets Anzaldua, h so doing he understands her locus as fractured sees the coloniality of gender and rejection, re to its negotiation always concretely, from with IV. Reading the Fractured Locus What I am proposing in working toward a decolonial feminism is to learn about each other as resisters to the coloniality of gender at the colonial difference, without necessarly being an insider to the worlds of meaning from which resistance to the coloniality arises. That is, the decolonial feminist's task begins by her seeing the colonial difference, emphatically resisting her epistemological habit of erasing it. Seeing it, she sees the world anew, and then she requires herself to drop her enchantment with "woman," the universal, and begins to learn about other resisters at the colonial difference.12 The reading moves against the social-scientific objectifying reading, attempting rather to understand subjects, the active subjectivity emphasized as the reading looks for the fractured locus in resistance to the coloniality of gender at a coalitional starting point. In thinking of the starting point as coalitional because the fractured locus is in common, the histories of resistance at the colonial difference are where we need to dwell, learning about each other. The coloniality of gender is sensed as concrete, intricately related exercises of power, some body to body, some legal, some inside a room as indigenous female-beasts-not-civilized-women are forced to weave day and night, others at the confessional. The differences in the This content downloaded from 134.74.20.15 on Sun, 05 Jul 2020 16:37:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms === [PDF page 14] === 754 Hypatia concreteness and intricacy of p of generality; embodied subjecti As the coloniality infiltrates ev power at the levels of the body troduction of property and land different concrete people whos spirit world do not follow the countenanced by the logic of po tions does not repeat itself. It d and everyone continues to resp resistantly - which is not to time there is open defiance - i capital, but that are not part of ment succeeds in retaining crea that are antithetical to the logi sibilities are continually transfo locus that constitutes a creativ adoption, ignoring, and integra tance as they are always perfo by inhabiting the colonial diffe multiplicity in the fracture of of gender and the resistant respo of the self-in-relation, of the c out the tense multiplicity, we accomplishment, or a freezing o relation from a precolonial sens ment, people moving: the tensio the coloniality of being, and th One does not resist the coloni within a way of understanding t can understand one's actions, th than individuals enable the doin ualist isolation. The passing from practices, values, beliefs, ontol one. The production of the eve self as it provides particular, m logies, gestures, rhythms, habi portant that these ways are not over profit, communalism over relation rather than dichotom violently ordered fragments. T persisted in the resistant respon This content downloaded from 134.74.20.15 on Sun, 05 Jul 2020 16:37:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms === [PDF page 15] === María Lugones 755 Finally, I mark here the interest in an ethics terms of both be-ing, and be- ing in relation t peopled ground (Lorde 2007). I can think of the the coloniality of gender at the colonial diffe backed by an alternative communal source of s rate responses. The direction of the possibility of and possibility of self in relation lies not thro with the oppressor from the point of the oppres the logic of difference and multiplicity and of c (Lorde 2007). The emphasis is on maintainin reduction - not in maintaining a hybrid "prod difference - in the tense workings of more than but transcended. Among the logics at work ar logic of oppression: many colonial differences The responses from the fragmented loci can be crea ing of the possibility of coalition that takes up the logic of coalition of feminists of color: the social erotics (Sandoval 2000) that takes on the creative, that permits enactments that are thoro chotomies (Lorde 2007). The logic of coalit dichotomies; differences are never seen in dic has as its opposition the logic of power. The mu So, I mark this as a beginning, but it is a begi term that Maldonado Torres has called the "de proliferate at this time and the answers are d again, an emphasis on methodologies that work responsibility is maximal. How do we learn abo without harming each other but with the cour everyday that may reveal deep betrayals? How d With whom do we do this work? The theoretic My own life - ways of spending my time, of s sorrow - is animated by great anger and direct Perez (1999), and Sandoval (2000) teach us. H other engaging in dialogue at the colonial diff we are doing it? Isn't it the case that those of us who rejected over by white women in consciousness-raising g and women's studies program meetings saw the coalition that would really include us? Isn't it t substantial sense of recognition when we aske White Woman?" Isn't it the case that we rejec Sojourner Truth and were ready to reject their This content downloaded from 134.74.20.15 on Sun, 05 Jul 2020 16:37:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms === [PDF page 16] === 756 Hypatia refused the offer at the colonial one woman, only one reality? Isn as multiple seers at the colonial d begins nor ends with that offer? seeing each other at the colonial d feminist geopolitics of knowing a Notes 1. Juan Ricardo Aparicio and Mario Blaser present this analysis and the relation between knowledge and political practices that focuses on politically committed research in indigenous communities in the Americas, including both academics and activists, insiders and outsiders to the communities in their forthcoming work. This is an important contribution to understanding decolonial, liberatory processes of knowledge production. 2. Since the eighteenth century the dominant Western view "has been that there are two stable, incommensurable, opposite sexes and that the political, economic, and cultural lives of men and women, their gender roles, are somehow based on these "facts"" (Laqueur 1992, 6). Thomas Laqueur also tells us that historically, differentiations of gender preceded differentiations of sex (62). What he terms the "one-sex model" he traces through Greek antiquity to the end of the seventeenth century (and beyond): a world where at least two genders correspond to but one sex, where the boundaries between male and female are of degree and not of kind (25). Laqueur tells us that the longevity of the one-sex model is due to its link to power. "In a world that was overwhelmingly male, the one-sex model displayed what was already massively evident in culture: man is the measure of all things, and woman does not exist as an ontologically distinct category" (62). Laqueur sums up the question of perfection by saying that for Aristotle and for "the long tradition founded on his thought, the generative substances are interconvertible elements in the economy of a single-sex body whose higher form is male" (42). 