Rich and sophisticated analyses of gender have been produced around the postcolonial world. But the theory in this work gets little recognition in the current global economy of knowledge. Feminist theory needs an understanding of the coloniality of gender, seeing the gender dynamic in imperialism and the significance of global processes for the meaning of gender itself. The agendas of feminist theory are being re-shaped on issues that include violence, power and the state, identity, methodology, and the land. An alternative (...) structure of knowledge is emerging that can re-shape the global terrain of feminist theory and its connections with practice. (shrink)

Some of the central questions that have been explored by Latin American and Latinx philosophers are questions of metaphilosophy. "Metaphilosophy" refers to philosophical reflections on the nature of philosophy itself. For example, we might ask: What is the purpose of doing philosophy? How does philosophy compare and contrast with other disciplines, such as science, theology, or literature? And what is the best way of categorizing the different kinds and traditions of philosophy? These are philosophical questions about philosophy as an activity (...) and as a discipline. In this chapter, we discuss some ways that Latin American and Latinx philosophers have addressed these and other metaphilosophical issues. Our focus will be on the following questions: What are the defining characteristics of Latin American philosophy and Latinx philosophy? Do they constitute distinctive traditions of philosophy, and if so, what is especially valuable about these traditions? (shrink)

Based on Maldonado-Torres’s formulation of the term, we conceive the decolonial turn as a form of liberating and decolonising reason beyond the liberal and Enlightened emancipation of rationality, and beyond the more radical Euro-critiques that have failed to consistently challenge the legacies of Eurocentrism and white male heteronormativity (often Eurocentric critiques of Eurocentrism). We complement Maldonado-Torres’s account of the decolonial turn in philosophy, theory and critique by providing an analysis of the trajectories of academic philosophy and clarifying the relevance of (...) decolonising philosophy and of the decolonial turn for current efforts in transforming philosophy in face of the challenges of social movements such as the Third World Liberation Front and Black Lives Matter in the United States, and Rhodes Must Fall in South Africa and England. After a brief analysis of the trajectory and current status of philosophy as a discipline in the modern Western research university, we provide examples of the decolonial turn and of decolonising philosophy in three areas: the engagement with (1) Asian and (2) Latin American philosophies, and (3) debates in the philosophy of race and gender. (shrink)

This article traces the centrality of capitalism in the work of three decolonial feminists: María Lugones, Sylvia Wynter, and Sayek Valencia. Elaborating on the role of capitalism in each of their work separately, I argue that each of these thinkers conceptualizes capitalism in a novel and urgent way, charting new directions for both theory and social movement practice. I thus argue that the decolonial feminist tradition holds crucial philosophical and historical resources for understanding the emergence of capitalism and its endurance.

This article begins at a crossroads; it straddles the difficult ground between the recent public outcry against sexual violence and concerns about the coloniality of voice made visible by the recent decolonial turn within feminist theory. Wary of concepts such as “visibility” or “transparency”—principles that continue to inform the call to “break the silence” by “speaking up” central to Western liberatory movements—in this article, I return to silence, laying the groundwork for the exploration of what a revised concept of silence (...) could mean for the development of practices of cross-cultural communication that do not play into coloniality. (shrink)

This article calls for an examination of the spectral operations of the perceptual architecture of colonization in conjunction with the enactment of a decolonial feminism as proposed by María Lugones. The first section discusses both the notion of ghostly subjectivity from Lugones's early work as well as the echoes of this notion in her recent work on the coloniality of gender that emphasizes the gender/race/sex nexus. Subsequently, through a photographic example, the article presents an analysis of the perceptual operations of (...) specter‐making in practices of colonization in light of Lugones's understanding of the “light” and “dark” sides of the coloniality of gender. This analysis highlights not only the intricate nexus between racialization and gender and sex norms both in the past and in the present context, but it also points to the necessity for of a decolonial feminism attuned to perceptual practices or a decolonial aesthesis. (shrink)

In her book Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, Judith Butler reads the figure of Antigone, who exists as an impossible aberration of kinship, as a challenge to the very terms of livability that are established by the reigning symbolic rules of Western thought. In this article I extend Butler's argument to reach beyond gender. I argue that African feminist scholarship shows that the kinship norms shaping the reigning symbolic rules of Western thought not only render certain gendered lives (...) unlivable, but through the gendered working thereof also become key to the colonial process of the racial dehumanization of the colonized and the violent expansion of Eurocentric capitalism. I show how Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí, in her work on the Yorùbá people of Nigeria, provides, in a way analogous to Antigone, a glimpse of an order structured by kinship formations that are remarkably different from, and thereby bring into crisis, the normative versions of kinship that are posited as timeless truths. Through a reimagining or reconstruction of precolonial Yorùbá kinship formations, Oyĕwùmí articulates a different scheme of intelligibility, which enables radically different ways of being human and existing in the world. (shrink)

