Trans and gender-nonconforming people sometimes say that certain gender norms are authentic for them. For example, a trans man might say that abiding by norms of masculinity tracks who he really is. Authenticity is sometimes taken to appeal to an essential, pre-social “inner self.” It is also sometimes understood as a moral notion. Authenticity claims about gender norms therefore appear inimical to two key commitments in feminist philosophy: that all gender norms are socially constructed, and that many domains of gender (...) norms are both morally and prudentially bad. I argue that that this apparent tension is illusory. Concordant with existing trans narratives of authenticity, I articulate an existentialist view that understands authenticity as a socially embedded, constructive project undertaken in a non-ideal social world, rather than a reflective uncovering of a pre-given, essential self. I then show that authenticity and morality can come apart; what is authentic for someone need not be either morally good or good for them. I conclude that the authenticity of gender norms does not cut against the feminist commitments that I identify. This conclusion enables a theoretical space that is both respectful of trans experience and critical of dominant gender norms, an important liberatory goal. (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)

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)

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)

There is a growing body of feminist scholarship and literature exploring the ways in which Western patriarchal technologies of gender differentiation and sexual violence structure the racial categorisation and dehumanisation that define South Africa’s history of slavery, colonialism and apartheid. In this article, I consider the gendered history of white Afrikaner nationalism in the context of these insights. Using the decolonial feminist lens of María Lugones, I interpret the historical and contemporary patriarchal subjugation of the white Afrikaner woman as a (...) site of the production and maintenance of colonial racial categories and hierarchies. Gaining a better understanding of how gender operated as a colonial mode of organisation in the process of forging the ethno-racialised white identity of the Afrikaner in the early nineteenth century in opposition to the black indigenous majority population helps to explain how the continued patriarchal subjugation of white Afrikaner women by Afrikaner men in postcolonial/postapartheid South Africa works to reassert and maintain colonial racial categories and inequalities that continue to plague the country. (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)

This article investigates related contexts and connections that both hide and display the coercion and sexual violence manifest in Western cultural and aesthetic artefacts during ancient Greek and Roman eras and the French imperialist epoch. Exploring ‘Pan and Syrinx’ from Ovid’s ‘Book I’ of the Metamorphoses and Claude Debussy’s Syrinx for solo flute, I historicise the meanings of rape and sexual assault that informed Ovid’s epic and then revisit the genesis of Debussy’s Syrinx because of the uneasy elements surrounding its (...) creation. I show how its cultural production is complicit with the imperial in several ways. I consider how sexual violence impacts voice, subjectivity and the body, and finally, I draw on Luce Irigaray’s work to sketch an embodied Syrinx in relation with others and her environment. I suggest the desiring potential of sexual difference, with limitations, as a generative conception of figuring the feminine-maternal body beyond masculine appropriation. In this way I open the myth up to watery material-social relations. (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)

Resumo: O artigo objetiva refletir sobre as concepções de gênero, poder, multiplicidade e multiculturalismo, em María Lugones, analisando o modo como sua teoria se associa ao pensamento pós-colonial. Para tanto, aborda a perspectiva do pensamento pós-colonial e a noção de colonialidade do poder, considerando o sistema moderno/colonial de gênero. As teorias pós-coloniais criticam o paradigma epistemológico do Ocidente e a hierarquização baseada na distinção entre humanos e não humanos, colonizador e colonizado. Em sua análise do sistema moderno/colonial, María Lugones introduz (...) a ideia de gênero na reflexão acerca das relações de poder. A teoria de Oyèronké Oyӗwùmí é uma referência para María Lugones, que desenvolve uma concepção de intersecção de raça, classe, gênero e sexualidade, propondo um feminismo decolonial baseado na identificação de formas de resistência e coalizão para emancipação.: The article reflects on María Lugones’s concepts of gender, power, multiplicity, and multiculturalism, analyzing the way her theory is associated with postcolonial thought. In order to do so, it aproaches the perspective of postcolonial thought, and the notion of coloniality of power, considering the colonial/modern gender system. The postcolonial theories criticize the Western epistemological paradigm, and hierarchy based on the distinction between human and non-human, colonizer and colonized. When analyzing the colonial/modern system, María Lugones’s perspective introduces the concept of gender in the analyses of the power relationships. Oyèronké Oyӗwùmí’s theory of gender is a reference to María Lugones. In the analysis of the coloniality of power, Lugones develops the idea of the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality, proposing decolonial feminism based on the identification of forms of resistance, and coalition in social movements for emancipation. (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.

