: My text is written to answer the questions asked at the APA Meeting's presentation of the book Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere by professors María Lugones and Eduardo Mendieta. The answer seeks to clarify that Lugones's infrapolitics position is not so distant from mine. I also address Mendieta's question directed more to the aesthetic domain. There, I seek to show how my position could be taken as a creative effort to extend some of Habermas's early (...) work on the public sphere, and to develop the thesis of the important relations between the aesthetic and the moral realms. (shrink)

My text is written to answer the questions asked at the APA Meeting's presentation of the book Moral Textures: Feminist Narratives in the Public Sphere by professors María Lugones and Eduardo Mendieta. The answer seeks to clarify that Lugones's infrapolitics position is not so distant from mine. I also address Mendieta's question directed more to the aesthetic domain. There, I seek to show how my position could be taken as a creative effort to extend some of Habermas's early work (...) on the public sphere, and to develop the thesis of the important relations between the aesthetic and the moral realms. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Reading the work of Sylvia Wynter and María Lugones together, particularly as it pertains to sex, gender, and sexuality, reveals the limits of popular discourses and frameworks of queer and feminist philosophy that may unwittingly obscure its constructions of sex and gender along the global color line. This article looks at Wynter’s analysis of gender as a category differentially applied across the global color line and Lugones’s analysis of the coloniality of gender. The author concludes to move beyond (...) the coloniality of gender requires intersex liberation, but also that intersex liberation must be understood within a decolonial framework. (shrink)

In this essay, I focus on Lugones’s relatively lesser explored notion of playfulness. I weigh in on the debate about whether playfulness is necessary for what Lugones calls “world-traveling,” which enables one to recognize another person as a full subject. I argue that although the attribute of playfulness may not be necessary for world-traveling, it is necessary for collaborative world-making––creating a new, shared world that is opened through the activity of play.

