When assumed by positions of dominance, the impersonal, analytical perspectives of scholar- narrators may serve to flatten, simplify, or render invisible the differences of constructed Others. Strategies of resistance necessarily correspond to where narrator-subjects enter relations of power. Without the presence of Others' narrations, dominance can neither value newly visible subjective agency nor confront the complicity in its own subjectivity. Intersubjectivity suggests a dialogical process that utilizes differences in lived experience to reconceive relationality.

Taking seriously Linda Martín Alcoff's suggestion that we reevaluate the extent to which poststructuralist articulations of the subject are truly socially constituted, as well as the centrality of Latina identity to her own account of such constitution, I argue that the discussion Alcoff and other Latina feminists offer of the experience of being Latina in North America is illustrative of the extent to which the relational and globally situated constitution of subjects needs further development in many social-constructionist accounts of selfhood. (...) I argue, however—contra Alcoff—that Michel Foucault's mode of investigating subjectivation, particularly as it is articulated in his later work, has room for just such an account, especially when it is supplemented by postcolonial theory. With this end in mind, I take as a case study the public discourse surrounding Sonia Sotomayor prior to her confirmation as the first Latina woman to serve on the United States Supreme Court, suggesting that an analysis of this discourse (including its position within and contribution to wider discourses of ethnicity, race, gender, and class) shows why the accounts of relational subject-constitution offered by both Foucault and Alcoff are indispensable. (shrink)

Though the invocation to be “reflexive” is widespread in feminist sociology, many questions remain about what it means to “turn back” and resituate our work—about how to engage with research subjects’ visions of the world and with our own theoretical models. Rather than a superficial rehearsal of researcher and interlocutor standpoints, I argue that “reflexivity” should help researchers theorize the social world in relational ways. To make this claim, I draw together the insights of feminist standpoint theory and Bourdieu’s reflexive (...) sociology to lay the foundation for a renewed reflexive project that centers epistemic privilege, the idea that positions of structural exclusion provide the best resources for theorizing social power. Reflexive sociology should consider interlocutors’ experiences of exclusion and contradiction, engaging with sites of alternative knowledge and incorporating them into the object of study. This type of reflexivity provides improved resources for relational theory building. I offer support for these theoretical arguments with a historical analysis of knowledge production in the feminist anti-violence movement. (shrink)

Around the globe people are confronted daily with intransigent problems of space and place. Educators have historically called for place-based or place-conscious education to introduce pedagogies that will address such questions as how to develop sustainable communities and places. These calls for place-conscious education have included liberal humanist approaches that evolved from the work of Wendell Berry (Ball & Lai, 2006) and critical place-based approaches such as those advocated by David Gruenewald (e.g. Gruenewald, 2003a, 2003b). In this paper I will (...) propose a reconceptualized framework of place as a pedagogical practice that draws on contemporary feminist poststructural and postcolonial philosophies as a basis for an alternative place pedagogy for 'global contemporaneity' (Carter, 2006, p. 683). Within this reconceptualized concept of place I will outline three key principles for a reconceptualised place pedagogy: our relationship to place is constituted in stories and other representations; place learning is local and embodied; and deep place learning occurs in a contact zone of contestation. These principles give rise to new emergent arts-based methodologies for developing and practising place-responsive pedagogies. (shrink)

Theories of the present have converged on changes in spatialization or the spatial order of societies. This article discusses the focus on borders and boundaries in programmatic statements on reflexive modernity or remodernization (RM) by Latour and Beck. It is insufficient to say that boundary-marking and border-making become simply more fraught or obvious. There is an historicity and dynamic quality which are central to these analyses which are best understood in terms of the intangible aspects, or virtuality, of borders and (...) boundaries. A dynamic, four-part ontology is advanced to elucidate the functioning of borders as interfaces and liminal zones with their own internal semiotics and emergent meanings and effects. This is the basis of a critique of RM. Further, a more diverse set of methods than might be supposed is required to research boundary phenomena, which social sciences are ill-equipped to undertake. (shrink)