The relation between hegemony and masculinity needs reassessment in the light of postcolonial critique. A fully historical understanding of hegemony is required. The violence of colonization set up a double movement, disrupting gender orders and launching new hegemonic projects. This dynamic can be traced in changing forms through the eras of decolonization, postcolonial development, and neoliberal globalization. Specific configurations of masculinity in the contemporary metropole-apparatus can be traced, together with their relations with local power. A gender order is emerging in (...) transnational space and minimal conditions for hegemony within it can be defined. Counter-hegemonic projects among men have multiplied but have limited reach. Hegemony under construction, rather than achieved hegemony, is the key concept. (shrink)

This paper develops and articulates a metaphysics of intersectionality, the idea that multiple axes of social oppression cross-cut each other. Though intersectionality is often described through metaphor, theories of intersectionality can be formulated using the tools of contemporary analytic metaphysics. A central tenet of intersectionality theory, that intersectional identities are inseparable, can be framed in terms of explanatory unity. Further, intersectionality is best understood as metaphysical and explanatory priority of the intersectional category over its constituents, akin to metaphysical priority of (...) the whole over its parts. (shrink)

Despite recognition of the gender dimensions of climate change, there is little attention to racism in climate justice perspectives. In response, this article advocates developing an ecologically informed intersectional approach designed to disclose the ways racism contributes to the construction of illegible lives in the domain of climate policies and practices. Differential impacts of climate change, while an important dimension, is ultimately inadequate to understanding and responding to both climate justice and environmental racism. What is required is a rich understanding (...) of the histories and lineages of the deep incorporation of racism and environmental exploitation. To catalyze such an approach to climate justice, this article develops an analysis of three instances of the intermingling of racism and environmental exploitation: climate adaptation practices in Lagos, Nigeria; the enmeshment of race and coal mining in the post–Civil War United States; and the infusing of precarity and rainforest destruction in Brazil. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been renewed interest in conceptualising the relationship between oppression and capitalism as well as intense debate over the precise nature of this relationship. No doubt spurred on by the financial crisis, it has become increasingly clear that capitalism, both historically and in the twenty-first century, has had particularly devastating effects for women and people of colour. Intersectionality, which emerged in the late twentieth century as a way of addressing the relationship between race, gender, sexuality and (...) class, has submitted orthodox Marxism to critique for its inattention to the complex dynamics of various social locations; in turn Marxist thinkers in the twenty-first century have engaged with intersectionality, calling attention to the impoverished notion of class and capitalism on which it relies. As intersectionality constitutes perhaps the most common way that contemporary activists and theorists on the left conceive of identity politics, an analysis of intersectionality’s relationship to Marxism is absolutely crucial for historical materialists to understand and consider. This paper looks at the history of intersectionality’s and Marxism’s critiques of one another in order to ground a synthesis of the two frameworks. It argues that in the twenty-first century, we need a robust, Marxist analysis of capitalism, and that the only robust account of capitalism is one articulated intersectionally, one which treats class, race, gender and sexuality as fundamental to capitalist accumulation. (shrink)

This essay offers an account of the philosophical significance of liberation and prescribes the special place the idea of liberation ought to hold in the context of inter-American philosophical dialogue. Drawing from Latin American liberation philosophy, as well as philosophical and theoretical discourses and debates that can be considered part of a larger liberatory tradition, my goal is to explore the idea of liberation as a process, or perhaps more appropriately a praxis, harboring both critical and creative potentialities.