A recent (2020) special issue in Critical Philosophy of Race dedicated to Maria Lugones illustrates and thematizes the continuing challenge of (re)constructing coalitions among Latina and Black feminists and their allies. As one proposed solution to this challenge, in their guest editors’ introduction to that special issue, Emma Velez and Nancy Tuana suggest an interpretive “dancing with” Lugones. Drawing on my own “dancing-with” interpretive method (which significantly predates that special issue), in the present article I choreograph an interpretive duet between (...) Lugones and Saidiya Hartman. My first section retraces Lugones’ essay on queering tango as a decolonizing practice, and how the latter echoes Marta Savigliano’s Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. My second section then utilizes Lugones’ queering of tango as a lens for interpreting her magnum opus, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, emphasizing the dance-resonance of its central concepts, including “playfulness” reinterpreted as a “dance-fulness” that empowers the peregrina’s “world-traveling.” My third section identifies this dancing peregrina’s world-traveling with the wayward young Black female chorus member, or “chorine,” at the center of Saidiya Hartman’s tour de force history, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. And my conclusion names chorines of color in Afro-Latin social dance communities today as exemplary agents for empowering coalitions among Latina and Black feminists and allies. (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)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Decolonial Movidas: María Lugones’s Notion of Decolonial Aesthesis through CosmologiesDenise Meda CalderonIntroductionMaría Lugones advances a decolonial feminist methodology that allows one to see both dehumanizing social reductions of colonized peoples and the resistant relations operating within non-dominant socialities. By exploring this double “seeing,” I articulate the relationship between resistant socialities and Lugones’s notion of decolonial aesthesis. In her only published text on decolonial aesthesis, Lugones states: “Thinking about (...) aesthesis, I think about the body and permeability and all that permeability allows us to reconceive about the world we live in” (qtd. in Ortega 275). Lugones promotes a notion of decolonial aesthesis that engages a resistant permeable sensing and, I argue, is exposed by her distinct approach to cosmology.1My analysis begins with Lugones’s decolonial methodology to articulate a “seeing” of coloniality that I contend leads to her development of decolonial aesthesis. In particular, I show that Lugones sketches a view of decolonial aesthesis as a sensing that grounds resistance to dehumanizing social reductions and reveals a non-dominant social relationality expressed through concrete sensuous movements. I suggest that Lugones theorizes a communal interconnected dimension of resistance as decolonial aesthesis through cosmologic relation. To flesh out this point, I turn to two interlocutors central to Lugones’s intellectual genealogy: Gloria Anzaldúa and Rodolfo Kusch. I conclude by interpreting Lugones’s reading of Anzaldúa as a coalitional movida performing decolonial aesthesis.Moving to “Seeing” ColonialityLugones’s 2010 essay “Toward a Decolonial Feminism” constitutes a methodological intervention or movida in gender scholarship. Referring to the [End Page 22] expansive global power system, Lugones argues that gender is historically implicated as part of the colonial/modern project and sustains a dominative closure that marks alternative socialities as unintelligible. The colonial/modern system established norms that did not previously inform social communities. A gender binary was imposed onto colonized peoples, erasing the existing socialities that informed the everyday of those peoples. Lugones’s analysis of gender exposes the deep social fissures that emerge from coloniality, and the tremendous harm sustained by reading gender across all social arrangements and onto all knowledge systems.According to Lugones, the colonial/modern category of gender shows a pervasive subjugation to non-humanity of peoples whose sex status does not conform to binary logics. Regarding these reductive processes, Lugones writes: “This dehumanization and bestialization occurred precisely because these people were not understood by the colonizers and enslavers as social agents, and thus their sexual difference [was] not socializable. Thus, one does not find gender; animals do not have gender” (“Gender and Universality” 44). Since gender is assigned to humans, reading gender onto colonized peoples covers up dehumanization, even in calls for gender-based liberation.It is precisely through seeing coloniality that we can track the concealed social arrangements and see the worlds of sense that do not conform to the colonial/modern system. Lugones suggests this point in the following quote:To see the coloniality is to see both jaqi, the persona, the being that is in a world of being without dichotomies, and the beast, both real, both vying under different powers for survival. Thus to see the coloniality is to reveal the very degradation that gives us two renditions of life and a being rendered by them.(“Toward a Decolonial Feminism” 751–52)As Lugones’s words indicate, seeing coloniality involves a complex sensing that goes beyond seeing from dominant social norms and gender roles.Lugones’s methodological movida of seeing coloniality reveals the dichotomous categorization as part of the immense violence committed against peoples as colonized subjects with non-human status. This move urges a recognition of the superimposed categories that continue to harm and separate colonized peoples from their fluid relations with cosmologies (Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism” 746). Seeing the coloniality of gender elicits a transition to the possibilities of sensing from the positionalities deemed animal, in search of socialities that are not mediated by modern/colonial categories. Subsequently, seeing coloniality is a pivotal methodological movida to theorizing resistance in non-dominative socialities, or what Lugones calls decolonial aesthesis.2 [End Page 23]Decolonial AesthesisLugones’s decolonial aesthesis is not concerned... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Decolonial Movidas: María Lugones’s Notion of Decolonial Aesthesis through CosmologiesDenise Meda CalderonIntroductionMaría Lugones advances a decolonial feminist methodology that allows one to see both dehumanizing social reductions of colonized peoples and the resistant relations operating within non-dominant socialities. By exploring this double “seeing,” I articulate the relationship between resistant socialities and Lugones’s notion of decolonial aesthesis. In her only published text on decolonial aesthesis, Lugones states: “Thinking about (...) aesthesis, I think about the body and permeability and all that permeability allows us to reconceive about the world we live in” (qtd. in Ortega 275). Lugones promotes a notion of decolonial aesthesis that engages a resistant permeable sensing and, I argue, is exposed by her distinct approach to cosmology.1My analysis begins with Lugones’s decolonial methodology to articulate a “seeing” of coloniality that I contend leads to her development of decolonial aesthesis. In particular, I show that Lugones sketches a view of decolonial aesthesis as a sensing that grounds resistance to dehumanizing social reductions and reveals a non-dominant social relationality expressed through concrete sensuous movements. I suggest that Lugones theorizes a communal interconnected dimension of resistance as decolonial aesthesis through cosmologic relation. To flesh out this point, I turn to two interlocutors central to Lugones’s intellectual genealogy: Gloria Anzaldúa and Rodolfo Kusch. I conclude by interpreting Lugones’s reading of Anzaldúa as a coalitional movida performing decolonial aesthesis.Moving to “Seeing” ColonialityLugones’s 2010 essay “Toward a Decolonial Feminism” constitutes a methodological intervention or movida in gender scholarship. Referring to the [End Page 22] expansive global power system, Lugones argues that gender is historically implicated as part of the colonial/modern project and sustains a dominative closure that marks alternative socialities as unintelligible. The colonial/modern system established norms that did not previously inform social communities. A gender binary was imposed onto colonized peoples, erasing the existing socialities that informed the everyday of those peoples. Lugones’s analysis of gender exposes the deep social fissures that emerge from coloniality, and the tremendous harm sustained by reading gender across all social arrangements and onto all knowledge systems.According to Lugones, the colonial/modern category of gender shows a pervasive subjugation to non-humanity of peoples whose sex status does not conform to binary logics. Regarding these reductive processes, Lugones writes: “This dehumanization and bestialization occurred precisely because these people were not understood by the colonizers and enslavers as social agents, and thus their sexual difference [was] not socializable. Thus, one does not find gender; animals do not have gender” (“Gender and Universality” 44). Since gender is assigned to humans, reading gender onto colonized peoples covers up dehumanization, even in calls for gender-based liberation.It is precisely through seeing coloniality that we can track the concealed social arrangements and see the worlds of sense that do not conform to the colonial/modern system. Lugones suggests this point in the following quote:To see the coloniality is to see both jaqi, the persona, the being that is in a world of being without dichotomies, and the beast, both real, both vying under different powers for survival. Thus to see the coloniality is to reveal the very degradation that gives us two renditions of life and a being rendered by them.(“Toward a Decolonial Feminism” 751–52)As Lugones’s words indicate, seeing coloniality involves a complex sensing that goes beyond seeing from dominant social norms and gender roles.Lugones’s methodological movida of seeing coloniality reveals the dichotomous categorization as part of the immense violence committed against peoples as colonized subjects with non-human status. This move urges a recognition of the superimposed categories that continue to harm and separate colonized peoples from their fluid relations with cosmologies (Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism” 746). Seeing the coloniality of gender elicits a transition to the possibilities of sensing from the positionalities deemed animal, in search of socialities that are not mediated by modern/colonial categories. Subsequently, seeing coloniality is a pivotal methodological movida to theorizing resistance in non-dominative socialities, or what Lugones calls decolonial aesthesis.2 [End Page 23]Decolonial AesthesisLugones’s decolonial aesthesis is not concerned... (shrink)

Book review of Maria Lugones's Pilgramages/peregrinajes: Theorizing coalition against multiple oppressions (Rowman & Littlefield 2003).