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 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)

Who/what can be had at an ontological discount? By grasping the “anitrelationality” and “dismediation” of social relations by capital’s system of accounts, we discern not only the epistemicide and the expropriation of the cognitive-linguistic by capital, we shed new light on racial abstraction and gender abstraction. We grasp in “the coloniality of race and gender” the logistics of abstraction that at once code the social factory and give rise to what I have called the derivative condition—a condition in which the (...) multiple forms of being, when dissolved in and as executable information, are functionalized as contingent claims on the value-form by means of “the world computer.” When we say that semiotic processes are metapragmatically put under economic and informatic pressure, we are also saying that the datafication expresses more than a simple analogy to the commodity form by assigning numbers to qualities. Rather, datafication appears as the preeminent mechanism for the commodification of sociality, and thus also encodes access to social currency. Femicide and the ritual violence of parastate cartels of “gore capitalism” can be seen as alternative means of issuing derivative (soft) currencies by imposing extrajudicial if equally violent systems of account. (shrink)

According to a current trend in social ontology, by articulating claims of social construction in terms of metaphysical grounding, we can shed light on the metaphysics of social construction and understand deep truths about social identities like race and gender. Focusing on two recent accounts, I argue that this move from social construction to grounding has limitations. While there are intelligible grounding claims that can explain certain ideas in social ontology, such grounding claims add nothing to what we have learnt (...) from constructionists about race and gender. Although some applications of this grounding approach attempt to remedy this and offer detailed analyses of how social kinds are grounded, they yield results that are inconsistent with some very plausible views about social construction. Thus, if we want to illuminate the metaphysics of social construction, we must explore other alternatives. (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)

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)

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)

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 being a figure 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)

This article begins by examining the importance that critical intercultural dialogues have within the Modernity/Coloniality Research Program toward reaching an alternative geopolitics and body-politics of knowledge, in order to raise the question whether the colonial difference creates conditions for dialogical situations that bring together critiques of coloniality emerging from different experiences of coloniality. The answer it offers is twofold. On the one hand, if one imagines such situations to be communicative exchanges à la Bakhtin that put logos at the center, (...) given what is termed the coloniality of language and speech, the possibility of such exchanges is feasible only as an abstract gesture. On the other hand, when one faces the complications of the erasure of dialogue produced by coloniality, the kind of decolonial communicative relations that seem possible among people thinking and acting from the colonial difference are less conscious or agential than emotive. By articulating the relations between coalitional methodologies and a global sense of connection the article proposes a nondialogical theory of decolonial communication: a way of orienting ourselves with a sense of permeability and recognition of being on the same side that doesn't need to be politically motivated but is always active. (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 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)

Despite the persistence of violence inside and around prisons, and the dubious adequacy of criminal law to respond to victim–survivors, international human rights (IHR) discourse increasingly promotes the mobilisation of the state’s penal apparatus to respond to human rights violations, including violence against women (VAW). Using an anticolonial feminist approach, this article scrutinises the ontological and epistemological commitments underlying ‘human rights penality,’ by analysing features of the Western-colonial register vis-a-vis more relational worldviews. Separateness, abstraction, and transcendence broadly underpin the exclusion (...) of embodied experience, context, and material reality from the juridical field. In the second part, through discourse analysis of Inter-American and European case law, the author shows the deployment of human rights penality, the displacement of experience, and the disregard of context in IHR discourse. VAW is construed as a procedural and penal matter: it is the absence of a penal process that courts regard as failure to protect women, rather than the state’s inability/unwillingness to address structural subordination. Moreover, the ‘virtues’ attributed to the penal system justify its expansion, which facilitates the continuity of penal violence and debilitates alternative approaches to justice. Finally, the author posits penal abolition as an anticolonial praxis, pointing at examples of anti-carceral feminist work. (shrink)