ABSTRACTThis paper argues that decolonial theory can offer a distinctive and valuable ethical lens. Decolonial perspectives give rise to an ethics that is fundamentally global but distinct from, and critical of, moral cosmopolitanism. Decolonial ethics shares with cosmopolitanism a refusal to circumscribe normative commitments on the basis of existing political and cultural boundaries. It differs from cosmopolitanism, though, by virtue of its rejection of the individualism and universalism of cosmopolitan thought. Where cosmopolitan approaches tend to articulate abstract principles developed from (...) within a particular Western tradition, decolonial approaches reject abstract global designs in favour of inter-cultural dialogue amongst multiple people, including peoples who deem collective and non-human entities to be of fundamental moral importance. In addition, decolonial global ethics rejects universality in favour of ‘pluriversality’. (shrink)

The “born this way” narrative remains a popular way to defend nonnormative genders and sexualities in the United States. While feminist and queer theorists have critiqued the narrative's implicit ahistorical and essentialist understanding of sexuality, the narrative's incorporation by the state as a way to regulate gender identity has gone largely underdeveloped. I argue that transgender accounts of this narrative reorient it amid questions of temporality, race, colonialism, and the nation-state, thereby allowing for a critique that does justice to the (...) enmeshment of categories of difference. (shrink)

There is already a long history of conversation between feminism and deconstruction, feminist theorists and Derrida or Derrideans. That conversation has been by turns fraught and constructive. While some of these interactions have occurred in queer feminism, to date little has been done to stage an engagement between deconstruction and transfeminism. Naysayers might think that transfeminism is too recent and too identitarian a discourse to meaningfully interact with Derrida’s legacy. On the other hand, perhaps Derrida’s work was too embedded in (...) second wave feminism, and in some cases implicit misogyny and transphobia, to meet transfeminism on its own playing field. And yet, I think both suspicions shortchange these discourses. In this article, I stage a conversation between Derrida and two writers working in the area of trans feminism: Paisley Currah and Julia Serano. I explore, in particular, how their conceptions of gender neutrality or gender pluralism are complementary and together change the so-called “question of woman,” from a philosophical and political perspective. (shrink)

Taking up Kimberlé Crenshaw's conclusion that black feminist theorists seem to continue to find themselves in many ways “speaking into the void” (Crenshaw 2011, 228), even as their works are widely celebrated, I examine intersectionality critiques as one site where power asymmetries and dominant imaginaries converge in the act of interpretation (or cooptation) of intersectionality. That is, despite its current “status,” intersectionality also faces epistemic intransigence in the ways in which it is read and applied. My aim is not to (...) suggest that intersectionality cannot (or should not) be critiqued, nor do I maintain that celebratory applications/interpretations are immune from epistemic distortion when it comes to interpreting intersectionality. Rather, my goal is to demonstrate that critiques of intersectionality are one important site to examine hermeneutic marginalization and interpretive violence; the politics of citation; and the impact of dominant expectations or established social imaginaries on meaning-making. In so doing, I aim to consider more fully how entrenched ways of thinking are frequently relied upon to interpret and critique intersectionality, even as these are often the very frameworks that intersectionality theorists have identified as highly problematic tools of misrepresentation, erasure, and violation. This slippage away from intersectionality's outlooks, whether in critical or laudatory contexts, is a pivotal site of epistemic negotiation we must examine more closely. (shrink)

Posthumanist feminist theory has been instrumental in demonstrating the salience of gender and sexism in structuring human–animal relationships and in revealing the connections between the oppression of women and of nonhuman animals. Despite the richness of feminist posthumanist theorizations it has been suggested that their influence in contemporary animal ethics has been muted. This marginalization of feminist work—here, in its posthumanist version—is a systemic issue within theory and needs to be remedied. At the same time, the limits of posthumanist feminist (...) theory must also be addressed. Although posthumanist feminist theory has generated a sophisticated body of work analyzing how gendered and sexist discourses and practices subordinate women and animals alike, its imprint in producing intersectional analyses of animal issues is considerably weaker. This leaves theorists vulnerable to charges of essentialism, ethnocentrism, and elitism despite best intentions to avoid such effects and despite commitments to uproot all forms of oppression. Gender-focused accounts also preclude understanding of the importance of race and culture in structuring species-based oppression. To counter these undesirable pragmatic and conceptual developments, posthumanist feminist theory needs to engender feminist accounts that centralize the structural axes of race and culture. (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)

Although intersectional analyses of gender have been widely adopted by feminist theorists in many disciplines, controversy remains over their character, limitations, and implications. I support intersectionality, cautioning against asking too much of it. It provides standards for the uses of methods or frameworks rather than theories of power, oppression, agency, or identity. I want feminist philosophers to incorporate intersectional analyses more fully into our work so that our theories can, in fact, have the pluralistic and inclusive character to which we (...) give lip service. To this end, I advocate an intersectional family resemblance strategy that does not create philosophical problems for feminists. I test my approach against María Lugones's argument in “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System” (Lugones 2007) to determine, in particular, whether we can successfully resist a move to create multiple genders for women. If we can successfully resist this move, then we can answer the objection that intersectionality fragments women both theoretically and politically. I also argue that my approach avoids Lugones's critique of forms of intersectionality that fall within “the logic of purity.”. (shrink)