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Anger in a Perilous Environment:María LugonesMariana Alessandriin a hundred years, maybe our commonsense beliefs about anger will come from a distinguished line of Women of Color like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and María Lugones, who make a case for listening to our anger instead of stifling it. But our ideas about anger still come from ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. Their stories about how anger works and (...) why it is bad have been dominant throughout history, and they are not kind to angry women in the twenty-first century. They have created a perilous environment for us, existentially speaking, by painting anger as irrational, crazy, and ugly. They have left us no way to handle our anger that does not amount to trying to control, suppress, or eradicate it. In this short paper, I contrast a philosophy of anger left to us by ancient Western philosophy with a contemporary one offered by Latina feminist María Lugones. Lugones offers a philosophy of anger that assumes it has something to teach us about our perilous environment.1Part I: Anger Seen in the LightPlato compared passions like anger to a hard-to-control, hot-blooded, black-skinned horse that must be reined in by the "charioteer" of reason (Phaedrus, ln. 253E). He thought we should use self-control to contain our anger, and he was not alone. The Roman Stoic Seneca, who described anger similarly, once told a story about Plato getting livid (Potegal and Novaco 9–24). Instead of beating one of his slaves, Plato froze, his hand drawn back in striking position. A friend asked Plato what he was doing. "I am making an angry man expiate his crime," Plato replied (Seneca, De Ira, Book III, section 12). Plato's freezing was his way of acknowledging that rage is weakness. Seneca formulated this scene into a principle: the only appropriate time to express anger is when you are not angry. Otherwise, you are a slave to your emotion. [End Page 23]I became angry during quarantine. I had been promised a year without teaching or administrative responsibility, but everything changed when the schools went remote. Since my kids were home anyway, I decided to home-school them. But I found myself becoming angry almost daily, and it was upsetting. To make sense of it, I went back to my philosophical sources.I consulted Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher whose Handbook I used to read every year. For the fifteenth time, he told me that "an uneducated man blames others; a partially educated man blames himself. A fully educated man blames no one" (13). While I could not control my circumstances in 2020—Epictetus granted that I did not have the power to end a pandemic or reopen schools—I could control my bursts of anger. Instead of blaming my spouse and kids for my troubles, I should blame myself for expecting life to be easier. Better yet, I should blame no one and accept the new normal gracefully. I also reread the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the second-century Roman emperor and Stoic who believed that yielding to anger is a sign of weakness (Potegal and Novaco 16). Marcus reformulated one of the central tenets of Stoicism: "Disturbance comes only from within—from our own perceptions" (38). His advice? Lower your expectations. Remember that the only person you can change is yourself. To that end, expect people to irritate you daily and you will be ready for it (17). For me, that meant remembering that having kids meant having messes. But expecting a mess did not clean the table every night, load or unload the dishwasher, or vacuum the crumb-riddled floor. Marcus did not send his servants to clean my house. So, I left him for Aristotle.Aristotle's soul was not a charioteer with horses, but it was tripartite: feelings, predispositions, active conditions. Feelings are hard to change, Aristotle thought, so let's not waste too much energy trying. Predispositions just name the likelihood of feeling a particular feeling. Both categories matter, but chiefly because self-knowledge is a philosophical virtue. Mostly, Aristotle urged us to cultivate our "active conditions." Forever a... (shrink)

The first in-depth analysis of the radical feminist theory and coalitional praxis of scholar-activist María Lugones. Speaking Face to Face provides an unprecedented, in-depth look at the feminist philosophy and practice of the renowned Argentinian-born scholar-activist María Lugones. Informed by her identification as “nondiasporic Latina” and US Woman of Color, as well as her long-term commitment to grassroots organizing in Chicana/o communities, Lugones’s work dovetails with, while remaining distinct from, that of other prominent transnational, decolonial, and women of (...) color feminists. Her visionary philosophy motivates transformative modes of engaging cultural others, inviting us to create political intimacies rooted in a shared yearning for interdependence. Bringing together scholars and activists across fields, this volume charts her profound impact in and beyond the academy for the past thirty years. In so doing, it exemplifies a new method of coalitional theorizing—traversing racial, ethnic, sexual, national, gendered, political, and disciplinary borders in order to cultivate learning, embrace heterogeneity, and provide a unique framework for engaging contemporary debates about identity, oppression, and activism. Across thirteen original contributions, authors address issues of intersectionality, colonial and decolonial subjectivities, the multiplicity and the coloniality of gender, indigenous spiritualities and cosmologies, pluralist and women of color feminisms, radical multiculturalism, popular education, and resistance to multiple oppressions. The book also includes a rare interview with Lugones and an afterword by Paula Moya, ultimately offering both new critical resources for longstanding admirers of Lugones and a welcome introduction for newcomers to her groundbreaking work. “This is an important contribution to Latinx studies, Latina feminist philosophy, queer studies, and the burgeoning field of decolonial feminism, a field that Lugones almost single-handedly launched. It is interdisciplinary, but also a wonderful pedagogical resource. It provides readers who are both familiar and unfamiliar with her work a thorough and judicious point of entry.” — Eduardo Mendieta, author of Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory. (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. (shrink)

La teoria dell’oppressione di Lugones è incentrata sulla necessità per l’oppresso di coltivare una diversa logica della realtà. Le condizioni per l’emergere di una coscienza resistente poggiano su un’ontologia pluralista e sull’idea di un sé molteplice capace di viaggiare tra «mondi». Un ruolo fondamentale viene occupato dallo spazio del _limen_. Il limen costituisce un portale verso la liberazione, ma non ne garantisce l’esito. Il progetto politico di emancipazione dalle oppressioni multiple richiede la creazione di coalizioni. Un obiettivo che può essere (...) raggiunto solo attraverso una comunicazione complessa, che abbandona la logica liberale della trasparenza. (shrink)