This article describes the political practices of a part of the Italian women’s movement that, as of the 1980s, gave way to the sexual difference thought. Through a political analysis of their own experience, which removed any humanist identity assumptions, the women’s movement generated new practices and discourses. With these, women were able to exert self-criticism, and simultaneously to produce new subjectivities articulated around the sexual difference concept. The difference thought helped highlight the limits of institutional policy, renewing the premises (...) of political analysis and redefining the borders of what was deemed to be ‘political’. Intended to foster dialogue with other feminist proposals, the article underlines the situated nature of this political experience and focuses on the method, the political praxis and the process rather than the outcome, the conclusions or the theory. (shrink)

: This paper responds to comments, queries, and criticisms offered by Alcoff, Bergoffen, and Ferguson at a scholar's session on my work held at the annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy in October 2001. Responding to Alcoff, I highlight my understanding of liberation in the context of a Nietzschean and a Latin American feminism and the politics of conceptualizing "resistance" in postcolonial theory. Responding to Ferguson, I address, among other issues, the often misunderstood distinction between postcolonialism (...) and postmodernism, as well as related implications regarding some postcolonial feminists' qualified appeals to universals and women's rights. Responding to Bergoffen, I advocate on behalf of cultural formations supportive of the feminist affirmation of life and of radical subjectivities that challenge gender orthodoxies. (shrink)

In this article, I use Lorena Cabnal’s notion of territorio cuerpo-tierra to analyse seventeen in-depth interviews with women leaders of rural social movements and other organisations in Colombia. In the interviews, social leaders condemn violence that is epistemic, systemic, militarised and that permeates all ambits of life. They denounce how the coloniality of power operates, while at the same time they propose alternatives for a better life from their own cosmovisions by enacting food sovereignty and constructing feminisms from ‘below’. I (...) demonstrate how these social leaders’ actions are entangled in decolonial feminist struggles, which undermine the way in which women in the Global South have been constructed as ‘objects’ or ‘in need of saving’. These women are not ‘victims who need saving’, but politically active subjects who enact change locally and nationally through their ‘territories bodies-lands’. Not only do their narratives highlight the intimate relationship of the body with the land, but I argue that we must follow their lead in order to dismantle the coloniality of power. (shrink)

Using 16 in-depth interviews drawn from a larger sample of Black/white biracial individuals, this article explores how gender shapes the microlevel process of racial identity construction. Skin color stratification within the Black community, combined with a low rate of marriageable men and high rates of interracial marriages among the most educated and affluent Black men, has created a social context that differentiates the interactional experiences of biracial men and women. The findings highlight the need for more complex theoretical conceptualizations of (...) how gender shapes the way that women negotiate their racial identities in post-Civil Rights America. (shrink)

This essay works to bridge conversations in philosophy of education with decolonial theory. The author considers Margonis’ ( 1999 , 2011a , b ) use of Rousseau ( 1979 ) and Heidegger ( 1962 ) in developing an ontological attitude that counters social hierarchies and promotes anti-colonial relations. While affirming this effort, the essay outlines a coloniality of being at work in Rousseau and Heidegger through thier reliance on the colonial conceptualization of African Americans and Native Americans as savage and (...) primitive. The essay turns to decolonial theory and the work of Maldenado-Torres (Cult Stud 21(2–3):240–270, 2007 , 2009 ) to highlight how a decolonial attitude complicates, yet enriches Margonis’ philosophical framework. (shrink)

This essay examines the contradictions often found in third wave feminist texts that function as strategic choices that may shape, foster, and enhance an individual's sense of agency. Many third wave feminists utilize contradiction as a way to understand emergent identities, to develop new ways of thinking, and to imagine new forms of social action. Agency, then, stems from the use of contradiction as a means of self-determination and identity, of transcendence of seemingly forced or dichotomous choices, and counter-imaginations of (...) a better future. (shrink)

: In this essay, I trace a rhetorical affinity between feminist postmodern theory and an Enlightenment narrative of development. This affinity consists in the valorization of mobility and the repudiation of locatedness. Although feminists deploy this rhetoric in order to accommodate differences and to accustom readers to the instability that results from such accommodation, I show how this rhetoric works to justify Western colonial development and to efface women's very different experiences of mobility in the early twenty-first century.