In “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System” (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 I 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. (shrink)

This article offers a decolonial methodology that questions the universality tied to the concept of gender. While not questioning that the modern/colonial capitalist gender system is an oppressive, variable, systemic organization of power, it argues that it is not universal; that is, that not all peoples organize their relations in terms of and on the grounds of gender. Its aim is to offer a decolonial methodology to both study colonized people who live at the colonial difference, but also to engage (...) in decolonial coalition. To see the colonial difference is to see coloniality/modernity as the place the colonized inhabit and the situation of oppression from which the colonized create meanings that are not assimilated. (shrink)

This article explores the affective challenges of María Lugones's coalitional imperative of decolonial feminism as it requires sustaining painful confrontations for acting in complicity with the very oppressions the aspiring decolonial feminist may have believed herself to be entirely against. Because the coalitional crossings necessary to Lugones's decolonial feminist methodology involves moving toward discomfort out of a sense of responsibility, the decolonial feminist may be tempted toward mastery of radical performance rather than self-transformation. As a possible way out of this (...) temptation toward mastery, this article turns to Lugones's own affective animation of her methodological commitment to live the coalitional imperative with a love rooted in, and routed through, an intimate sense of interdependence with other resisters at the colonial difference. (shrink)

RESUMEN En este artículo exploro subversiones caribeñas de la deuda enfocándome en el caso de Puerto Rico. Desde 2016, la Colectiva Feminista en Construcción ha configurado un terreno y un imaginario político novedoso que ejemplifica la subversión de la deuda en Puerto Rico. Las tácticas de la Colectiva se ubican en la deuda para subvertirla, invirtiendo las posiciones de poder distintivas de la deuda. Elaboro esta inversión/subversión como una expresión de resistencia a través del "desvío", como lo entiende Édouard Glissant (...) en El Discurso Antillano. Imprescindible aquí es el trabajo sobre el sistema mundo colonial de género en el Caribe, en particular en la República Dominicana, de Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso y Celenis Rodríguez Moreno. El trabajo de Rodríguez Moreno en torno a la "formación de género mimética", nos permite precisar la interrupción de la operación de la colonialidad en cuanto al deseo, el tiempo, y el espacio clave para las acciones de la Colectiva. ABSTRACT In this essay, Caribbean subversions of debt are explored, focusing on the case of Puerto Rico. Since 2016, the Colectiva Feminista en Construcción has designed a new ground and political imaginary that exemplifies the subversion of debt in Puerto Rico. The Collectiva's tactics subvert indebtedness, reversing the positions of power that debt generates. This inversion/subversion is elaborated as an expression of resistance through "detour", as Édouard Glissant understands it in Caribbean Discourse. The work ofYuderkys Espinosa Miñoso and Celenis Rodriguez Moreno on the colonial/modern gender system in the Caribbean, particularly in the Dominican Republic, is essential. Furthermore, the work of Rodríguez Moreno on the "mimetic formation of gender" allows pinpointing the interruption of coloniality regarding the desire, the time, and the space for the actions of la Colectiva. (shrink)

This article positions punk rock pedagogy, or the educative dimensions of punk rock subculture, as an exemplar for combatting hate speech. This analysis contrast institutional efforts to protect free speech (which are rooted in free speech absolutism) with the ways by which punks protect one another from bigotry. This paper argues that the punk approach more closely reflects how free speech protections are framed in international human rights law.

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)

Examines the relationship between time and sexual difference in the work of French feminists Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. This book is the first to examine the relationship between time and sexual difference in the work of Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. Because of their association with reproduction, embodiment, and the survival of the species, women have been confined to the cyclical time of nature—a temporal model that is said to merely repeat itself. Men, on the other hand, have been (...) seen as bearers of linear time and as capable of change and progress. Fanny Söderbäck argues that both these temporal models make change impossible because they either repeat or repress the past. The model of time developed here—revolutionary time—aims at returning to and revitalizing the past so as to make possible a dynamic-embodied present and a future pregnant with change. Söderbäck stages an unprecedented conversation between Kristeva and Irigaray on issues of both time and difference, and engages thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Derrida, Sigmund Freud, Judith Butler, Hannah Arendt, and Plato along the way. “Revolutionary Time makes a distinctive contribution to contemporary feminist and continental philosophical thought. By engaging Kristeva and Irigaray in depth alongside one another, and making time the guiding thread for reading their work, the author generates insights that are not to be found elsewhere in the existing literature. Through its development of the concept of revolutionary time, the book offers rich resources for thinking about temporalization in its existential, ontological, and political dimensions, in ways that are particularly valuable for feminist projects of change and political transformation.” — Rachel Jones, author of Irigaray: Towards a Sexuate Philosophy. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall make the following propositions: in order to conceptually capture and represent the acts of political protest in a state of exception, we will need to reorient and supplement our representational apparatuses and also our theoretical frameworks for thinking about the gendered modes of protest under emergency laws and political abandonment. Through an analysis of the ‘naked protest’ of the Meira Peibis in Manipur, a ‘state of exception’ in democratic India, I shall argue that a series (...) of supplementations to our current thinking on intersectionality, bare life and political subjectivation are required if we are to make sense of political acts of resistance, refusal and disavowal of the law of exception. (shrink)