In her work on decolonial feminism María Lugones expands and strengthens the task of decolonial thinking. On the one hand this occurs as gender becomes explicitly part of the very ways of being under modernity, and this means that gender, race, and labor are always entangled in the coloniality of power. As a result decolonial thought may only occur by the critique of one's concrete situation in the living intersectionality in which identities and power relations are founded. This turn (...) to concrete intersectionality occurs as Lugones thinks in light of cosmological indigenous lineages in América,1 and with this turn engages not only the logical, epistemic, and conceptual levels of coloniality but, in a turn that makes possible the affirmation of subjugated knowledges, she turns to the aisthetic dimensions of the coloniality of power and knowledge: Most significantly, in this way, she is able to begin to think with the liberatory rhythms, movements, practices that are our lives as sites of resistance and contestation never subsumed by the coloniality of power, modernity, and capitalism. (shrink)

This paper strengthens the theoretical ground of feminist analyses of anger by explaining how the angers of the oppressed are ways of knowing. Relying on insights created through the juxtaposition of Latina feminism and Zen Buddhism, I argue that these angers are special kinds of embodied perceptions that surface when there is a profound lack of fit between a particular bodily orientation and its framing world of sense. As openings to alternative sensibilities, these angers are transformative, liberatory, and deeply epistemohgical.

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 reflects on the worlds that María Lugones has made and has transformed, particularly for the doing of feminist theory. Thus this article will be more exploratory than argumentative: to explore the lessons that Lugones's work holds, especially her work on pluralist feminism, world-traveling, the uses of anger, boomerang perception, and the multiplicitousness of both our selves and our communities, for our twenty-first-century challenges. This article argues that Lugones's work addresses how to negotiate conflicts that arise within social (...) movements of liberation, within coalitions or spaces of shared commitments. (shrink)

pSara Ahmed’s emWillful Subjects/em develops an account of willfulness as a site of simultaneous oppression and resistance: a diagnosis attributed to particular (not-quite-)subjects and to modes of behavior that are thereby diminished, pathologized, and controlled, and a “diagnosis” that may be positively affirmed as a way of living and doing otherwise. This essay puts Ahmed’s work on willfulness in conversation with María Lugones’ decolonial feminism, particularly her theory of active subjectivity. With Lugones, we offer, one can better understand the (...) resistant potential of willfulness, not simply as the willful subject possessing an oppositional “will of her own” (which risks reinscribing a unitary notion of the self), but rather, as exercising a different kind of subjectivity altogether—one that relies on multiplicity and arises through relationships across non-dominant difference. Extending the connections that Ahmed herself draws between willfulness and “madness,” we further explore the willful elements in experiences relating to mental illness and cognitive disability, categories of experience that we understand to be important (and undertheorized) aspects of what Aníbal Quijano has termed “the coloniality of power.”/p. (shrink)

This article considers María Lugones's work in Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, especially her association of the fragmented self with modernity, in order to understand the existential grounds of what she calls an impure, perceptually aware, mestizaje. It suggests that the impure Latina self validated thereby may be seen retrospectively as the forerunner of the decolonial feminist self who unveils the coloniality of gender analysis. Noting some discrepancies between them, the article questions whether Lugones's use of Quijano's world systems theory leads to an (...) overdetermining historical approach that disables the spirit of inquiry for diversely situated Latinas, even as the theory itself invokes the heterogeneity of their experiences. The dilemma is illustrated by two types of peregrinas: a community-bound peregrina who easily undertakes the decolonial turn, and a diasporic peregrina who may or may not pass its guarded gate. The question remains: what difference does the divergence between these two peregrinas's paths make? (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)

This paper analyzes the innovative way of doing critical philosophy that María del Rosario Acosta López proposes in her aesthetics of resistance and grammars of the unheard. The paper examines the contributions of two sets of conversations with Acosta López’s critical philosophy. In the first place, staging a dialogue between Acosta López and Black feminist philosophy, the article offers a defence of reconceptualizing philosophy in the 21st Century through a dialogue with the voices and perspectives of the excluded and silenced—a (...) reconceptualization that reimagines the critical role of philosophy. In the second place, the paper calls attention to the crucial significance of Acosta López’s aesthetics of resistance for contemporary debates in contemporary political epistemology, putting in conversation her grammars of the unheard with my epistemology of resist- ance and María Lugones’s concept of complex communication. This second conversation also underscores a new way of understanding the critical and transformative function of philosophy by centering the voices and perspectives of the excluded and silenced. (shrink)

Determinations of ability/disability are rooted in coloniality, specifically in categorizations of race, gender, and animality as they bear on social formations. I elucidate this rootedness by weaving the “coloniality of ability” into María Lugones’ accounts of the coloniality of gender and the colonial-modern system as founded on the “human-nonhuman” difference. This enables me to reveal an “ability system” based on the “ability-bestiality” difference and delineate with more specificity liminal sites of oppression and resistance across the heterogeneous socialities of coloniality-modernity. (...) From the perspective of the coloniality of ability that I develop, I focus on the liminality of the white woman Victorian invalid and that of the colonized “bestial” body in order to distinguish between two forms of colonial-modern liminality—“light” and “dark.” I also draw from this discussion two forms of colonial-modern oppression—“dehumanizing” and “bestializing”—and two related modalities of anticolonial resistance—“humanizing” and “decolonial.”. (shrink)

