Tango Dancing with María Lugones

Abstract

This special issue is a response to María Lugones's provocative invitation to engage in a methodological move toward decolonial feminisms in the attempt to philosophize about the ways race and gender intersect and intermesh. As editors of this special issue, we believe that Lugones's challenge is especially important for those interested in liberatory philosophies, broadly, and the critical philosophy of race and feminist thought, specifically.The authors gathered here offer provocative reflections on the myriad impacts of philosopher, activist, and popular educator, María Lugones. The articles included emerged from a nexus of conversations that began at the conference, “Towards Decolonial Feminisms: A Conference Inspired by the work of María Lugones,” held at The Pennsylvania State University in 2018. In co-organizing the conference, we (the editors) and those in attendance accepted Lugones's challenge to think toward what is required to take up the demanding coalitional work of decolonial feminisms. Lugones has long called on her readers to attend to multiple worlds of sense and the importance of what she has called “deep coalitions” for liberatory theory and praxis (Lugones 2003). More recently, Lugones's work has inspired renewed attention to the effects of colonization on categorizations of people according to race, gender, and sexuality. Through her analysis of what she has termed the coloniality of gender, Lugones underscores the importance of simultaneous engagement with feminist and decolonial philosophy in order to understand systems of oppression as complex interactions of powerful economic, racializing, and gendering policies and practices.We have organized this introduction into four parts. In the first part, we locate decolonial feminism more broadly within what we will call anticolonial philosophies by differentiating decolonial philosophy from postcolonial philosophy and decolonial feminism from postcolonial feminism. Second, we point to what we take to be the particular methodological commitments of decolonial feminism as articulated by Lugones. Then, we focus on Lugones's analysis of the coloniality of gender and the colonial/modern gender system in order to demonstrate how her analysis contributes to the critical philosophy of race. Third, we outline our vision for the contributions the authors make in this special issue. Specifically, we sketch out the contours of the decolonial feminist philosophies that emerge within this particular special issue. Fourth, we briefly discuss the organization of the special issue. Inspired by the centrality of the rhythms of her coalitional ethos that saturate her oeuvre as well as her affection for dancing the tango, we group the papers together with such movements in mind.There has been a great deal of theoretical work in a myriad of contexts and traditions that has at its core a critique of the histories, impacts, and experience of colonialism across the world. Though many of these dialogues span centuries, the development of work critical of the legacies and impacts of colonialism in philosophy is relatively new, particularly to the mainstream scene of the discipline. By sketching a topography in which to locate decolonial feminisms, our intent is not to produce an exhaustive or conclusive account of philosophies that are critical of colonialism. Rather, our hope is to generate distinctions that remain attentive to the particularity of specific sites, contexts, histories, and experiences of colonialism and the way these impact the workings of coloniality. Doing so allows us to draw out what we take to be the contributions made by Lugones's articulation of decolonial feminism as well as by the authors of this special issue. To do this work in the spirit of a decolonial feminist methodology, we believe that it is imperative to first check our desires for grand narratives and origin stories that neatly unpack the way in which these strands of thinking have emerged. Rather, we must feel around, engaging in the practice that Lugones calls tantear, to discover the different threads that make up the distinct patterns and textures in the weave of decolonial feminism (Lugones 2003).In our tentative topography, we situate decolonial theory within a broader body of philosophical work that we refer to as “anticolonial.”1 We use the term as the broadest register for naming philosophical work that positions itself against systems of colonial oppression. As Breny Mendoza explains, anticolonial philosophy is a “theoretical and political project that challenges imperialist and colonizing practices, past and present” (Mendoza 2015). The topography we offer also invokes the terms postcolonial and decolonial as a useful heuristic to demarcate two distinct schools and orientations to anticolonial thought.2 However, it is not sufficient to simply delineate anticolonial thinking into only two schools of thought. Despite its usefulness as a heuristic, the risk of generating such a binary is that these schools might be taken to be largely internally homogenous, to share the same assumptions and methodological approaches, as well as the same response to experiences of a monolithic conception of colonization. In order to affirm differences among schools of thought in anticolonial philosophy, we further distinguish between decolonial thinking emerging from