Looking from a critical race perspective at Wittig’s lesbian, in this article, I draw two conclusions. First, I suggest that it is actually trans exclusionary lesbians' own transphobia that makes them cis-gendered. And second, it becomes clear that the politicisation of choosing and refusing gender needs to acknowledge racism’s shaping role in the construction of gender. My approach not only intervenes in transphobic feminisms that are obsessed with simplistic understandings of sexual violence, but also questions rigid cis/trans binaries and rejects (...) accounts of trans/gender that ignore the role of racialisation for the emergence of gender. The main question that I address is: how to conceptualise the complex im/possibilities of refusing and choosing in relation to gender? It is my aim to connect seemingly disparate knowledge productions on genderqueer, trans and other ‘impossible’ genders and sexualities. I am particularly interested in a phenomenon that can be described as ‘lesbian haunting’: the ambivalences one will find in tracing lesbian theory in relation to transing gender. With this, it is my attempt to rethink lesbian, queer and trans feminist approaches on violence, and to investigate the role of sexual violence within broader concepts of violence. More specifically, in order to understand both ‘gender’ and ‘transing gender’ as always already racialised, my approach builds on theories that identify ‘ungendering’ as an effect of normative racial violence (e.g. Spillers, 1987; Lewis, 2017; Snorton, 2017). (shrink)

Based on extensive field work focused on interreligious peacebuilding practices in Kenya and the Philippines, this article argues that decolonial accounts of peacebuilding, in line with decolonial interventions in the study of religion, remain captive to the task of epistemological undoing and thus insufficiently relevant to the precarious lives of many invisibalized people in the global South. The question is whether decolonial thinking in the study of religion and theology should concern itself with such pertinence. I first examine the colonial (...) legacy of “peace” and key features of decolonial interventions in the modernist, civilizational, and developmentalist discourses within which “peace” is embedded. Next, I analyze how interreligious peacebuilding practices both entrench coloniality while improving the lives of people who engage in such practices and how such practices rely on thin or “sticky notes” religiosity, deeply inconsistent with decolonial theologies and religiosity. Finally, I show how, on the ground, mere existence and overcoming hate reside along a spectrum of decolonial politics. (shrink)

In this article I caution that María Lugones's critiques of Kimberlé Crenshaw's intersectional theory posit a dangerous form of epistemic erasure, which underlies Lugones's decolonial methodology. This essay serves as a critical engagement with Lugones's essay “Radical Multiculturalism and Women of Color Feminisms” in order to uncover the decolonial lens within Crenshaw's theory of intersectionality. In her assertion that intersectionality is a “white bourgeois feminism colluding with the oppression of Women of Color,” Lugones precludes any possibility of intersectionality operating as (...) a decolonial method. Although Lugones states that her “decolonial feminism” is for all women of color, it ultimately excludes Black women, particularly with her misconstruing of Crenshaw's articulation of intersectionality that is rooted within the Black American feminist tradition. I explore Lugones's claims by juxtaposing her rendering of intersectionality with Crenshaw's and conclude that Lugones's decolonial theory risks erasing Black women from her framework. (shrink)

"[N]o matter how much of a coalition space this is, it ain't nothing like the coalescing you've got to do tomorrow, and Tuesday and Wednesday."This essay is a critical reflection on the centrality of coalitional politics for decolonial feminist philosophy. Decolonial feminisms emerge from multisited struggles with colonization and, as a result, are rich and heterogeneous.1 Thus, the starting point for decolonial feminists must be one that centers on coalitional politics. Women of color have long emphasized the importance of coalition (...) to collective struggle against a matrix of systems of oppression.2 However, the work of forging coalitions is just that, work. Indeed, the work of coalition building, as Bernice... (shrink)

