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 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)

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