distinct geopolitical locations and histories of struggles against colonization: for example, Africana contexts, Black American contexts, Caribbean contexts, Indigenous contexts, Latin American contexts, and U.S. Latinx contexts. Though these strands of decolonial thought mutually influence and complement each other, they are not coterminous or exhaustive of one another nor are they in and of themselves internally cohesive or noncontradictory. This is, in part, due to diverse responses to multiplicitous forms and experiences of current and ongoing practices of colonization. These practices are found in settler-colonial contexts such as the United States, as well as in the continued and lasting imprint of past forms of colonization that Quijano has described as coloniality. Indeed, each form of decolonial thinking offers its own distinct contributions to anticolonial philosophy as it outlines and prioritizes different sets of decolonial imperatives. Further, as editors, we contend that it is important to remain attentive to differences among these imperatives while also building bridges between postcolonial theory and postcolonial feminism, decolonial theory and decolonial feminism, and postcolonial feminism and decolonial feminism. This task is significant because it is only through feminist postcolonial and decolonial theory that questions of sex, gender, and sexuality are brought into each respective school's analysis of colonialism.Inspired by Edward Said's landmark text Orientalism (1978), which unveils the way colonialism relies on an imaginary that generates binary distinctions such as East/West and Colonizer/Colonized, the body of theory that Western academics refer to as “postcolonial studies” tends to point to the work of those in the South Asian Subaltern Studies Group.3 However, as a school of thought, postcolonial theory is a much wider tradition that reaches far beyond this narrow context. As an intellectual tradition, postcolonial studies—particularly those works influenced by the Subaltern Studies Group—largely responds to the colonial practices of Northern European countries, particularly to British and French imperial/colonial projects. The continued and far-reaching influence of the analytical lens of postcolonial theory on academic discourses is undeniable. As Nivedita Majumda writes, “Postcolonial theory today is viewed as an indispensable framework for understanding how power works in modern social formations and, in particular, how the West exercises its dominance over the Global South” (Majumdar 2017).Postcolonial theorists' engagement with Marxism, postmodernism, and poststructuralism results in distinctive approaches to re-thinking questions of the relationship between capitalism, nationalism, globalism, and colonialism. Indeed, this theoretical background guides the innovative interventions of those like Homi Bhaba, Ranajit Guha, and Gayatri Spivak.4 Beginning from the perspective of the colonized, postcolonial scholars generate theoretical and epistemological frameworks from which to approach the specificity of the workings of capitalism and modernity in the aftermath of colonization in the so-called “Global South.”5 This is especially exemplified in the critical lexicons postcolonial scholars have generated, such as the concepts of subalternity and subaltern subjects. Some of the key claims that many postcolonial scholars hold in common include a rejection of Eurocentrism and Eurocentric paradigms of reason and representation, a critique of modernity, an emphasis on difference, and theorization of the creation of a racialized “subaltern” class under British and French colonial capitalism (Mendoza 2015, Mujumdar 2017).6 Resistance and the agency of the oppressed are also key themes of postcolonial theory (Mendoza 2015, Mujumdar 2017).7 However, concerns regarding the impacts of gender and sexuality were often left unexplored by the approach of the Subaltern Studies Group. It is the work of postcolonial feminist theory that most effectively presents questions of gender and sexuality as inextricable to the theoretical and political projects of postcolonial theory.The work of Gayatri Spivak has been central to academic articulations of postcolonial feminism. Despite her role as one of the founders of the Subaltern Studies Group, Spivak's insistence on gender and sexuality as primary to the critical work of postcolonial theory led to her departure (and ostracization) from this group of theorists. By foregrounding race, gender, and sexuality as inseparable from postcolonial discourses, postcolonial feminists like Spivak, Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Uma Narayan, and Lila Abu-Lughod have moved away from the homogenizing tendencies of some U.S. mainstream (white, imperial) feminism in order to bring attention to the lived experiences of women in the “Global South.”8 For example, in her landmark text “Under Western Eyes” Mohanty challenges the homogenizing assumptions of Western feminist discourses that construct a monolithic image of the “Third World Woman” as a perpetual victim. In this work, Mohanty demonstrates that the epistemic violence contained in these representations erase the political agency of women in the “Global South.” Mohanty argues that by assuming “woman as an already constituted, coherent group with identical interests and desires, regardless of class, ethnic or racial