A turn from the “whither” to the “whence” of anarchism is at stake in Catherine Malabou’s interpretation of Latin American decolonial theory. This is a turn from a materialist philosophy that seeks to open the space of anarchism within the modern state toward one that discerns anarchism as already operative in the modern state given the social implications of colonial legacies. In tracing this turn, I propose a development of Malabou’s work insofar as I put her in dialogue with (...) class='Hi'>María Lugones, who is much closer to Malabou than the more canonical decolonial figures she actively engages, especially in view of anarchism as a form of social–political plasticity. Understanding Lugones’ critique of earlier iterations of decolonial theory helps make explicit an immanent anarchic resistance to domination as an explosive inhabitation of everyday loci of tension. (shrink)

This essay uses Maria Lugones’s account of the colonial/modern gender system to analyze the retro-use of “biological sex” in recent anti-trans legislation. The retro-use of sex refers to the role of sex in legislation that has been widely described by critics as moving the U.S. backward in time, or as a rollback of trans rights. The essay argues that Lugones’s theorization of the sex/gender distinction in the context of colonialism offers a better way of understanding the retro-use of sex in (...) this legislation than white Anglo-American feminist theories. While Lugones does not explicitly engage with this legislation, the essay shows that her racialized material history of the concept of biological sex not only allows for an expanded sense of the pasts that are at work in the present use of sex but also sharpens the need for feminist and trans responses to the retro-use of sex that are explicitly anti-racist and decolonial. -/- . (shrink)

This chapter examines María Lugones’s germane and insightful attempt to theorize “intermeshed oppressions,” which, she argues, have been (mis)represented in women of color feminisms by the concepts of “interlocking systems of oppression” and, more recently, “intersectionality.” The latter, intersectionality, introduced by Black feminist legal scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw as a metaphor (1989) and as a “provisional concept” (1991), has become the predominant way of referencing the mutual constitution of what have been theorized as multiple systems of oppression, constructing the (...) multiplicity of social identities. But Lugones’s analysis, which maintains subtle but important distinctions among the concepts of “intermeshed,” “interlocking,” and “intersecting” oppressions, shows that intersectionality theory often conflates fragmentation with multiplicity, and—by reifying “intersectional identities”—reproduces social-ontological fragmentation at the political and perceptual-cognitive levels of representation. Intersectional accounts redeploy unitary categories (for instance, race, gender, class, sexuality, disability) that are defined to the exclusion of each other by privileging the identities of normative group members. Consequently, they remain within what Lugones calls the “logic of purity,” which erases “curdled,” impure, category-transgressive, border-dwelling, mestiza subjects. Although, according to Lugones, intersectionality enables us to discern how the logic of purity produces “women of color” as impossible beings, she argues that the liminal identities of subjects dwelling in categorial interstices can only be made visible by conceptualizing oppressions as fused or “intermeshed.” However, as I interpret her, Lugones is not merely criticizing intersectionality or seeking to transcend its conceptual limitations by proposing an alternate concept. Rather, the concepts of “intermeshed,” “interlocking,” and “intersecting” oppressions do significantly different work in her account and illuminate different aspects of the social ontology, phenomenology, and epistemology of resistance to oppression. First, I situate Lugones with respect to the current conjuncture in intersectionality studies, in which some scholars are calling for a post-intersectional turn. Then, I reconstruct Lugones’s complex account of intermeshed oppressions, interlocking oppressions, and intersectionality. Finally, I discuss the status of intersectionality in the shift in Lugones’s work from “women of color feminisms” to “decolonial feminism.” Intersectionality is now routinely invoked as a representational theory of multiple identities, but Lugones’s heterodox interpretation helps us to see that it is best understood as a critique of representations based on the logic of purity: specifically, of how categorial axes of oppression (mis)represent intermeshed oppressions. Lugones’s triadic distinction (intersecting/interlocking/intermeshed) points toward a provisional usage of intersectionality, namely, to diagnose the fragmentation of social experiences of multiplicity (which, I would argue, is more consistent with the concept’s original aims). In her visionary philosophy, which attempts to theorize resistance against the grain of fragmentation from a conceptual space outside of the “logic of purity,” we find “glimpses” of a non-fragmented account of oppression, and praxical possibilities for liberatory, decolonial feminist coalitions. (shrink)

In The Alchemy of Race and Rights Patricia Williams notes that when people of color are asked to understand such practices as racial profiling by putting themselves in the shoes of white people, they are, in effect, being asked to, ‘look into the mirror of frightened white faces for the reality of their undesirability’ (1992, 46). While we often see understanding another as ethically and epistemically virtuous, in this paper I argue that it is wrong in some cases to ask (...) another to attempt to understand certain positions or lines of thought. In developing my argument I draw on the work of María Lugones to argue for a view of agency that is epistemically interdependent. I examine the case described by Patricia Williams to demonstrate specifically how the understanding requested in this case unfairly undermines both epistemic and non-epistemic agency. I distinguish appropriate requests for understanding from inappropriate requests so as to make clear that I am not suggesting that it is wrong to make such requests when the understanding sought after is difficult, painful, or even when it forces one to reconsider the meaning of one’s actions. Finally, I examine an example from Susan Brison to show how strategic refusals to understand may provide a pathway toward new ways of knowing and being in resistance to oppressive regimes. (shrink)