In this essay, I trace a rhetorical affinity between feminist postmodern theory and an Enlightenment narrative of development. This affinity consists in the valorization of mobility and the repudiation of locatedness. Although feminists deploy this rhetoric in order to accommodate differences and to accustom readers to the instability that results from such accommodation, I show how this rhetoric works to justify Western colonial development and to efface women's very different experiences of mobility in the early twenty-first century.

The “Home” is ideologically understood as a place of safety and refuge. Such an account cloaks violence against women. The voices of battered women can disrupt that dominant construction of the space of the home, a construction typified by the work of Gaston Bachelard. The space that Bachelard presupposes and theorizes as given is in fact being-produced, cleaned, and organized by people who themselves may not find in it any solace or respite.

: The "Home" is ideologically understood as a place of safety and refuge. Such an account cloaks violence against women. The voices of battered women can disrupt that dominant construction of the space of the home, a construction typified by the work of Gaston Bachelard. The space that Bachelard presupposes and theorizes as given is in fact being-produced, cleaned, and organized by people who themselves may not find in it any solace or respite.

: A pronatalist perspective on maternal bodies renders the adoptive maternal body queer. In this essay, I argue that the queerness of the adoptive maternal body makes it a useful epistemic standpoint from which to critique dominant views of mothering. In particular, exploring motherhood through the lens of adoption reveals the discursive mediation and social regulation of all maternal bodies, as well as the normalizing assumptions of heteronormativity, "reprosexuality," and family homogeneity that frame a traditional view of the biological family. (...) As participants in motherhood who resist "repro-narrativity," " reprosexuality," and essentialism, adoptive maternal bodies have the potential to both queer our notions of normal mothering and normalize our notions of queer mothering. (shrink)

A pronatalist perspective on maternal bodies renders the adoptive maternal body queer. In this essay, I argue that the queerness of the adoptive maternal body makes it a useful epistemic standpoint from which to critique dominant views of mothering. In particular, exploring motherhood through the lens of adoption reveals the discursive mediation and social regulation of all maternal bodies, as well as the normalizing assumptions of heteronormativity, “reprosexuality,” and family homogeneity that frame a traditional view of the biological family. As (...) participants in motherhood who resist “repro-narrativity,”“reprosexuality,” and essentialism, adoptive maternal bodies have the potential to both queer our notions of normal mothering and normalize our notions of queer mothering. (shrink)

In this paper, I use Gloria Anzaldúa’s narrative method of “autohistoría” in concert with theoretical analysis to reflect on my experiences as a queer teacher in the heteronormative United States schooling system. These reflections are aimed at unpacking the ways in which racialization, sexual orientation and coloniality are inseparably tied to living out one’s gender. It is this phenomenon of “Gender-as-Lived” that I urge become a focus of identity development research in education studies and is my central concern in this (...) post-intentional phenomenological study. Furthermore, Anzaldúa’s conceptualization of the liminal zone of “nepantla” as an embodied and in-between space of resistance offers to transform the practice of teaching into a vocation of healing. (shrink)

How to communicate with "the other" who is culturally different from oneself is one of the greatest challenges facing North-South relations. This paper builds on existential-phenomenological and poststructuralist concepts of alterity and difference to strengthen the position of Latina and other subaltern speakers in North-South dialogue. It defends a postcolonial approach to feminist theory as a basis for negotiating culturally differentiated feminist positions in this age of accelerated globalization, migration, and displacement.