In this article we aim to show the potential of cross-continental dialogues for a decolonizing feminism. We relate the work of one of the major critics of the Western metaphysical patriarchal order, Luce Irigaray, to the critique of the colonial/modern gender system by the Nigerian feminist scholar Oyĕrónké Oyĕwùmí. Oyĕwùmí's work is often rejected based on the argument that it is empirically wrong. We start by problematizing this line of thinking by providing an epistemological interpretation of Oyĕwùmí's claims. We then (...) draw Irigaray and Oyĕwùmí into conversation, and show how this bolsters and helps to further illuminate and contextualize Oyĕwùmí's critique of gender. But the dialogue between these thinkers also reveals significant limitations of Irigaray's philosophy, namely her presumption of the priority of sexual difference, its rigid duality, and her failure to take into account the inextricable intertwinement of gender and race in the Western patriarchal order. Relating Irigaray's critique of Western culture's forgetting of sexual difference to Oyĕwùmí's critique hence demonstrates to what extent Irigaray's philosophy remains typically Western and how she therefore fails to escape the paradigm that she is so critical of. (shrink)

Thanks in large part to the record of scholarship fostered by Hypatia, feminist philosophers are now positioned not just as critics of the canon, but as innovators advancing uniquely feminist perspectives for theorizing about the world. As relatively junior feminist scholars, the five of us were called upon to provide some reflections on emerging trends in feminist philosophy and to comment on its future. Despite the fact that we come from diverse subfields and philosophical traditions, four common aims emerged in (...) our collaboration as central to the future of feminist philosophies. We seek to: 1) challenge universalist and essentialist frameworks without ceding to relativism; 2) center coloniality and embodiment in our analyses of the intermeshed realities of race and gender by shifting from oppression in the abstract to concrete cosmologies and struggles, particularly those of women of color and women of colonized communities across the globe; 3) elaborate the materialities of thought, being, and community that must succeed atomistic conceptions of persons as disembodied, individually constituted, and autonomous; 4) demonstrate what is distinctive and valuable about feminist philosophy, while fighting persistent marginalization within the discipline. In our joint musings here, we attempt to articulate how future feminist philosophies might advance these aims, as well as some of the challenges we face. (shrink)

Focusing on contemporary Bolivia, this article examines promises and pitfalls of political and legal initiatives that have turned Pachamama into a subject of rights. The conferral of rights on the indigenous earth being had the potential to unsettle the Western ontological distinction between active human subjects who engage in politics and passive natural resources. This essay, however, highlights some paradoxical effects of the rights of nature in Bolivia, where Evo Morales’ model of development relies on the intensification of the export-oriented (...) extractive economy. Through the analysis of a range of texts, including paintings, legal documents, political speeches and activist interventions, I consider the equivocation between the normatively gendered Mother Earth that the state recognises as the subject of rights, and the figure of Pachamama evoked by feminist and indigenous activists. Pachamama, I suggest, has been incorporated into the Bolivian state as a being whose generative capacities have been translated into a rigid gender binary. As a gendered subject of rights, Pachamama/mother Earth is exposed to governmental strategies that ultimately increase its subordination to state power. The concluding remarks foreground the import of feminist perspectives in yielding insights concerning political ontological conflicts. (shrink)

In this article the authors discuss in broad strokes the work of two theorists, namely Nigerian sociologist Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí and Argentinian philosopher Maria Lugones to argue that a specific logic of sexualisation accompanied, permeated and coloured the colonial project of racialising the ‘native’. The sexual wound which to a great extent explains the abjection of the racialised body, is a key aspect of the colony and should therefore also be a central theme in any properly critical discourse on decolonisation in (...) Africa. After drawing on Oyĕwùmí and Lugones to make their central argument, the authors apply this framework to the problem of sexual violence in South Africa. Understanding the nature of the sexual-racial wound of coloniality will not only ensure that the problem of sexual violence gets properly addressed as a central question of decolonisation, but will also suggest new ways of concretely addressing the problem. In particular, the dominant discourse needs to shift away from the ‘emasculated man’ trope and towards a critical feminist decoloniality which views the radical dehumanisation of native woman as key to colonial violence understood as a world-destructive. (shrink)