This article explores the role of second-order anger in the formation of resistant feminist space through the work of María Lugones and Sara Ahmed. I argue that this incommunicative form of anger can operate as a bridge between two senses of resistant spatiality in Lugones, connecting the hangout, which is a collective and transgressive space for alternative sense making, and the cocoon, which is a solitary and germinative space of tense internal transformation. By weaving connections with Ahmed’s concept of (...) feminist fragile sheltering, I demonstrate that the insulating character of second-order anger need not be equated with spatial solitude. Rather, given its orientation toward a future becoming away from oppressed subjectivity, germinative cocooning can be understood as constitutive of collective, feminist, and resistant spaces. I conclude, therefore, that feminist spaces ought to shelter second-order angers and embrace fragility as a condition of resistant transformation. (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)

In this essay, I sketch the contours of a critical phenomenology of walking. I begin by briefly characterizing the critical phenomenological project and marking some of its invitations to think method and movement alongside one another. Then, I explore two modes of doing a critical phenomenology of walking: attending to how one walks and when and where one walks. I revisit and reread, in particular, the stories of Charlie Howard and Latisha King, whose walks not only signaled a unique comportment (...) in the world, but a comportment so offensive as to be extinguished by a fatal admixture of homophobia, transphobia, and racism. Finally, I close by considering the conditions under which a critical phenomenology of walking can be ameliorative—that is, how it can participate in liberatory projects of thinking and making. Drawing on Michel de Certeau and María Lugones, I argue not only that a critical phenomenology of walking can diagnose how structures of oppression constrain walking chances in the world, but also can witness how walking critiques those very structures. Walking is a movement of resistance and reimagination against the constraints of embodiment and subjectivity so singularly inherited and enforced. Traversing the space of this inquiry, I aim to complexify my understanding of walking as a practice, but also to deepen my appreciation of critical phenomenology as a method. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Vasconcelos and Essentialist Conceptions of Mestizaje Gloria Anzaldúa: The New Mestizaje María Lugones: Mestizaje and Hybridity The New Mestizaje and Race Mestizaje and Pan‐Hispanic Identity References Further Reading.

This paper adds to the epistemological contributions of Latin American philosophy. In particular, I propose a “resistant epistemology” informed by contemporary indigenous Andean philosophies and cosmologies. Focusing on the work of María Lugones, Rodolfo Kusch, and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, I explore ways in which communities are made and remade on the basis of knowledges from below, surviving political and ecological crises, including colonialism and modern development. These kinds of resistive knowledges draw from rituals, quotidian and cosmic rhythms, and affective (...) withdrawals from instrumental and objectifying dispositions. (shrink)

Anorexia Nervosa (AN) is an eating disorder characterised by self-starvation. Accounts of AN typically frame the disorder in individualistic terms: e.g., genetic predisposition, perceptual disturbances of body size and shape, experiential bodily disturbances. Without disputing the role these factors may play in developing AN, we instead draw attention to the way disordered eating practices in AN are actively supported by others. Specifically, we consider how Pro-Anorexia (ProAna) websites—which provide support and solidarity, tips, motivational content, a sense of community, and understanding (...) to individuals with AN—help drive and maintain AN practices. We use C. Thi Nguyen’s work on epistemic “echo chambers”, along with Maria Lugones’ work on “worlds” and “ease”, to explore the dynamics of these processes. Adopting this broader temporal and intersubjective perspective, we argue, not only helps to further illuminate the experiential character of AN but also has important clinical and therapeutic significance. (shrink)

Informed by María Lugones’s understanding of the “logic of purity,” this essay analyzes the race for critical phenomenology. It suggests how Lugones’s analysis of such a logic may guide us in developing phenomenological analyses of complex social identities such as race. It also shows how traces of the logic of purity remain even in critical phenomenological analyses of race. Specifically, the essay analyzes the methodological call for a reduction of quasi-transcendental structures. Ultimately an attitude and practice of critical criticality (...) and a mode of critical impurity are suggested so as to avoid problematic traces of the logic of purity. Ultimately, the discussion reveals how Latina feminist theorizing stands to enhance critical phenomenology. (shrink)

When diversity figures in ways that insulate women's differences from one another rather than theorizing about them together, it is difficult to see how interactionamong women that recognizes their differences is possible. In turn, the possibility of communication may seem inordinately difficult when taking place among diverse groups about their differences. While not denying these difficulties, I want to avoid approaches and practices that may draw us into a stalemate in considering possibilities for communication. In the following, I bring together (...) Maria Lugones's reflections on cross-cultural understanding with some of the ways of articulating understanding highlighted by the later Wittgenstein, which are open to the possibility of communicating differences. (shrink)

María Lugones was a feminist philosopher whose work spanned four decades, two continents, and multiple languages. Over the course of her career, her writing made major contributions to feminist ethics, the philosophy of race, lesbian epistemology, and decolonial thought. She passed away on July 14, 2020, after many years of poor health, leaving behind an influential legacy and a substantial body of unpublished work.