Responding to Rosi Braidotti's call for more ‘conceptual creativity’ in thinking through contemporary feminist subjectivity, this paper proposes the figuration of the body of water. It begins with a critical materialist enhancement of Adrienne Rich's concept of a politics of location, followed by a schematised description of the various ‘hydro-logics’ in which our bodies partake. The ways in which these logics already inform diverse modes of feminist scholarship are then explored. The objective of this paper is to locate, at the (...) confluence of these discourses and descriptions, an invigorated figuration of the feminist subject as body of water. This subject is posthumanist and material, both real and aspirational. Most importantly, she is responsively attuned to other watery bodies—both human and more-than-human—within global flows of political, social, cultural, economic and colonial planetary power. (shrink)

Decolonial/anti-colonial Black, Indigenous and Mestiza feminist movements and scholar-activists foreground how the oft-touted apocalypse that the Covid-19 pandemic heralds is not new, nor does it signify the great rupture into chaos that those from within modernity-coloniality often claim it to be. Rather Covid-19 is preceded by and will be out-lived by the apocalyptic anti-life onto-epistemological logics that are foundational to the production of hetero-patriarchal capitalist- coloniality. However, one would commit the violence of reproduction of the epistemological logics and rationalities constitutive (...) of the current system if the story ended there. We have survived and our survival points to the urgent necessity and responsibility of social theory to listen to the story of the pandemic from a Black/Indigenous genealogy and to begin the sense-making of the Covid-19 pandemic, from prior to this particular virus, outside, against and beyond the politics of knowledge of critical social theory itself. Thus, I invite you to journey to an affirmative re-enfleshment of reason and theory-making in relation to and dialogue with Black, Indigenous, and subaltern Mestiza feminist movements in southwest Colombia and in southeast so-called Australia in the unceded lands of the Awabakal and the Worimi. I explore this through the metaphor, the materiality, the cosmology and the herstory of the mangrove swamps a knowing-being otherwise visible to the dehumanising gave of Whiteness and bring to thought three stories of a politics of knowledge of/as the Black/racialised and feminised body/flesh. To do this is to suggest that the co-creation of pathways which are life affirming and life making beyond and out of the post-Covid 19 conjuncture involves an epistemological-political project which decolonises and feminises the containments of reason and knowing being of coloniality/modernity. (shrink)

ABSTRACT An often-adopted use of the predicate, “to be colonized”, is one that applies it loosely, not in reference to original Africans or indigenous people enslaved by Europeans or heirs of enslaved persons, but to academics who are citizens of former colonies like Brazil, their ways of thinking, philosophical works, academic communities, etc. But under what conditions one is to do that? And how can one avoid the attribution of such predicate to oneself or one’s works? These issues have not (...) received much attention. While dialoguing with authors associated with decolonial studies, Brazilian, continental and analytic philosophers, this essay aims to contribute to change this situation. It does so by proposing an alternative use of the predicate, “to be ‘subtly’ philosophically colonized”, according to which this predicate is to be applied to philosophical works that have the thirteen features described in the essay or at least most of them. It is argued that this alternative use is to be endorsed because it is: precise; exemplified in a detailed way by at least one philosophical work; and “inexplosive” in not suggesting the “explosive” claim that practically all Western philosophical works are colonized by Western metaphysics. RESUMO Um uso recorrente do predicado, “ser colonizado”, é um que o aplica imprecisamente, não em referência aos africanos e aos povos indígenas originais escravizados pelos europeus ou a descendentes de pessoas escravizadas, mas, sim, a acadêmicos que são cidadãos de ex-colônias como o Brasil, seus modos de pensar, trabalhos filosóficos, comunidades acadêmicas etc. Mas sob quais condições se deve proceder desse modo? E como é possível evitar que tal predicado seja atribuído a si ou a um trabalho autoral? Essas questões não têm recebido muita atenção. Ao dialogar com autores associados aos estudos decoloniais, filósofos brasileiros, continentais e analíticos, este artigo procura contribuir para mudar essa situação. Ele assim o faz ao propor um uso alternativo do predicado, “ser ‘sutilmente’ colonizado filosoficamente”, segundo o qual esse predicado deve ser aplicado em referência a trabalhos filosóficos que possuem as treze características descritas neste artigo ou ao menos a maioria delas. Argumenta-se que esse uso alternativo deve ser aceito porque ele é: preciso; exemplificado de modo detalhado por ao menos um trabalho filosófico; e “inexplosivo” ao não sugerir a alegação “explosiva” de que praticamente todos os trabalhos filosóficos ocidentais são colonizados pela metafísica ocidental. (shrink)