location and contradictions,” Western feminist discourses falsely universalize the experience of “womanhood' as well as the functioning of patriarchy and sexual difference, regardless of cultural or historical contexts (Mohanty 1984, 336–37). Postcolonial feminists challenge these foundational methodological assumptions in mainstream Western feminist discourses that attempt to prove universality and cross-cultural validity on the basis of a shared experience of “womanhood.” Further, postcolonial feminists challenge the colonizing model of power that undergirds the political principles that motivate these theoretical and methodological approaches.Decolonial theory, as a distinct school of anticolonial thinking, has multiple roots that span geographical and cultural contexts. Whereas postcolonial thinking tends to focus on the impact of European colonial rule around the world in the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries, decolonial thinking, particularly the body of thinking that emerges from Latin American and U.S. Latinx contexts, appeals to 1492 as a point of departure. This shift in the locus of enunciation brings a longer view of the history of colonialism into focus in order to account for Spanish and Portuguese colonization of the Americas that significantly predates British colonialism. Thus, a decolonial lens highlights the history of colonization particular to the Americas that is often occluded in postcolonial theories.This special issue focuses on decolonial philosophy emerging from Latin American and U.S. Latinx contexts. This is due in large part to a conference focused on María Lugones's contributions to decolonial feminisms. As we mentioned at the beginning of this section, decolonial thinking has many strands, each marking a particular experience and reaction to colonization. Though the trauma of colonization has affective resonances across many anticolonial texts, to evoke Gloria Anzaldúa, we must remain attentive to the specificity of the multiple heridas abiertas/open wounds of colonialism, colonization, and coloniality in order to give greater hermeneutic context to the experiences to which decolonial theorists are responding (Anzaldúa 1987). Thus, we contend that it is important to be mindful of the heterogeneity within decolonial theories and the responses to multiple forms and experiences of colonization and coloniality.The work of María Lugones is central to the philosophical articulation of decolonial feminism. Lugones's thinking traverses questions of identity, epistemology, and the socio-political. Her move toward a decolonial feminism emphasizes the necessity of identifying and diagnosing the workings of the coloniality of power and its collusion with our contemporary understandings of race, gender, and sexuality. Situating decolonial feminism within both feminist and decolonial traditions and utilizing the critical tools of her training in philosophy,9 Lugones's methodological approach sketches the outlines of a decolonial feminist methodology. By putting the insights of Black, Indigenous, and Latina/x feminist thinkers such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, and Paula Gunn Allen into conversation with thinkers in the modernity/coloniality group such as Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Lugones deepens the philosophical complexity of decolonial as well as feminist thought.Lugones's contributions to decolonial philosophy stem, in large part, from her careful accounts of the coloniality of gender. She argues that the coloniality of gender is a defining apparatus of what she has called the colonial/modern gender system.10 In order to theorize the ways in which gender is a colonial imposition, Lugones places the work of U.S. women of color on gender, race, and colonization in conversation with Quijano's framework of the coloniality of power. In so doing, Lugones aims to demonstrate the depth and breadth of social and political complicity with this racializing and gendering system of oppression. Though Lugones engages with Quijano's framework, she is critical of the way in which his account naturalizes hegemonic understandings of gender. As she contends, In Quijano's model (pattern) gender seems to be contained within the organization of that ‘basic area of existence’ that Quijano calls “sex, its resources, and products.” That is, there is an account of gender within the framework that is not itself placed under scrutiny and that is too narrow and overly biologized as it presupposes sexual dimorphism, heterosexuality, patriarchal distribution of power, and so on. (Lugones 2007, 193) Building from Quijano's work, Lugones argues that the question of gender is central to a critical analysis of coloniality and to the project of decoloniality.In order to intervene, Lugones engages the work of Black, Indigenous, and Latina feminists to demonstrate the ways in which the colonial production of race is co-constitutive of the production of gender. Just as race was used to generate a naturalized order of inferiority to justify the violent abuse and exploitation characteristic of the processes of colonization, gender played an important role in the practices and perceptions that led to forms of sociality generated by the modern/colonial system. Far from unproblematically biological, Lugones demonstrates that the modern/colonial system ushered in a sophisticated