“Care robots” offer technological solutions to increasing needs for care just as economic imperatives increasingly regulate the care sector. Ethical critiques of this technology cannot succeed without situating themselves within the crisis of social reproduction under neoliberal capitalism. What, however, constitutes “care” and its status as a potential critical resource, and how might care robots damage this potential? Although robots might threaten norms of care, I argue that they are by no means necessarily damaging. Critiques of care robots must not (...) entrench exclusionary images of the ideal carer. Instead, critical reflection on their use should trouble dominant paradigms of care. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to offer a reparative framework for current feminist approaches, most of which seek to inhabit rather than assimilate previous forms of inclusivity or intersectionality, by vindicating the pioneering role of past feminisms. For this purpose, I will stick to a double-edged methodological tool that has been an object of dispute in feminist and literary studies for the last decades, namely, critique and postcritique, two concepts that could be said to bear witness to old (...) and new ways of doing feminism. My aim is not to dismiss recent feminist work but to render visible forgotten critiques that have been an essential heritage of feminism. To acknowledge such debts is part of the reparative reading I present here, for I hold that the desire for deep knowledge is accretive and demands a closer and more respectful attention to past practices and theoretical positions. (shrink)

Trans of Color inclusion is not simply a gesture of affectionate commitment to María Lugones's theory of impure communities. Rather, it is required for the enactment of her liberatory theory within and across communities of color. While María Lugones's historico-theoretical analysis of the colonial/modern gender system relies upon anthropological citations of Native gender and sexual diversity, she argues that we must bracket gender for the benefit of [cis]women of color feminisms. However, if this bracketing does not first carefully uncover cisgender (...) histories of violence, then this decolonial feminist praxis reinscribes the invisibility of transphobia, racism, and colonialism's violent intersections, performing another mode of erasure and silence on Trans, Two-Spirit, and Nonbinary Native, Black, and Latinx peoples. In placing Lugones's texts into conversation with the voices of Two-Spirit and Trans of Color theorists, I argue that the mutilation of trans flesh makes possible the integration of [cis]People of Color into the gender–sex binary even if as failures. More important, this essay offers the beginnings of a phenomenological account of Trans World-Traveling, where the unruliness of Two-Spirit and Trans of Color bodies cocoons decolonial worlds from within the spiraling folds of abject flesh—always already in infra-communication with ancestral pasts, presents, and futures. (shrink)

This article examines the treatment of gender and the woman question in the ongoing Latin American decolonial debate. More specifically, it traces how the Zapatistas and other indigenous movements as well as some of the main mestizo male voices in this debate have endeavored to frame these issues and the criticism they have received from María Lugones and other decolonial feminists. It then points to some of the limitations in Lugones's own approach, and in a final stream of discussion, it (...) explores some of the ways in which these limitations might be surpassed within a decolonial framework that follows closely indigenous ontological thought. (shrink)

This article explores some of the central challenges presented by decolonial thought to other critical, progressive, or emancipatory theories, especially theories of radical democracy. The article has two main aims. First it seeks to synthesize and highlight a number of key strands and interventions of contemporary decolonial thought. It does so through a reading of several decolonial literatures including the Latin American modernity/coloniality school, as well as research in Indigenous Studies and Settler Colonial Studies focused largely on the Anglo settler (...) colonies of Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Three key thematics of decolonial thought are drawn out and explicated in this survey: modernity/coloniality, land, and ethico-political resurgences. The second aim is to show what kind of work is done by these decolonial interventions by using them to interrogate Chantal Mouffe’s theory of radical democracy. (shrink)

Because of risks of essentialism and homogenization, feminist theorists frequently avoid making precise ontological claims, especially in regard to specifying bodily connections and differences among women. However well-intentioned, this trend may actually run counter to the spirit of intersectionality by shifting feminists' attention away from embodiment, fostering oppressor-centric theories, and obscuring privilege within feminism. What feminism needs is not to turn from ontological specificity altogether, but to engage a new kind of ontological project that can account for the material complexity (...) of social space in the twenty-first century. Taking inspiration from the phenomenological concept of flesh as well as ecofeminism and María Lugones's theory of the colonial/modern gender system, this essay argues that our own flesh is related to that of others through lines of intercorporeal relations that collectively form topographies of flesh. When we attend to those material relationships present in a particular locality at a point in time, we are able to recognize topographical aggregates of beings that can serve as a basis for this new feminist ontology. An example from Toni Morrison's Beloved involving a human woman and a nonhuman one is used as a paradigm for thinking ontological connection and difference at the same time. (shrink)