Recent trends in the understanding of culture contact, with concepts such as hybridization, cosmopolitanism, and cultural innovation, open up the possibility of a new understanding of human interaction. While the social imaginary is rich with images of conflict resulting from culture contact, images of creativity are far rarer. We propose the creation of an extensive research project to document cultural creativity, starting with obvious examples in the arts, and expanding into all areas of life in order to counteract the present (...) conflictual images and develop a social imaginary with positive “attractor” images that can guide to greater creativity. (shrink)

This essay argues that a new, politicized mestiza is emerging within the cultural borderlands of the Mexico-U.S. divide. She works in the upper ranks of the multinational maquiladoras and raises many challenges for a feminist theorization of a new border politics. Through a presentation of research in one maquiladora, the essay demonstrates how understanding the dynamic between metaphorical and material space is vital for imagining a feminist politics in the cultural borderlands.

This paper analyzes the innovative way of doing critical philosophy that María del Rosario Acosta López proposes in her aesthetics of resistance and grammars of the unheard. The paper examines the contributions of two sets of conversations with Acosta López’s critical philosophy. In the first place, staging a dialogue between Acosta López and Black feminist philosophy, the article offers a defence of reconceptualizing philosophy in the 21st Century through a dialogue with the voices and perspectives of the excluded and silenced—a (...) reconceptualization that reimagines the critical role of philosophy. In the second place, the paper calls attention to the crucial significance of Acosta López’s aesthetics of resistance for contemporary debates in contemporary political epistemology, putting in conversation her grammars of the unheard with my epistemology of resist- ance and María Lugones’s concept of complex communication. This second conversation also underscores a new way of understanding the critical and transformative function of philosophy by centering the voices and perspectives of the excluded and silenced. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a new reading of Simone de Beauvoir’s first major work, L’Invitée ( She Came to Stay ), in order to reveal the text as a vital place of origin for feminist phenomenological philosophy. My reading of L’Invitée departs from most scholarly interpretations of the text in three notable respects: (1) it is inclusive of the “two unpublished chapters” that were excised from the original manuscript at the publisher’s request, (2) it takes seriously Beauvoir’s claim that (...) phenomenological philosophy is often better expressed in novels than essays or treatises, and (3) it views the novel’s main characters, Françoise and Xavière, as one woman who has multiple, contradictory, excessive selves. Thus approached, L’Invitée provides us with a thick description of one woman’s embodied consciousness and thereby shows us with specificity what a consciousness whose underlying structures reflect sexual difference looks like. This consciousness not only experiences itself as being both gendered, categorized, disciplined, and defined and in excess of these genders, categories, disciplines, and definitions at the same time, but also experiences its own self-relation through the presence of multiple selves who are each simultaneously attracted to and negating of the other. As such, the defining features of this consciousness involve experiences that I have respectively labeled “ontological multiplicity” and “auto-jealousy.”. (shrink)

This essay examines two tendencies in lesbian ethics as differing visions of community, as well as contrasting views of the relationship between the erotic and the ethical. In addition to considering those authors who make explicit claims about lesbian ethics, this paper reflects on the works of some lesbians whose works are less frequently attended to in discussions about lesbian ethics, including lesbians writing from the perspectives of theology and of literature.

The aim of this essay is to carry out an analysis of the multi-voiced, multi-cultural self discussed by Latina feminists in light of a Heideggerian phenomenological account of persons or "Existential Analytic." In so doing, it (a) points out similarities as well as differences between the Heideggerian description of the self and Latina feminists' phenomenological accounts of self, and (b) critically assesses María Lugones's important notion of "world-traveling." In the end, the essay defends the view of a "multiplicitous" self which (...) takes insights from Lugones's view of the self that "travels 'worlds'" and from other Latina feminists' accounts of self as well as from Martin Heidegger's account of Dasein. (shrink)

An explication of the phenomenological sensibilities found in the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and other Latina feminist philosophers offers insight into the problem of bringing philosophy into greater relevance beyond academic and scholarly worlds. This greater relevance entails clear and direct contact with the immediacy of our communicative relationships with others, both inside and outside the academy, and allows for an interrogation of the totalizing perceptions that are at work within normative processes of epistemological legitimation. As a result of this (...) interrogation, it is possible to cultivate perceptual capacities related to culture that intervene in the normatively tacit cultural dispositions that often limit the possibilities of understanding. (shrink)