3. There is a tension between the understanding of procreation central to the onesex model and the Christian advocacy of virginity. Instead of seeing the working of sex as related to the production of heat leading to orgasm, St. Augustine sees it as related to the fall. Idealized Christian sex is without passion (see Laqueur 1992, 59-60). The consequences for the coloniality of gender are evident, as the bestial, colonized males and females are understood as excessively sexual. 4. Anibal Quijano understands the coloniality of power as the specific form that domination and exploitation takes in the constitution of the capitalist world system of power. "Coloniality" refers to: the classification of the world's populations in terms of races - the racialization of the relations between colonizers and colonized; the configuration of a new system of exploitation that articulates in one structure all forms of control of labor around the hegemony of capital, where labor is racialized (wage labor as well as slavery, servitude, and small commodity production all became racialized forms of production; they were all new forms as they were constituted in the service of capitalism); Eurocentrism as the new mode of production and control of subjectivity; a new This content downloaded from 134.74.20.15 on Sun, 05 Jul 2020 16:37:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms === [PDF page 17] === María Lugones 757 system of control of collective authority around excludes populations racialized as inferior from c jano 1991; 1995; and Quijano and Wallerstein 1 5. For my argument against Quijano's understa and sex/gender, see Lugones 2007. 6. "Ain't I a Woman?"; speech given at the W May 29, 1851. 7. In Lugones 2003 I introduce the concept of "active subjectivity" to capture the minimal sense of agency of the resister to multiple oppressions whose multiple subjectivity is reduced by hegemonic understandings/colonial understandings/racist-gendered understandings to no agency at all. It is her belonging to impure communities that gives life to her agency. 8. It is outside the scope of this article, but certainly well within the project to which I am committed, to argue that the coloniality of gender is constituted by and constitutive of the coloniality of power, knowledge, being, nature, and language. They are crucially inseparable. One way of expressing this is that the coloniality of knowledge, for example, is gendered and that one has not understood the coloniality of knowledge without understanding its being gendered. But here I want to get ahead of myself in claiming that there is no de-coloniality without de-coloniality of gender. Thus, the modern colonial imposition of an oppressive, racially differentiated, hierarchical gender system permeated through and through by the modern logic of dichotomizing cannot be characterized as a circulation of power that organizes the domestic sphere as opposed to the public domain of authority and the sphere of waged labor (and access and control of sex and reproduction biology) as contrasted to cognitive/epistemic intersubjectivity and knowledge, or nature as opposed to culture. 9. A further note on the relation of intersectionality and categorial purity: intersectionality has become pivotal in U.S. women of color feminisms. As said above, one cannot see, locate, or address women of color (U.S. Latinas, Asians, Chicanas, African Americans, Native American women) in the U.S. legal system and in much of institutionalized U.S. life. As one considers the dominant categories, among them "woman," "black," "poor," they are not articulated in a way that includes people who are women, black, and poor. The intersection of "woman" and "black" reveals the absence of black women rather their presence. That is because the modern categorial logic constructs categories as homogeneous, atomic, separable, and constituted in dichotomous terms. That construction proceeds from the pervasive presence of hierarchical dichotomies in the logic of modernity and modern institutions. The relation between categorial purity and hierarchical dichotomies works as follows. Each homogeneous, separable, atomic category is characterized in terms of the superior member of the dichotomy. Thus "women" stands for white women. "Black" stands for black men. When one is trying to understand women at the intersection of race, class, and gender, non-white black, mestiza, indigenous, and Asian women are impossible beings. They are impossible since they are neither European bourgeois women, nor indigenous males. Intersectionality is important when showing the failures of institutions to include discrimination or oppression against women of color. But here I want to be able to think of their presence as This content downloaded from 134.74.20.15 on Sun, 05 Jul 2020 16:37:07 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms === [PDF page 18] === 758 Hypatia being both oppressed and resisting. So from the colonial difference to be ab colonized women and agents fluent i 10. I agree with Oyeronke Oyewum tion of the Yoruba (Oyewumi 1997). gender and sex as colonial imposition gender is hierarchical and dichotom of sex is dimorphic and relates the m true of the female. Thus, Mesoamer separable terms, but in terms of fl Alcoff sees the contribution of sper entailing the sexual division and the egg is quite compatible with intersex utes sperm" to a particular act of contributor is either male or a man, n or a woman. But nothing about them to a sperm contributor who is mar matter of normed logic. If the Weste to the dimorphic sexual distinction, ficient condition of maleness, then Hormonal and gonadal characteristics der. Think of the dangerous misfit o prisons to get a feel for this percepti 11. It is important for me not to understand what I am saying, but not translated the terms. So, if I do not not understand at all, I think that yo ample of thinking at the colonial diff 12. Learning each other's historie standing deep coalitions among U.S. this learning. References Aparicio, Juan Ricardo, and Mario Blaser, [unpublished manuscript.] La "CiudadLetrada" y la insurrección de saberes subyugados en América Latina. Calla, Pamela, and Nina Laurie. 2006. 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