On 30 March 2020, the Hungarian parliament approved emergency measures in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, granting prime minister Viktor Orbán the power to rule by decree. The very next day, the government repealed the legal recognition of transgenderism, ruling that assignations of biological sex are binary and permanent. The decision to place sexual difference under house arrest during a time of lockdown was not coincidental. As I argue in this short essay, Orbán’s move was itself a kind of assignation, (...) an act of discursive placing designed to eradicate transgenderism under the name of immunisation. -/- Drawing on Derrida’s motifs of the gift and the dance, I offer a topology of birthsex, the ontological category produced by Orbán’s law of immutable, dichotomous sexual dimorphism. I observe the movements of ipseity to show how Orbán’s placement of the birthsex legislation within his pandemic programme enabled him to define transgenderism as a dangerous and foreign illness that requires an immunising response. Finally, to consider the racial and colonial context of this assault on trans, intersex, and nonbinary lives, I turn to María Lugones and her work on the coloniality of gender, finding her choreography of resistance to be in step with Derrida’s. (shrink)

Maria Lugones and other writers of post-colonial discourse emphasize hybrid over univocal identities. I argue that a significantly expanded version of Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of “dialogized heteroglossia” reveals that the linguistic community and the “voives” at play in the latter constitute a form of dialogic hybridity. This view of the linguistic community offers an alternative to the notion of pure identities and the politics of exclusion that it has supported either overtly or tacitly. Moreover, a political principle - “the interplay (...) of equally audible voices” - can be derived from this view; it permits us simultaneously to affirmmulticulturalism and to deny racism, sexism, classism and other exclusionary discourses the right to become policy-making voices.Maria Lugones et d’autres théoriciens du discours post-colonial mettent l’accent sur les identités hybrides par opposition à univoques. Je soutiens qu’une version significativement plus large de la notion bakhtinienne d’“hétéroglossie dialogisée” fait ressortir que la communauté linguistique et les “voix” en jeu dans cette dernière constituent une forme d’hybridité dialogique. Cette conception de lacommunauté linguistique offre une alternative à la notion d’identité pure et à la politique d’exclusion qu’elle a défendue, ouvertement ou de façon tacite. De plus, un principe politique - “le jeu de voix audibles au même degré” - peut être tiré de cette conception, lequel permettrait à la fois d’affirmer le multiculturalisme et d’empêcher que le racisme, le sexisme, le classicisme et tout autre discours d’exclusion puissent devenir des voix qui déterminent fes pofitiques du jour. (shrink)

This article argues that María Lugones's articulation of decolonial feminism, as a theory and potential political praxis, both disappears Blackness and subjugates African American women—their scholarship, their language, and the materiality of their Black “flesh”—within the same subordinate position the coloniality of gender decries. Expanding Hortense Spillers's concept of “pornotroping,” this article puts into relief the ideological and rhetorical investments in deploying the figure of the Black woman to institute an argument about gender, but only to erase this figure (...) from the political and affective registers of its theorization. This essay argues that Lugones's theorization of decolonial feminism effectively reifies the libidinal dynamics it denounces: turning Africans into captives, into commodities for use and abuse. It questions the camouflaging and decontextualization of Black feminist interventions that consider the singularity of antiblack violence as a model for thinking about violence as a phenomenological and ontological global order, critiquing the category of gender incipit to the process of enslavement and colonialism that ushers in the very modernity that decoloniality frames itself against. (shrink)

This article considers María Lugones's concept of faithful witnessing as a point of departure to think about the ethics and possibilities of faithful witnessing in literary contexts. For Lugones, faithful witnessing is an act of aligning oneself with oppressed peoples against the grain of power and recognizing their humanity, oppression, and resistance despite the lack of institutional endorsement. I engage the work of Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Denise Oliver, and other scholars who offer methodologies and discourses on recognition, witnessing, and (...) resistance. I argue that the feminist philosophical concept of faithful witnessing is a critical element of reading decolonial imaginaries. The article undertakes close readings of two novels in the Afro-Latinx and Afro-Hispanic tradition: Donato Ndongo's Shadows of Your Black Memory and Junot Díaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. In these readings, the concept of faithful witnessing enriches the analysis of religious colonization and the gender violence inherent to coloniality. (shrink)

Often, when we are angry, we are angry at someone who has hurt us, and our anger is a protest against our perceived mistreatment. In these cases, its function is to hold the abuser accountable for their offense. The anger involves a demand for some sort of change or response: that the hurt be acknowledged, that the relationship be repaired, that the offending party reform in some way. In this paper, I develop and defend an account of a different form (...) of anger, called "outrage anger". Outrage anger does not aim to hold an abuser accountable, nor to demand repair or reform. Drawing on the work of Maria Lugones, I argue that outrage anger is directed at the state of affairs in which a violation is unintelligible to the dominant moral community. The central function of outrage anger is a psychological boundary setting: it closes off the victim’s ability to feel empathy for their abuser. Outrage has an important role to play in the context of political injustice, but that it also comes with significant costs. (shrink)

Politics of Reality includes nine essays that examine sexism, the exploitation of women, the gay rights movement and other topics from a feminist perspective. -/- The essays "The Problem That Has No Name" and "A Note On Anger" have been translated into Spanish by Maria Lugones for circulation in la Asociacion Argentina de Mujeres en Filosofia.