This article examines the discourses of the Indian state and of community élites during battles for the custody of a young Muslim girl, Ameena, who was ‘rescued’ from a marriage with an elderly Arab. The battles for Ameena's custody were fought as much in news reports, opinion columns, and letters to the editor of metropolitan and vernacular newspapers, as in courts. Questions were raised about Ameena's age, the viability of her marriage, the applicability of secular laws to Muslim communities, and (...) the political economy of the sexuality of girl-children. In these representations, Ameena became a symbol of minority identity, and was transformed into an unwilling and unwitting object of protection. Why did Ameena's story attract so much attention? What were the different positions underlying the arguments made for Ameena's ‘protection’? Without dismissing the protection of children and the advocacy of their rights, this article analyses the agendas shaping the discourses of the Indian state and national and community élites during the battles for Ameena's custody. The article situates the controversies surrounding Ameena in the wider context of the increasing polarization between Hindu and Muslim communities in India in the early 1990s, and focuses on the relationship between notions of childhood and discourses of community, gender and nation. The article argues that there was a synecdochic relationship between the purity of girl-children and the purity of the Indian nation: far from being ‘pre-cultural’ or apolitical, discourses of childhood were profoundly implicated in the politics of gender, sexuality, community and nation. What are the implications of Ameena's predicament for feminist epistemology and praxis? In pointing to the ways in which feminist critiques of modernist regimes of power and knowledge can enable us to understand the multiple positionalities of children in the contemporary world, the article explores the spaces available for feminist theorists and activists to engage in a politics of vigilance and intervention with regard to the state's positions towards children. (shrink)

This article discusses death, mourning and decolonisation, focusing on the Selk’nam of Karokynka/Tierra del Fuego, Chile. Methodologically, it is grounded in feminist experiments of bringing creative and personalized writing into academic scholarship to challenge subject/object-relations, and to generate platforms for affective, world-making intra-actions and undoings of power. Through collaborative efforts of three differently situated co-authors, using poetic epistolary forms of address, the article unfolds an indigenous centered feminist, decolonial methodology. Along similar lines, the theoretical approach to death and mourning is (...) pluriversal, transgressing Western epistemologies and ontologies. Through letters, addressed to dead and alive, human and non-human key actors in a revitalizing of Selk’nam culture, the article questions ethico-politically in/appropriate ways of mourning the consequences of the necropolitics imposed on the Selk’nam through white colonisation, Western modernity and its colonial matrix of necropower. It is critically addressed how mourning the lost became embedded in colonial discourses of white melancholia and humanism. Moreover combining creative writing methodologies, inspired by feminism, posthumanism, and by indigenous activism and practices of reviving Selk’nam culture, the authors use their different locations to search affirmatively for ways of mourning, which open horizons towards decolonising, cultural revitalising, reclaiming of indigenous rights and philosophies of death and mourning. (shrink)

: This review considers the process of expansion of subjectivity that María Pía Lara introduces in Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere. As the complexity of Lara's understanding of multiculturalism is exhibited, the process of achievement of self-realization and autonomy is critiqued as inconsistent with the hidden transcript/public transcript distinction. The "we" to be fashioned intersubjectively in the dialogical process of subjective expansion cannot countenance that crucial distinction to the understanding of those narratives.

This review considers the process of expansion of subjectivity that María Pía Lara introduces in Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere. As the complexity of Lara's understanding of multiculturalism is exhibited, the process of achievement of self-realization and autonomy is critiqued as inconsistent with the hidden transcript/public transcript distinction. The “we” to be fashioned intersubjectively in the dialogical process of subjective expansion cannot countenance that crucial distinction to the understanding of those narratives.