This article analyses feminist discourses on the criminalisation of violence against women in Ecuador, after the enactment of a “post-neoliberal” constitution. It responds to arguments in feminist legal theory, which affirm that penal expansion thrives through neoliberal globalisation, and that certain feminists have sponsored this carceral-neoliberal alliance, over and above redistributive concerns. However, in Ecuador, many feminists who participated in a recent criminalisation process also endorsed the post-neoliberal government’s social redistribution programme. Ecuadorian feminism therefore complicates current discussions on carceral and (...) governance feminism, which link penal expansion with neoliberalism and an absence of redistributive concerns. Ecuadorian left-leaning feminists use rights-based frameworks to reconcile penal interventions with potential abuses of coercive power. This allows them to regard criminal justice as minimally problematic within the redistributive agenda they endorse. At the same time, the penal approach of Ecuadorian feminists runs the danger of marginalising legally pluralistic approaches to justice. (shrink)

This special issue explores intersections of feminism, postcolonialism, and technoscience. The papers emerged out of a 2014 research seminar on Feminist Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan. Through innovative engagement with rich empirical cases and theoretical trends in postcolonial theory, feminist theory, and STS, the papers trace local and global circulations of technoscience. They illuminate ways in which science and technology are imbricated in circuits of state power and global (...) inequality and in social movements resisting the state and neocolonial orders. The collection foregrounds the importance of feminist postcolonial STS to our understandings of technoscience, especially how power matters for epistemology and justice. (shrink)

This article addresses the conceptual challenges of articulating the ethical–political limits of ‘higher education as we know it’, and the practical challenges of exploring alternative formations of higher education that are unimaginable from within the dominant imaginary of the higher education field. This article responds to the contemporary conjuncture in which possible futures have been significantly narrowed, and yet these possibilities also appear increasingly unsustainable and unethical. It invites scholars of higher education to rethink the epistemological and ontological frames within (...) which most imaginaries and institutions of higher education are embedded. If we fail to denaturalize these frames, then efforts to pluralize possible higher education futures will risk reproducing existing conceptual limitations and enduring colonial harms. (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)

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.

This essay collects four decades of my own reflections, as an anthropologist and feminist, on gender and coloniality across various contexts in Latin America. It also highlights the decolonial methodology and vocabulary that I have had to develop in my various roles as scholar, public intellectual, and expert witness over the years. Briefly, what I present here is a decolonial feminist perspective that argues for the existence of a patriarchal political order in communal societies before colonization. Yet, in my view, (...) precolonial gender has a dual structure that is plural in essence and differs markedly from the binary gender structure of colonial-modern societies, which works in terms of a One and its marginalized others. As I argue, the capturing and transformation of precolonial dual gender structures by the modern gender system exacerbates inequality, increases violence against women, and disempowers them politically. For that reason, I speak of “low-intensity” and “high-intensity” patriarchal systems. (shrink)

In this essay, I situate Irigaray’s philosophy of sexuate difference between the Heideggerian response to the collapse of the project of Western modernity and that of decolonial theorist Oscar Guardiola-Riviera. First, I return to Heidegger’s theorisation of ‘planetary technicity’ as the ontology of modernity, arguing, with Heidegger, that in order to respond to this problem we must return to the question of Being. From here, I link Heidegger’s theory of technicity with the work of decolonial theory on the ‘coloniality of (...) Being’, suggesting that one reason for Heidegger’s pessimism is that he did not think technicity from beyond a Eurocentric perspective. The recent ‘ontological turn’ in decolonial anthropology that seeks to study Indigenous thought as ontology, however, shows that there are resources for thinking beyond the onto-logic of technicity. Yet, here, I return to Irigaray’s critique of Heidegger for his forgetting of sexuate difference in his analysis of technology to say that a move to a decolonial ontology beyond planetary technicity can only take place if we go through an ontology of sexual difference: because, as Irigaray shows, the onto-logic of technicity that underwrites coloniality and modernity begins in an ontological annihilation of life, sexuate difference, and the maternal debt, the only way to recover this is by thinking the question of sexuate difference. Finally, I conclude by examining the case of the Kogi peoples of Colombia who have warned Westerners that the destruction of the planet can only be stopped if we learn to recompense our common Mother. This case, I suggest, shows how and why the turn to non-Western ontologies as a way out of the death project of modern technicity must reckon with the work of Irigaray. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that victims of domestic violence characteristically suffer from two distinct kinds of moral harm: moral damage and moral injury. Moral damage occurs when the ability to develop or sustain good moral character has been compromised by an agent’s circumstances. Moral injury refers to a kind of psychological anguish that follows from when an agent causes or becomes causally implicated in actions that we ordinarily would understand to be morally grievous offenses because of their circumstances. A (...) person can experience moral damage or moral injury separately, but the experiences of moral damage and moral injury can also overlap. Because abusers often expect victims to adopt morally deficient dispositions and often implicate victims in wrongdoing, I argue that victims of domestic violence characteristically suffer from both moral damage and moral injury. By appreciating the different yet overlapping moral experiences of the victim, we become better positioned to identify strategies for responding to and repairing the different harms they suffer. (shrink)