Este trabajo tiene como objetivo discutir la modernidad y el otro en la obra Islands of Decolonial Love, de Leanne Simpson. El autor presenta una voz indígena persuasiva que ha atraído la atención de muchos lectores más allá de las fronteras del Canadá sobre cuestiones relacionadas con la tierra y los indígenas, el extractivismo y el medio ambiente. En la obra enfocada, el autor acerca al lector no indígena a la construcción del conocimiento indígena presentando un material que va más (...) allá de la palabra escrita. La nación a la que pertenece Simpson y tantos otros pueblos indígenas han sufrido las marcas de la colonización. Pensar en las narraciones y conversaciones de los personajes de Islands of Decolonial Love es hacer que el lector reflexione sobre las ‘grietas’ invisibles que el proceso de civilización y su lado ‘oscuro’ desatan bajo la ‘ética’ de la retórica de la modernidad y el discurso progresista del capitalismo. No se puede negar la existencia del otro. (shrink)

Este ensaio revisita artigo em que abordamos conceito chave no marxismo, o de emancipação, relacionando entrelaces sobre seu norte, o gênero humano, categoria trabalhada na ontologia do ser social por Lukács e Marx, com debates sobre gênero, como elaborado no plano de debates feministas sobre patriarcado. Já neste texto, se insistimos que a centralidade do trabalho deve ser compartida com as de sexualidade e desejo, defendemos que o debate sobre projetos de emancipação, quer do gênero no feminino, quer do gênero (...) humanizado, como o de sujeitos colonizados, no caso da América Latina, passam tanto pelo desejo, como élan de vida, implicando decolonialidade do ser, como pela decolonialidade do saber. Considera-se aportes de feministas emancipacionistas e as decoloniais, e a ênfase em diversidades de experiencias e níveis de resistência. Defende-se que desejo, sexualidade e trabalho são singularidades do ser humano, mas quem é considerado humano? Palavras-chave: Emancipação, trabalho, decolonialidade, desejo e sexualidade. (shrink)

Set within discussions of gender, migration and social practices, this thesis explores the ways in which Thai women migrants to Sweden build connections between rural areas through their daily activities. Arriving in Sweden primarily through marriage ties, Thai women migrants are more likely to live in Swedish rural areas than in urban areas. Rural areas are typically not seen as a site of globalization or as receivers of international migrants. In contrast to these perceptions, the case of Thai women migrants (...) in the Swedish countryside reveals a complex and vigorous set of social practices that connect rural Sweden across spatial and temporal scales. The aim of this study is to explore the ways in which Thai migrant women construct and implement social practices spatially and temporally. Drawing on the life stories of 16 Thai women living in Sweden, along with other sources of empirical data analysed within feminist epistemologies, this thesis discusses: In what ways does gender shape migrant social practices? How are social practices constructed within individual migrant micro-geographies? By what means are migrant social practices contextualized by spaces and places? Thai women migrants are gendered agents of these social practices and are utilizing specific resources, objects and networks to bridge the distances found in their daily lives. The empirical material examined in this thesis points to the importance of women’s everyday social practices in connecting and linking rural areas globally at different spatial and temporal scales. The results highlight the importance of a translocalism perspective to understanding gendered social practices. This study adds to the translocal discussion by demonstrating that social practices are embedded in multiple geographic sites and scales. Thai women migrants, in this study, emerge as significant actors in global countrysides and do the functional work of bringing spaces and places together daily and through their life course. This thesis consists of an introductory chapter and five papers. The introductory chapter outlines the context and theoretical approaches to understanding Thai migration flows to Sweden. The papers share an emphasis on local sites: homes, workplaces and community. They examine different ways that women construct and build social practices – for example, through food, community projects and in developing their businesses. (shrink)

To reflect on coloniality is not to study the history of colonialism from the safety of a “postcolonial” present. Rather, it requires one to interrogate ongoing legacies of colonialism, not only in...

Recent discussions of Hegel’s conception of second nature, specifically focused on Hegel’s notion of habit, have greatly advanced our understanding of Hegel’s views on embodied normativity. This essay examines Hegel’s account of embodied normativity in relation to his assessment of good and bad habits. Engaging Hegel’s account of the rabble in the Philosophy of Right and Frank Ruda’s assessment of Hegel’s rabble, this essay traces the relation between ethicality, idleness and race in Hegel. In embodying a position of refusal in (...) its affirmation of idleness, the rabble disallows the progressive revision of the project of modernity central to Hegel’s philosophy. Hegel’s discussion of the rabble is thus key to assessing the production of race within Hegel’s notion of ethical life. (shrink)