US Latina Feminism

One way to track the many critical impacts of women of color feminisms is through the powerful structural analyses of gendered and racialized oppression they offer. This article discusses diverse lineages of women of color feminisms in the global South that tackle systemic structures of power and domination from their situated perspectives. It offers an introduction to structuralist theories in the humanities and differentiates them from women of color feminist theorizing, which begins analyses of structures from embodied and phenomenological st¬¬andpoints--with (...) the day-to-day concerns of our lives. The essay is divided into three sections. In section one, I discuss theories of structure in the humanities and sciences, differentiating them from women of color’s analysis of structure as diagnostic of the ways colonial power relations are functionalized through social structures. In section two, I discuss the diverse contexts of interpretation that background women of color feminisms, outlining key themes and ideas related to theories of structure. I argue against a unified theory of women of color structural feminisms that supplants difference, favoring a rehabilitated concept of structure for the purposes of making targeted interventions in contemporary radical anti-colonial politics. I offer the example of systematic marginalization produced by colonial violence and mythology as one reason to take up this approach. In section three, I outline four provisional characteristics of women of color structural feminisms. I conclude that, when divested from colonial myths that guide mainstream notions of structure, it can be a useful hermeneutic tactic in the fight for liberation from ongoing colonial violence. (shrink)

This essay addresses structural violence against Latinas by looking at the existential toll different forms of cultural violence take on us. In particular, it looks at linguistic violence and the role lesser-known violences play in the intergenerational continuation of colonial violence, such as hermeneutic violence. Defined as violence done to systems of meaning and interpretation, hermeneutic violence is discussed at length in relation to the experience of harm and injury. The essay further explores some resistant epistemic practices Latina feminists have (...) generated to address systemic violence. The work of Gloria Anzaldúa is elaborated as an example of resistant epistemic practices. (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 book provides an introduction to the key arguments in decolonial feminism, particularly, the coloniality of gender, the critique of white and Eurocentric feminisms, the imbrication between gender, race, and colonialism, feminicides, and the coloniality of democracy and public institutions.

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)

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)

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.

In this paper, I examine the writings of African American philosopher Leonard Harris as an author who has been read primarily for his contributions to the study of Africana philosophy, U.S. pragmatism, and moral philosophy. Despite contributions to bioethics and reflections on systemic racism within the context of institutional medical settings, Harris’s work has yet to be read in terms of its relevance for disability critique. This paper demonstrates how Harris’s writings may be read as contributing to the field of (...) philosophy of disability by arguing that his concept of “necro-being” helps reveal the mutually reinforcing relationships between race, disability, gender, and class. To carry this out, I consider core themes from his work such as metaphilosophy, health, and autonomy to show the relevance of his writings for philosophy of disability, and, in a parallel manner, the importance of disability critique for expanding his accounts of oppression and racism. (shrink)

Unlike many theories of the self found in Western philosophy, Maria Lugones and Mariana Ortega argue that subjectivity is multiplicitous in ways that defy the either/or logic of colonial Western thought. They also center liminal subjects, take embodiment seriously, and position multiplicitous subjects as always already in the borderlands. Their accounts of multiplicity are grounded in their lived experiences. Nevertheless, Lugones and Ortega disagree on the ontological and existential statuses of the multiplicitous self. While Lugones defends ontological pluralism and the (...) discontinuity of experience that dissolves any unified "I," Ortega defends existential pluralism and the continuity of experience, retaining an... (shrink)

This exciting new Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the contemporary state of the field in feminist philosophy. The editors' introduction and forty-five essays cover feminist critical engagements with philosophy and adjacent scholarly fields, as well as feminist approaches to current debates and crises across the world. Authors cover topics ranging from the ways in which feminist philosophy attends to other systems of oppression, and the gendered, racialized, and classed assumptions embedded in philosophical concepts, to feminist perspectives on prominent subfields (...) of philosophy. The first section contains chapters that explore feminist philosophical engagement with mainstream and marginalized histories and traditions, while the second section parses feminist philosophy's contributions to numerous philosophical subfields, for example metaphysics and bioethics. A third section explores what feminist philosophy can illuminate about crucial moral and political issues of identity, gender, the body, autonomy, prisons, among numerous others. The Handbook concludes with the field's engagement with other theories and movements, including trans studies, queer theory, critical race, theory, postcolonial theory, and decolonial theory. The volume provides a rigorous but accessible resource for students and scholars who are interested in feminist philosophy, and how feminist philosophers situate their work in relation to the philosophical mainstream and other disciplines. Above all it aims to showcase the rich diversity of subject matter, approach, and method among feminist philosophers. (shrink)

