Toward a Decolonial Feminism

451 María Lugones’ text demonstrates the colonial introduction of the modern concept of gender. While colonization might be thought of as formally over in many parts of the world, its enduring legacies of racialization, dehumanization, and extractive capitalism persist through what scholars call coloniality. For decolonial feminist scholars, gender is a product of colonial modernity; it is a colonial imposition that consistently renews the man/woman dichotomy as a normative construction of the social order. In order to decolonize gender, then, we have to think with a different set of tools than that which coloniality gave us. We have to take the perspective of colonial difference as a located, situated, lived experience of cosmologies, or lifeworlds. Resisting the coloniality of gender cannot happen from a pure space outside coloniality; it cannot happen via seeking parity with our superiors. Instead, we require dialogue where we take seriously the contradictions between different cosmologies, by inhabiting border spaces that straddle the differences between different worlds. By engaging in a feminist border-thinking, Lugones shows how the place of colonial difference is crucial to the production of decolonial feminist knowledge.