: The coloniality of power is understood by Anibal Quijano as at the constituting crux of the global capitalist system of power. What is characteristic of global, Eurocentered, capitalist power is that it is organized around two axes that Quijano terms "the coloniality of power" and "modernity." The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social classification of the population of the planet in terms of the idea of race, a replacing of relations of superiority and inferiority established through (...) domination with naturalized understandings of inferiority and superiority. In this essay, Lugones introduces a systemic understanding of gender constituted by colonial/modernity in terms of multiple relations of power. This gender system has a light and a dark side that depict relations, and beings in relation as deeply different and thus as calling for very different patterns of violent abuse. Lugones argues that gender itself is a colonial introduction, a violent introduction consistently and contemporarily used to destroy peoples, cosmologies, and communities as the building ground of the "civilized" West. (shrink)

The coloniality of power is understood by Anibal Quijano as at the constituting crux of the global capitalist system of power. What is characteristic of global, Eurocentered, capitalist power is that it is organized around two axes that Quijano terms “the coloniality of power” and “modernity.” The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social classification of the population of the planet in terms of the idea of race, a replacing of relations of superiority and inferiority established through domination (...) with naturalized understandings of inferiority and superiority. In this essay, Lugones introduces a systemic understanding of gender constituted by colonial/modernity in terms of multiple relations of power. This gender system has a light and a dark side that depict relations, and beings in relation as deeply different and thus as calling for very different patterns of violent abuse. Lugones argues that gender itself is a colonial introduction, a violent introduction consistently and contemporarily used to destroy peoples, cosmologies, and communities as the building ground of the “civilized” West. (shrink)

Foreign nationals who marry U.S. citizens have an expedited track to naturalization. U.S. immigration officials require that “green card” petitioning couples demonstrate that their relationships are “valid and subsisting” and not fraudulent. These requirements are ostensibly gender and racially neutral, but migration itself is not; men and women petitioners seek partners in different regions and solicit advice from similar others about the potential obstacles to their petitions’ success. Using an online ethnography and textual analysis of conversation threads on a large (...) online immigration forum where U.S. petitioners exchange such information, I examine how gendered standards of legitimacy are applied to family and sexuality and used discursively among petitioners to achieve genuineness and define red flags indicating potential marriage fraud. I argue that forum members police immigration requests even before cases reach an immigration officer. Petitioners use the formal criteria of U.S. immigration in ways that reveal gender ideologies, expectations for conformity to a gendered hegemonic family ideal, and sexual double standards surrounding sexual agency, fertility, and desirability. These intersectional norms shape members’ online discussions about the suitability of marriages and of the migration of noncitizen partners to the United States. (shrink)

Queer theorists have considered the problems concerning the political strategy of using LGBT rights to justify racist xenophobia and using homo/transphobia to consolidate heterosexist nationalism. Their timely interventions are important in exposing state violence in the name of human rights and sovereign equality, but they have offered no alternative. They may also have reinforced the assumption of state science. This assumption is based on a trinity structure of the nation-state-sovereignty of ‘modern, self-determining men’, who are against each other and thereby (...) co-built the so-called ‘international’. State-centric internationalism produces exclusionary effects that undermine the rights of sexual and gender minorities. To address this, I first consider the debate over ‘LGBT rights as human rights’, and identify two types of cultural relativism (epistemological and political) as the categories to formulate a decolonial response to the debate. In this article, queer political theorising is pushed forward to: 1) critically evaluate universalism, 2) differentiate cultural relativism (opposing the political version of it) and 3) revise the epistemological version with decolonial-queer praxis. I propose a pluralist approach to sovereignty and human rights; informed by this approach, the lack of international consensus is remedied by recognising the polyvocality within transnational queer activism beyond the monopoly of states’ representation of their own peoples. This proposal also aims to decentre modern statecraft from the political imagination of contemporary international studies scholarship. (shrink)

: My text is written to answer the questions asked at the APA Meeting's presentation of the book Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere by professors María Lugones and Eduardo Mendieta. The answer seeks to clarify that Lugones's infrapolitics position is not so distant from mine. I also address Mendieta's question directed more to the aesthetic domain. There, I seek to show how my position could be taken as a creative effort to extend some of Habermas's early work (...) on the public sphere, and to develop the thesis of the important relations between the aesthetic and the moral realms. (shrink)