This essay builds on a recent intervention made by Mariana Ortega, who has called on philosophers committed to decolonization to avoid reproducing “colonial impulses and erasures” in the very attempt to advance epistemic decolonization. When connected to “practices of un-knowing,” these tendencies become an “affliction,” which Ortega labels with the notion of “decolonial woes.” The author focuses on the reception of the spiritual elements in Anzaldúa’s work to identify a specifically secular form of a decolonial woe: the disregard for the (...) potential that spirituality comprises for advancing the project of decolonization. To counter such secularist erasure, this essay offers an interpretation of Anzaldúa’s well-known concept of la facultad as a postsecular methodology that can help advance the project of epistemic decolonization. (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)

This chapter suggests an approach to decolonial feminism drawing from Latina feminist theory and practice. Rejecting an imperial feminism involves something else besides “going local”: it requires a genuine reorientation of feminist theory toward the everyday. This chapter considers how this affects the central debates about gender identities and gender liberation. How might we approach gender questions in the context of learning from, rather than teaching, lo cotidiano of the impoverished? This would counter the popular accounts of identity formation that (...) view it as necessarily involving either authoritarianism from above, or irrationality from below. The chapter then explores the late theologian Ada-María Isasi-Díaz’s development of a mujerista theology, which adapted certain aspects of liberation theology’s “preference for the poor” to US Latinas. (shrink)

Inspired by Mariana Ortega's invitation to reflect on diverse iterations of intersectionality, this article focuses on María Lugones's engagements with two Black feminist concepts, namely, interlocking oppressions and intersectionality. It explores these concepts alongside Lugones's use of her own terms such as intermeshed, curdling, multiplicity, and fusion, in several paradigm shifting essays, specifically, “Purity, Impurity, and Separation”, “Tactical Strategies of the Street Walker”, “On Complex Communication”, “Heterosexism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System”, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism”, “Methodological Notes Toward a Decolonial (...) Feminism”, and “Radical Multiculturalism and Women of Color Feminisms”. It also underscores Ortega's important contributions bringing these Black and Latina feminist concepts together in philosophically productive ways—in a spirit of collaboration and coalition rather than zero-sum competition. (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 this article I am concerned with how relatively privileged people who wish to act in anti-oppressive ways respond to their own ignorance in ways that fall short of what is necessary for building coalitions against oppression. I consider María Lugones's sense of “world”-travel and José Medina's notion of epistemic friction-seeking as strategies for combating privileged ignorance, and assess how well they fare when put into practice by those suffering from privileged ignorance. Drawing on the resources of tourism studies, I (...) critique the political and material context that can turn these attempts to “world”-travel or seek epistemic friction into a morally and epistemically problematic epistemic tourism. Centrally, I argue that trying to learn what it's like to experience oppression is not an effective method of counteracting privileged ignorance, since the epistemic vices and cognitive distortions that created the ignorance in the first place continue to influence knowledge-creation even after they are acknowledged. Rather than attempting to understand “what it's like” to experience oppression, privileged progressives should undertake to learn about the provenance and purpose of their ignorance and the structures of oppression that facilitate and are facilitated by that ignorance. (shrink)

Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa—theorist, Chicana, feminist—famously called on scholars to do work that matters. This pronouncement was a rallying call, inspiring scholars across disciplines to become scholar-activists and to channel their intellectual energy and labor toward the betterment of society. Scholars and activists alike have encountered and expanded on these pathbreaking theories and concepts first introduced by Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La frontera and other texts. Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa is a pragmatic and inspiring offering of how to apply Anzaldúa’s ideas to the (...) classroom and in the community rather than simply discussing them as theory. The book gathers nineteen essays by scholars, activists, teachers, and professors who share how their first-hand use of Anzaldúa’s theories in their classrooms and community environments. The collection is divided into three main parts, according to the ways the text has been used: “Curriculum Design,” “Pedagogy and Praxis,” and “Decolonizing Pedagogies.” As a pedagogical text, Teaching Gloria E. Anzaldúa also offers practical advice in the form of lesson plans, activities, and other suggested resources for the classroom. This volume offers practical and inspiring ways to deploy Anzaldúa’s transformative theories with real and meaningful action. Contributors Carolina E. Alonso Cordelia Barrera Christina Bleyer Altheria Caldera Norma E. Cantú Margaret Cantú-Sánchez Freyca Calderon-Berumen Stephanie Cariaga Dylan Marie Colvin Candace de León-Zepeda Miryam Espinosa-Dulanto Alma Itzé Flores Christine Garcia Patricia M. García Patricia Pedroza González María del Socorro Gutiérrez-Magallanes Leandra H. Hernández Nina Hoechtl Rían Lozano Socorro Morales Anthony Nuño Karla O’Donald Christina Puntasecca Dagoberto Eli Ramirez José L. Saldívar Tanya J. Gaxiola Serrano Verónica Solís Alexander V. Stehn Carlos A. Tarin Sarah De Los Santos Upton Carla Wilson Kelli Zaytoun. (shrink)

This chapter shows how Friedrich Nietzsche’s work on genealogy can be read critically and strategically alongside Gloria Anzaldúa’s thought to develop a conception of “embodied genealogy” as a mode of critical, historical, and transformative philosophical practice. Anzaldúa’s thought resonates with Nietzsche’s conception of genealogy, a method of philosophical practice that sheds critical light on dominant ways of knowing by calling into question assumptions about historical necessity and rational progress. Reading Anzaldúa’s work through this lens sheds light on her contributions to (...) philosophical conversations about knowledge, identity, and community. Anzaldúa’s work can also be read as a productive critique and necessary supplement to a Nietzschean conception of genealogical ways of knowing. Considering Anzaldúa’s thought and Nietzschean genealogy together yields a rich philosophical ground for thinking through questions about knowledge, embodiment, and identity in general, and the intellectual and political practice of Latina feminist philosophy in particular. (shrink)

This essay proposes that Marta Moreno Vega’s 2004 memoir, When the Spirits Dance Mambo, is a Latina feminist narrative that foregrounds African diaspora worldviews, thought, forms, and practices as resources for cultivating a path toward decoloniality. In this memoir, Abuela’s spiritual leadership and her introduction of the young Cotito into the practice of Espiritismo become a central prism through which Cotito innovatively apprehends the links between sacred and secular realms in the burgeoning mambo and salsa music scene of New York. (...) Even more importantly, her engagement with this diasporan worldview allows Cotito to critically apprehend prevailing gender norms and their limitations. This essay, therefore, argues that an Afro-Latina feminism emerges in this memoir from the practice of embodied spirituality that also has sonic, aesthetic, and social dimensions in everyday life. (shrink)

Through ancestral and submerged sensual repertoires, through healing practices, spoken word poetry, and other forms of psychic praxis, Latina and Xicana feminist theorizing resists the westernizing idioms of cognitive impairment. This chapter examines the ways that the coloniality of gender—as an injunction to inhabit heterosexualist, human-centered, notions of sanity—exclude Latina and Xicana experience and knowledge from the realm of cognitive accuracy. It suggests that heterosexualism creates conditions for hallucinations to arise within Latinx communities. Specifically, it explores healing traditions several centuries (...) long as they shape contemporary Latina and Xicana theories and their ties to hallucinating perception. Positing that hallucinating knowing carries the healing properties of spiritual practices among mixed-race indigenous-Latinx peoples, this chapter gathers evidence of gender-nonconforming subjectivities and the more-than-human remedies that they concoct in their negotiation of perceptual repertoires. More-than-human knowing ultimately illustrates the role of perceptual cross-referencing, or transitioning, between tangible and intangible domains. (shrink)

