Coloniality of Gender

The coloniality of gender offers a paradigmatic shift in the ways that populations of color make sense of the cognitive, political, and experiential needs of capitalism through coalitional and feminist labor. Native, Indigenous, Black, Afro-diasporic, Asian, Asian-American, Latinx, and Latin American communities have developed a far-reaching anticolonial stance on gender relations, examining and resisting the linking of capitalism and coloniality. As theorized by María Lugones (2007, 2010, 2020), decolonial feminism challenges the coloniality of gender and its shaping of all domains of social existence. This shift is rooted in two key practices, engaging intersectional approaches to the simultaneity of race, class, cast, ability, gender, and sexuality, and making visible what intersectional approaches can only name as an absence. Its core insight reveals the contradiction of centering (white heterosexual, able-bodied, and cisgender) women as a site of feminist liberation while simultaneously foregrounding the (white-supremacist, full-fledged, abled-bodied) human as a site of antiracist struggles. Thus, decolonial feminism entails dismantling all existing links between coloniality and liberatory struggles.

As a framework, the coloniality of gender stems from the convergence of contributions by women of color, third-world feminist perspectives, Native and Indigenous feminist theorizing, critical race theory (CRT), and the sociology and anthropology of nonWestern societies. Women of color and third-world women feminists developed situated critiques that analyze patriarchal oppression both within and across local and global cultures (Alexander and Mohanty 1997; Espinosa Miñoso 2009; Grewal and Kaplan 1994; Kempadoo 2004; Swarr and Nagar 2013; Wekker 2006). Intersectional feminist thought has highlighted the limitations of gender-only approaches to epistemic and political subordination, aiming to dispel distortion regarding the lived experience of women of color as they organize, theorize simultaneous oppressions, and seek redress (Carastathis 2016; Crenshaw 1991; Dhamoon 2015; Hammonds 1994; Viveros Vigoya 2016).

CRT has focused on systemic inequalities and their impact on communities historically marginalized based on racism. By highlighting disenfranchisement and its intersecting with institutional structures and practices, CRT fostered a multi-pronged approach to social, racial, and feminist justice (Cho and Westley 2000; Cho, Crenshaw and McCall 2013; Collins 2008). Sociological and anthropological studies of nonWestern societies also made their own contributions, providing nuanced accounts of simultaneous and multiple oppressions while contesting hegemonic and colonizing representations of women’s lives and formerly colonized societies (Miranda 2002, 2010; Oyěwùmí 1997; Silverblatt 1987; Tzul Tzul 2019; Wekker 2006). Meanwhile, Native and Indigenous feminist theorizing foregrounds a sovereign stance, denouncing colonialism as an ongoing pattern of power that shapes the intertwining of white supremacy, land theft, heteropatriarchal, and heteropaternalist arrangements (Arvin, Tuck and Morrill 2013; Paredes 2010).

As a popular educator and practitioner of pluralist feminism's coalition-building, Lugones critically examines the troubling indifference of BIPOC individuals, particularly BIPOC men, toward violence against women of color (2007:188). She identifies the coloniality of gender as a possible explanation for the pervasive structuring of white supremacy throughout all relations of conflict and control over sexual and social reproduction. Colonization subjected colonized populations to enslavement and indentured servitude, giving rise to a new gender system that divided people into two categories: those belonging to the “light” side of white enslavers and wage earners and those on the “dark” side of nonwhite nonhumans (2007:190-96). In fact, as Lugones claims, “women racialized as inferior were turned from animals into various modified versions of ‘women’ as it fit the processes of global, Eurocentered capitalism” (2007:203). The technologies of depersonification she theorizes disrupted existing reciprocal ties among all life forms, leading to white supremacy devaluing noncapitalist ecologies of sustainability and care. Depersonification continues today both as a conduit and a justification for the economic, social, cultural, environmental, and interpersonal violence perpetrated against BIPOC nonwomen.

The coloniality of gender framework makes sense of a paradigmatic shift, the rendering of Native, Indigenous, and Black flesh into modified versions of “gender,” often treated as beasts or automata. It underscores that coloniality pits BIPOC populations against each other, setting barriers for liberatory, anti-systemic struggles. Mohanty (1984) argued that colonial barriers distort feminist representations of political subjects and their agendas. As exemplified by Lugones’s statement on the thorough reduction of women racialized as inferior, the coloniality of gender framework challenges barriers such as the “relation of direct identity, or a relation of correspondence or simple implication” between “women as historical subjects and the re-presentation of Woman produced by hegemonic discourses” (Mohanty 1984:62). Furthermore, Paola Bacchetta (Bacchetta, Jivraj and Bakshi 2020:577) has theorized that the coloniality of gender is one but not the only way in which worldwide power systems co-constitute economic and social organization. Addressing barriers to liberation – including feminist, queer, and trans liberation – requires the development of encompassing yet situated theories of power relations that account for the differences and similarities among various and coexisting orders.

The coloniality of gender framework underscores the significance of epistemic and theoretico-practical collaborations for the pursuit of deep coalitions, equipped to decipher, as Bacchetta suggests (ibid.:577-78), the ways that ruling social formations constitute and articulate morphing systems of domination and exploitation. To illustrate this point, we shall revisit the account of patriarchy found within the coloniality of gender framework. Lugones claims that heterosexualism is a mode of colonial/modern domination and exploitation. This mode builds on the growing rift between the kinds “human,” which colonizers reserved for themselves, and “nonhumans,” which colonizers assigned to Indigenous, Native, African, and other enslaved and indentured populations in Abya Yala.1 Without a heterosexualist nuclear family at its core, colonizers-cum-humans cannot reproduce racial, class, masculinist, and ableist privileges and resources. The nuclear family sanctions all forms of systemic violence, including the compatibility of the devaluation of white, bourgeois, reproductive labor, and the enslavement of nonwhite, bestialized nonwomen (Federici 2004). Thus, the coloniality of gender establishes, but also assumes, that gender systems coexist under the hegemony of heterosexualist and racializing capitalism, and that the ascent of European patriarchy is compatible and yet distinct from the rise and morphing in Abya Yala of both colonial and precolonial hierarchies.

Decolonizing the colonial/modern gender system requires, on one end, fostering the continuity of Indigenous, Native, Afro-diasporic, and anticolonial ways of knowing, being, and doing, and, on the other, repairing and recovering nondominant and noncapitalist arrangements, both precolonial and postcolonial. In my journey as a scholar / activist, I witness and work with travesti and trans individuals. We often find ourselves in the condition of living as either internal exiles, from periphery to more affluent areas where sex work offers an early exercise of autonomy, or transnational migrants, from the global south to the north. The coloniality of gender framework disputes any easy interpretation that reads an approximation to the human station among travesti and trans exiles and migrants. Indeed, unlike settler legacies of pathologization and assimilation, we understand and commit to travesti and trans embodiments from the abyss of the nonhuman, from within the ongoing struggles against dispossession, and from within the recalibration of what points beyond westernizing scarcity and impoverishment (DiPietro 2020). Decolonial feminists and transfeminists organize against all forms of violence specifically directed toward BIPOC women, nonbinary, trans, and nonwomen populations. In so doing, decolonial feminists and transfeminist challenge myriad technologies of depersonification while affirming novel ontologies and epistemologies of embodied dissent, reciprocity, restorative justice, mutual care, and communal wellbeing (Smith 2012; Taylor 2022).

• 1. Abya Yala is a term belonging to the Kuna language and that, signifying land of full maturity, refers to the continent that the conquest christened America.