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)

Feminism and Ecological Communities presents a bold and passionate rethinking of teh ecofeminist movement. It is one of the first books to acknowledge the importance of postmodern feminist arguments against ecofeminism whilst persuasively preseenting a strong new case for econolocal feminism. Chris J.Cuomo first traces the emergence of ecofeminism from the ecological and feminist movements before clearly discussing the weaknesses of some ecofeminist positions. Exploring the dualisms of nature/culture and masculing/feminine that are the bulwark of many contemporary ecofeminist positions and (...) questioning traditional traditional feminist analyses of gender and caring, Feminism and Ecological Communities asks whether women are essentially closer to nature than men and how we ought to link the oppression of women, people of colour, and other subjugated groups to the degradation of nature. Chris J.Cuomo addresses these key issues by drawing on recent work in feminist ethics as well as teh work of diverse figures such as Aristotle, John Dewey, Donna Haraway adn Maria Lugones. A fascinating feature of the book is the use of the metaphor of the cyborg to highlight the fluidity of the nature/culture distinction and how this can enrich econfeminist ethics and politics. An outstanding new argument for an ecological feminism that links both theory and practice, Feminism and Ecological Communities bravely redraws the ecofeminist map. It will be essential reading for all those interested in gender studies, environmental studies and philosophy. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to analyze the notion of “loving, knowing ignorance,” a type of “arrogant perception” that produces ignorance about women of color and their work at the same time that it proclaims to have both knowledge about and loving perception toward them. The first part discusses Marilyn Frye's accounts of “arrogant” as well as of “loving” perception and presents an explanation of “loving, knowing ignorance.” The second part discusses the work of Audre Lorde, Elizabeth Spelman, and (...) María Lugones in their attempts to deal with the issue of arrogant perception within feminism, and examines how Lugones's notion of “‘world’-traveling” may help us deal with “loving, knowing ignorance.” Ultimately, the author suggests that we need to become aware of instances of “loving, knowing ignorance,” especially if we are to stay true to Third Wave feminism's commitment to diversity. (shrink)

_Feminism and Ecological Communities_ presents a bold and passionate rethinking of the ecofeminist movement. It is one of the first books to acknowledge the importance of postmodern feminist arguments against ecofeminism whilst persuasively preseenting a strong new case for econolocal feminism. Chris J.Cuomo first traces the emergence of ecofeminism from the ecological and feminist movements before clearly discussing the weaknesses of some ecofeminist positions. Exploring the dualisms of nature/culture and masculing/feminine that are the bulwark of many contemporary ecofeminist positions and (...) questioning traditional traditional feminist analyses of gender and caring, _Feminism and Ecological Communities_ asks whether women are essentially closer to nature than men and how we ought to link the oppression of women, people of colour, and other subjugated groups to the degradation of nature. Chris J.Cuomo addresses these key issues by drawing on recent work in feminist ethics as well as teh work of diverse figures such as Aristotle, John Dewey, Donna Haraway adn Maria Lugones. A fascinating feature of the book is the use of the metaphor of the cyborg to highlight the fluidity of the nature/culture distinction and how this can enrich econfeminist ethics and politics. An outstanding new argument for an ecological feminism that links both theory and practice, _Feminism and Ecological Communities_ bravely redraws the ecofeminist map. It will be essential reading for all those interested in gender studies, environmental studies and philosophy. (shrink)

Abstract: If anger is the emotion of injustice, and if most injustices have prominent epistemic dimensions, then where is the anger in epistemic injustice? Despite the question my task is not to account for the lack of attention to anger in epistemic injustice discussions. Instead, I argue that a particular texture of transformative anger – a knowing resistant anger – offers marginalized knowers a powerful resource for countering epistemic injustice. I begin by making visible the anger that saturates the silences (...) that epistemic injustices repeatedly manufacture and explain the obvious: silencing practices produce angry experiences. I focus on tone policing and tone vigilance to illustrate the relationship between silencing and angry knowledge management. Next, I use María Lugones’s pluralist account of anger to bring out the epistemic dimensions of knowing resistant anger in a way that also calls attention to their histories and felt textures. The final section draws on feminist scholarship about the transformative power of angry knowledge to suggest how it might serve as a resource for resisting epistemic injustice. (shrink)

We engage in an affirmative feminist reading of the recent, predominantly Western, philosophical movement called the new materialisms—that is, we problematize the “new” while still valuing its contributions toward justice. We put Sara Ahmed in conversation with María Lugones and Zoe Todd in order to recognize that not only have feminist scholars engaged in conversations around the material before publications of the “new”, but we also argue that the “new” creates a coloniality of non-modern knowledges that think and live (...) some of the so-called groundbreaking ideas of the “new.” The new materialisms, then, function systematically to deny and silence the multiple and varied ways in which the concepts it engages have a prolonged and deep scholarship of theorization in both feminisms and non-modern knowledges. The significance of this, we contend, is not merely a question of semantics as authors of the “new” purport—language matters. That is, language materializes the world; it affects. In engendering this philosophy as “new,” it acts, in effect, as a colonization that reinforces harmful and violent discourses of white, neoliberal, colonial capitalism that some feminist theories seek to dismantle. (shrink)

The literature on epistemic injustice has been helpful for highlighting some of the epistemic harms that have long troubled those working in area studies that concern oppressed populations. Nonetheless, a good deal of this literature is oriented toward those in a position to perpetrate injustices, rather than those who historically have been harmed by them. This orientation, I argue, is ill-suited to the work of epistemic decolonization. In this essay, I call and hold attention to the epistemic interests of those (...) who are epistemically marginalized on account of relations of dominance and oppression. To do so, I draw on Kristie Dotson’s work, which uses a systems approach focused on epistemic agency. I develop Dotson’s insights further to argue that epistemic inclusions may be just as pernicious as epistemic exclusions Specifically, I highlight some of the ways in which epistemic agents can be included in epistemic systems in a manner that is epistemically exploitative—extracting epistemic labor coercively or in ways that are distinctly non-reciprocal. I then turn to María Lugones’ distinction between horizontal and vertical practices to discuss avenues of resisting both exclusions and inclusions that thwart the epistemic agency of marginalized knowers. (shrink)