The first version of this piece was written for the opening panel of the 2017 Conference of the Association for Feminist Ethics and Social Theory in Florida. The panel, “Decolonial Feminism: Theories and Praxis,” offered the opportunity for Black and Latinx feminist philosophers and decolonial scholars to consider their arrival to decolonial feminisms, their various points of emergence, and the utility of decolonial politics for liberation movements and organizing. I was prepared to discuss some genealogies of US Latina decolonial feminisms (...) with a focus on the relationship of decolonial feminisms to other feminist articulations—for example, a consideration of the relation and divergence between decolonial and postcolonial feminism. I was particularly interested in examining some of the “decolonizing constellations of resistance and love” created by Black, Indigenous, Latinx feminisms. I wanted to track the intergenerational labor of relationality as a part of women of color politics and to discuss how these politics unseat coloniality in its variant iterations. (shrink)

This essay works on the role of trauma and forgetting in the subjective formations of the world-traveler and la nueva mestiza. I investigate how forgetting affects the resistant capacities of these figures. I argue throughout that the memory of the world-traveler is an opaque memory, which is unintelligible for the hegemonic demands of transparency, and which forms the silt upon which the resistant possibilities of the world-traveler rest. The first part elaborates María Lugones's conception of world-traveling in relation to Gloria (...) Anzaldúa's New Mestiza consciousness and Mariana Ortega's multiplicitous self. Here I draw attention to the role of opacity and forgetting in the ways in which one can inhabit a world. The second part develops the notions of trauma and haunting to establish the experiential memory of the world-traveler not as a traumatic rupture, but rather as a haunted memory that accompanies her travels. The last section turns to Édouard Glissant's notion of opacity as a resistant mechanism, which works not through the traumatic rupture of experience but rather through sedimentation of experience. (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)

This article offers a decolonial methodology that questions the universality tied to the concept of gender. While not questioning that the modern/colonial capitalist gender system is an oppressive, variable, systemic organization of power, it argues that it is not universal; that is, that not all peoples organize their relations in terms of and on the grounds of gender. Its aim is to offer a decolonial methodology to both study colonized people who live at the colonial difference, but also to engage (...) in decolonial coalition. To see the colonial difference is to see coloniality/modernity as the place the colonized inhabit and the situation of oppression from which the colonized create meanings that are not assimilated. (shrink)

This chapter provides an analysis of the work of Rita Segato and María Lugones’s assessment of Segato’s approach to gender and questions of decoloniality. The chapter examines the concepts of “patriarchy” and “gender” from within several critical paradigms among communities of color, including, specifically, indigenous and Afro-descendant communities within Abya Yala (a Puna term for the geographic lands of the Americas). Lugones proposes that terms of analysis such as “patriarchy” and “gender” undermine the complexity of the relations of power constituted (...) in and through coloniality, including specifically the racialization of gendered terms. European women were racialized, but colonized females were not. Retaining the use of gender as a category of analysis thereby leaves decolonial activists and scholars working toward coalitional struggle with indigenous and Afro-descedent communities unable to sufficiently affirm the embodied, erotic, intersubjective, and otherwise distinct modes of communal relations not bound by dimorphic gender categories that continue to exist among these communities. The conclusion of the chapter then traces Lugones’s contributions to decolonial feminism, responding to the concerns she raises in the previous sections. (shrink)

This article elucidates and expands on María Lugones's account of complex communication across liminal sites as the basis for deep coalitions among oppressed groups. The analysis underscores the crucial role that emotions and resistant imaginations play in complex communication and world-traveling across liminal sites. In particular, it focuses on the role of emotional echoing and epistemic activism in complex forms of communication among oppressed subjects. It elucidates Gloria Anzaldúa's storytelling and Doris Salcedo's visual art as exemplary forms of epistemic activism (...) that issue coalitional gestures and critical provocations that can wake people up from their epistemic slumbers and instigate forms of complex communication that can create new possibilities for coalitional politics. (shrink)

This chapter examines the set of relational dynamics that produce the “wages of gender,” namely the economic, social, political, and psychological “privileges”/“benefits” one gets from identifying with, aspiring to, and manifesting dominant racialized and heteronormative conceptions of sex/gender. Rather than frame the benefits reserved for heterosexual, middle-class, white females as “privileges” and emphasize women of color’s systematic exclusion from those “privileges,” it instead homes in on the inextricable relational and intimate violence woven into those “privileges.” Building on the political work (...) of women of color, indigenous, and decolonial feminists who argue that gender was reconstituted and racialized in and through colonial/imperial practices, this chapter tracks the sets of “wages” that undermine efforts to organize across difference by underscoring what is politically at stake for differently situated bodies. It concludes with a list of ingredients and orientations that contribute to decolonizing feminist methodologies. (shrink)