In the closing episode of Diamela Eltit's 1988 novella The Fourth World, the city of Santiago de Chile—including its inhabitants—goes up for sale. Eltit's investigation of the specter of all‐out commodification illuminates the entwinements of aesthetics and race under finance capitalism. Published at the tail end of the Pinochet dictatorship, the novel makes a poignant contribution to the debate over the “lettered city” in Latin America. Briefly situating The Fourth World in this context and placing it in conversation with current (...) lines of reflection on social identity and the notion of the aesthetic, this article analyzes the novel's implications for a philosophical understanding of the aesthetics–race relation: one, the work attests to an expansive conception of racial identity; two, it comprehends aesthetic agency as a much‐needed and potentially critical site of transformed racial existence; and, three, it calls for multimodal forms of address to counter neoliberal rationality. The article brings out these points through a close reading of passages and by highlighting the novel's decolonial feminist aesthetic. In ending, the article takes note of the new notions of creativity and political participation that arise. (shrink)

Address figures prominently in contemporary feminism, yet calls for further theorizing. Modes of address are forms of signification we direct at people, objects, and places, and they at us. Address constitutes a vital dimension of our corporeal interactions with persons and the material world. Our relationships are in motion as we adopt modes of address toward one another or fail to do so. Clarifying address through examples from Gloria Anzaldúa, this essay reveals its importance in María Lugones's writings. The essay (...) thereby highlights underexplored aspects of Lugones's texts, identifies continuities between Lugones's philosophy and feminist work that comprehends address as a carrier of aesthetic and political meanings, and illuminates the resources of a remarkably fruitful concept. Address, in Lugones, is the centerpiece of a quotidian cultural politics. Principal concepts she introduces recruit address. Yet, by foregrounding address, the essay also brings into view unforeseen obstructions in the paths of address that Lugones champions, and an enlarged playing field that we can activate to realize desirable frames of address and derail objectionable structures. Avenues open up for further development of Lugones's insights and for inquiries into address. (shrink)

Linked to extractive practices, territorial dispossession can be traced back to the colonisation of Abya Yala. From a decolonial commitment, this article complicates notions of dispossession and extractivism as merely emerging from war in Colombia and focuses on their presence in Campesinas territories. Based on the conceptualisations of the coloniality of power and coloniality of gender, I narrate how territorial dispossession and extractivism are felt in women’s ‘body-lands’ through foreign tourism/conservation development and new export crops in two rural veredas in (...) the Colombian Andes and in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta where I conducted participatory visual projects in 2016. From a relational understanding of place, I also demonstrate the ways that the rural population is resisting and negotiating within these processes. Ultimately, I make a call for feminist scholars to politically commit to the dismantling of the coloniality of gender, and to the resistances to territorial dispossession and extractivism (epistemic and economic) that rural women are leading in place in the Global South. (shrink)

This article documents our collaborative ongoing struggle to disrupt the reproduction of the coloniality of knowledge in the teaching of Gender Studies. We document how our decolonial feminist activism is actualised in our pedagogy, which is guided by feminist interpretations of ‘wonder’ (Irigaray, 1999; Ahmed, 2004; hooks, 2010) read alongside decolonial theory, including that of Ramón Grosfoguel, Walter D. Mignolo and María Lugones. Using notions of wonder as pedagogy, we attempt to create spaces in our classrooms where critical self-reflection and (...) critical intellectual and embodied engagement can emerge. Our attempts to create these spaces include multiple aspects or threads that, when woven together, might enable other ways of knowing-being-doing that works towards disrupting feminist complicity with coloniality in the Australian context. (shrink)

This article is an interpretation of Alejandro Vallega’s “decolonial aesthetics,” focusing on his book Latin American Philosophy: From Identity to Radical Exteriority. This interpretation situates decolonial aesthetics in relation to figures in the history of Latin American Philosophy, and the work of Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Linda Martín Alcoff, and Gloria Anzaldúa. It also explores the determination of decolonial aesthetics as an aesthetics of liberation.