This essay examines how the Chicana feminist muralist Juana Alicia fosters environmental justice activism that values vulnerable lives in her two most famous murals, both painted at Twenty-Fourth and York Streets in San Francisco’s Mission District: Las Lechugueras (1983) and La Llorona’s Sacred Waters (2004). It explores how Juana Alicia gives visual form to an environmental ethics that prompts a politics of inclusion, equitable resource distribution, and bodily diversity. Juana Alicia’s murals remind us what antiracist, feminist, disability, environmental, and other (...) social justice movements share: an investment in radical interdependence between different kinds of bodies and beings. They depict disabilities created by environmental hazards (including pollution, pesticide poisoning, and the privatization of water) without reducing disability to tragedy, prompting viewers to envision a world in which working-class communities of color are not forced to bear the brunt of environmental risk. (shrink)

This essay examines photographic representations of queer Latinidad. A longing to discover a photographic history of Latina lesbian desire prompts a discussion of queerness in the context of Latinx love, sexuality, and desire. By way of examples of photographic representations, queer Latinidad is presented as complex and capable of encompassing paradoxical but expansive, nondichotomous understandings of sexuality and of gender presentation. Such photographic representations also allow for disidentifications that introduce the possibility of desires that cut across races and racism. Following (...) Muñoz, queer Latinidad is ultimately connected to a sense of longing and melancholia that is resistant in the face of the various erasures of queer Latinidad, both in the context of queer theory and in the context of everydayness. (shrink)

As a US woman of color and queer-centered critique, this chapter analyses coalitionary attempts that merely list oppressions yet reproduce them in their own failure to seriously engage the thought emanating from marginalized intellectuals, even within Third World and US people-of-color communities. To take seriously knowledge from negatively racialized and gendered US women of color is to engage that important bibliography/body of thought but also to examine and transform oneself. The essay specifically argues for recognition of the historic decolonial analyses (...) of double, triple, and multiple oppressions and the “simultaneity of oppressions” theorized by US women of color in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s critiquing discourses privileging a single “key” contradiction rather than the complex “simultaneity of oppressions” that render class, “racial,” gender, and sexuality analyses more appropriately complex and useful. I also argue for a profound solidarity based on a politics of identification with the otherness of the other as an imbricated, interdependent part of our own selves and being even as it is a recognition of the irreducible difference of the other as such. (shrink)

This volume brings together many prominent philosophical voices today focusing on issues of U. S. Latinx and Latin American identities and feminist theory. As such, the essays collected here highlight the varied and multidimensional aspects of gender, racial, cultural, and sexual questions impacting U.S. Latinx and Latin American communities today. The collection also highlights a number of important threads of analysis from fields as diverse as disability studies,aesthetics, literary theory, and pop culture studies.

The chapter explores the perceptual and epistemic structures of boomerang perception, as developed by María Lugones, by focusing on contemporary lived experiences of Latinas of commercialization and homogenization. Boomerang perception is the mechanism through which people of color are constructed through a white imaginary lens and denied subjectivity. The internalization of boomerang perception subsequently yields horizontal hostilities whereby people of color construct each other through white eyes and engender a fake/real dichotomy that polices the boundaries of communities. The commercialization of (...) Latina identity in the 21st century serves as one example that draws out the ways in which boomerang perception is internalized and plays on the production of the real/fake dichotomy. Drawing on Gloria Anzaldúa’s notion of conocimiento, the chapter subsequently considers the possibilities of resistance through the development of style politics that can transform embodied ways of knowing. In this capacity, the chapter takes up the project of chonga stylized politics as exemplifying practices of conocimiento. (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 essay frames systemic patterns of mental abuse against women of color and Indigenous women on Turtle Island (North America) in terms of larger design-of-distribution strategies in settler colonial societies, as these societies use various forms of social power to distribute, reproduce, and automate social inequalities (including public health precarities and mortality disadvantages) that skew socio-economic gain continuously toward white settler populations and their descendants. It departs from traditional studies in gender-based violence research that frame mental abuses such as gaslighting--commonly (...) understood as mental manipulation through lying or deceit--stochastically, as chance-driven interpersonal phenomena. Building on structural analyses of knowledge in political epistemology (Dotson 2012, Berenstain 2016), political theory (Davis and Ernst 2017), and Indigenous social theory (Tuck and Yang 2012), I develop the notion of cultural gaslighting to refer to the social and historical infrastructural support mechanisms that disproportionately produce abusive mental ambients in settler colonial cultures in order to further the ends of cultural genocide and dispossession. I conclude by proposing a social epidemiological account of gaslighting that a) highlights the public health harms of abusive ambients for minority populations, b) illuminates the hidden rules of social structure in settler colonial societies, and c) amplifies the corresponding need for structural reparations. (shrink)

The essay focuses on Gloria Anzaldúa’s narrative of overcoming shame in Borderlands/La Frontera. It addresses the question of coming to terms with multiple conditions of oppression obstructing the creative agency of radical Latina subjects. The discussion occurs along two intersecting planes: (1) the existential question of self-knowledge as the self undergoes the difficult process of identifying and releasing the weight of past oppressions and (2) the situated character of Anzaldúa’s Chicana/Latina condition in light of the heteronormative and epistemic constraints she (...) faces as a Latina writer whose work is intimately interlinked with her sense of self. Anzaldúa’s message of overcoming shame is shown to have some affinities with Friedrich Nietzsche’s reflections on freedom from shame as the ultimate seal of liberation. Considered as Anzaldúa’s companion in a journey in self-overcoming at the crossroads of indigenous and Chicana/Tejana cultures, her new mestiza takes on a new significance. (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)

Many of my first students at Anzaldúa’s alma mater read Borderlands/La Frontera and concluded that Anzaldúa was not a philosopher. Hostile comments suggested that Anzaldúa’s intimately personal and poetic ways of writing were not philosophical. In response, I created “American Philosophy and Self-Culture” using backwards course design and taught variations of it in 2013, 2016, and 2018. Students spend nearly a month exploring Anzaldúa’s works, but only after reading three centuries of U.S.-American philosophers who wrote in deeply personal and literary (...) ways about self-transformation, community-building, and world-changing. The sections of this chapter: 1) describe why my first students rejected Anzaldúa as a philosopher in terms of the discipline’s parochialism; 2) present Anzaldúa’s broader understanding of herself as a philosopher; 3) summarize my reconstructed Anzaldúa-inspired American Philosophy course and outline some assignments; 4) discuss how my students respond to Borderlands/La Frontera when we read it through the lens of self-culture; and 5) explain my attempt to shape the subdiscipline of American Philosophy by teaching Anzaldúa to specialists at the 2017 Summer Institute in American Philosophy. (shrink)

This essay examines Gloria Anzaldúa’s critical appropriation of two Mexican philosophers in the writing of Borderlands/La Frontera: Samuel Ramos and Octavio Paz. We argue that although neither of these authors is cited in her seminal work, Anzaldúa had them both in mind through the writing process and that their ideas are present in the text itself. Through a genealogical reading of Borderlands/La Frontera, and aided by archival research, we demonstrate how Anzaldúa’s philosophical vision of the “new mestiza” is a critical (...) continuation of the broader tradition known as la filosofía de lo mexicano, which flourished during a golden age of Mexican philosophy (1910–1960). Our aim is to open new directions in Latinx and Latin American philosophy by presenting Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera as a profound scholarly encounter with two classic works of Mexican philosophy, Ramos’ Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico and Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude. (shrink)

This article examines Gloria Anzaldúa’s critical appropriation of Mexican philosophical sources, especially in the writing of Borderlands/La Frontera. We argue that Anzaldúa effectively contributed to la filosofía de lo mexicano by developing an Inter-American Philosophy of Mexicanness. More specifically, we recover “La Mexicana en la Chicana” by paying careful attention to Anzaldúa’s Mexican sources, both those she explicitly cites and those we have discovered while conducting archival research using the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers at the Benson Latin American Collection at (...) the University of Texas at Austin. The eight Mexican philosophical sources we examine and discuss here are: José Vasconcelos (1882-1959), Miguel León-Portilla (1926-2019), Juana Armanda Alegría (1938- ), Octavio Paz (1914-1998), Samuel Ramos (1897-1959), Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974), Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz (1648-1695), and Jorge Carrión (1913-2005). (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)