In this article, I use ethnographic and historical evidence to consider marriage as a particular locus of what Maria Lugones has called “the colonial/modern gender system.” By bringing specific research on marriage among the matrilineal Asante of Kumasi, Ghana, together with a consideration of global ideals of marriage and gender, I argue that marriage and the family are key sites through which the subjugation of women in Africa can be understood, but that this requires local and historical contextualization. To do (...) this, I trace the emergence and current local expression of “companionate marriage,” an ideal of marriage that is associated with romantic love and personal choice, and that is often seen as a gender-progressive marriage ideal. In Kumasi, “companionate” ideals began to emerge during the colonial period, not as an empowering force, but in complicated interactions with other gendered changes that limited wives' claims to husbands' reciprocal support and isolated women from their matrilineal kin. Today, customary marriage is often considered harmful to women and distinct from other forms of marriage; however, I show that such assumptions impose categorial differences where none may exist, and occlude the complexities of women's lives and struggles. (shrink)

Serene J. Khader’s Decolonizing Universalism presents a vision for how feminism might be decolonized for transnational work by doing without traditional Western feminist values and focusing instead on opposing sexist oppression. This paper presents a challenge to the idea that feminism consists in opposing sexist oppression, claiming that it instead consists in opposing gender oppression, where that includes combating cissexism and heterosexism. More specifically, it argues that critiquing cissexist criteria within gender categories as well as critiquing harms that follow from (...) having a queer sexual identity are decidedly feminist tasks. Furthermore, cases of these harms where group identities cannot arise in the social ontology due to a lack of hermeneutical resources challenge the idea that feminism is concerned only with oppression. The second half of the paper extends Khader’s critique of the Western liberal moral vocabulary of feminism by proposing a radical decolonization of the feminist canon as it is usually conceived in the global North. (shrink)

This article examines some of the ways in which Black and Brown young women and men within the context of the US are consistently confronted by the silences around state-sanctioned violence enacted on our bodies with impunity while even our playful sonoric outbursts are reconfigured as threats to the state. I argue that, different from Deleuze and Guattari's conceptualisation where the refrain functions to keep chaos at bay, the refrain produced by a group of Black and Brown youth at a (...) ferry station in New York brings to the fore and into confrontation the very Codes that create a sense of ‘home’ and ‘security’ for some at the expense of their well-being and often lives. However it is from navigating, what I refer to as, silent chaos that this article seeks to explore the decolonial potential of the sonoric ‘disruptions' produced by these Black and Brown young women and men, in particular by examining how they challenge the status quo and highlight the urgent need for new systems of valuation that would serve to reconstitute their collective worth. (shrink)

It is of concern that, until now, Western and Southern theories have not been able to provide a full conceptual understanding of the complicity of the elites and states of former colonies outside the West with the political domination they suffer from their Western counterparts. Decolonial thought, by exploring global epistemic designs, can fully explain such political dependency, which, for Aníbal Quijano, results from the local elites’ goal to racially identify with their Western peers (self-humanization), obstructing local nationalization. We explore (...) why the racially dehumanized local elites believe they can humanize themselves. Our claim is that this happens because of modernity’s pretense that everyone can become civilized and, thereby, human, hiding the fact that hu(man)s are only heterosexual men that are simultaneously Western, white and Christian. Only by focusing on the enunciation of Western knowledge, instead of on its enunciated content, can we make that argument. (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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

This essay offers a critical engagement with Deleuze and Guattari's concept of becoming, from the perspective of postcolonial and decolonial feminism. It starts by exploring the main characteristics of becoming, including the provisional continuity of affective liberation among its various modalities. It then foregrounds the concept of ‘racialised gender’, to trace a very different sequence of affective recomposition sponsored by the colonial state. Over and against Deleuze and Guattari's monological perspective as a universal narrative of emancipation, the article calls for (...) a multilingual approach in the semantics of evaluating its deployments. (shrink)