organization of gendered relations that Lugones terms “the coloniality of gender” (Lugones 2007, 2008, 2010, 2011). Engaging the work of Kimberlé Crenshaw, Julie Greenberg, Oyéronké Oyewùmí, and Paula Gunn Allen (among others), Lugones provocatively argues that “gender is a modern colonial imposition” (Lugones 2011, 78).Similar to her expansion of Quijano's analysis of the coloniality of power, Lugones's engagement with Mignolo's concepts of the “colonial difference” and “fractured locus” also figure as central in her theorization of the coloniality of gender (Lugones 2007, 2010, 2011). In order to give a sense of how Lugones is building from these important concepts in Latin American decolonial philosophy, in what follows we provide a quick overview and contextualization of these terms. According to Mignolo (who is himself building on the work of Enrique Dussel and Quijano), the colonial difference is a direct consequence of the coloniality of power (Mignolo 2002). The colonial difference introduces a fracture between coloniality and modernity under the modern/colonial system. In generating this fracture, the coloniality of power establishes a cleavage between the colonized and colonizer that has philosophical, social scientific, and historical consequences. Lugones refers to this distinction as the “dichotomous hierarchy between the human and nonhuman” in her theorization of the coloniality of gender (Lugones 2010, 743). This distinction, that is, the colonial difference, ushers in an array of further distinctions including: rational/irrational, civilized/uncivilized, nature/culture, and man (as male)/woman (as female). Relatedly, the concept of the fractured locus of enunciation, often shortened to ‘fractured locus,’ is meant to demarcate this shift in the self-narrativization of the West. As Alejandro Vallega describes this concept in Latin American Philosophy from Identity to Radical Exteriority (2014), “The break occurs because, as Mignolo understands it, the situation from which one speaks in the colonial world system, by virtue of that very colonial history, is the site of a broken enunciation, or the 'fractured locus of enunciation'” (Vallega 2014, 176). Such fracture generates possibilities for resistance.In her theorization of the coloniality of gender and her methodological move toward decolonial feminism, Lugones situates herself and her theorizing at the fractured locus of the colonial difference. In so doing, she seeks to make perceptible what had not often been perceived in Western feminism, that is, the colonial difference. Further, her account of the coloniality of gender seeks to make perceptible what had not often been perceived in decolonial theory, that is, that the colonial difference is constitutive of the category of gender itself as well as the coloniality of power. As she contends in a footnote to her important article “Toward a Decolonial Feminism” (2010), “the coloniality of gender is constituted by and constitutive of the coloniality of power, knowledge, being, nature, and language. They are crucially inseparable” (Lugones 2010, 757n8). This assertion marks a major intervention in the philosophical articulation of coloniality emerging from the Latin American context.Through her critical engagement with Quijano's concept of the coloniality of power and Mignolo's concept of the fractured locus, Lugones demonstrates why decolonial thinking must strive for decolonial futures with the firm belief that otros mundos son posibles/other worlds are possible. For Lugones, to undertake decolonial feminist work we must begin by rigorously interrogating the reach of coloniality in our everyday lives as well as any lingering attachments to it that we may have. Despite coloniality's extensive reach, Lugones maintains that the processes of colonization and the logics of coloniality are not totalizing. We believe that it is worth quoting her at length on precisely this point: [I]nstead of thinking of the global, capitalist, colonial system as in every way successful in its destruction of peoples, knowledges, relations, and economies, I want to think of the process as continually resisted. And thus I want to think of the colonized neither as simply imagined and constructed by the colonizer and coloniality in accordance with the colonial imagination and the strictures of the capitalist colonial venture, but as a being who begins to inhabit a fractured locus constructed double, perceiving double, relating double, where the sides of the locus are in tension, in conflict, and the conflict itself, its energy and moves, actively informs the subjectivity of the colonized self in multiple relation. (Lugones 2010, 78; our emphasis) Because we are never totally made over by the processes of colonization, because other ways of being and practicing gender and sociality have persisted in the face of the genocidal and annihilative forces of colonization, deep inclinations toward resistance exist and persist within and between worlds of sense in ways that keep alive possibilities for “alternative socialites” and “creative inhabitations of the colonial difference” (Lugones 2010).Lugones calls these spaces of resistance that exist in the cracks and fissures of coloniality nonmodern, following anthropologists and decolonial thinkers Juan Ricardo Aparicio and Mario Blaser. As they argue, non-modern knowledges and practices unveil the totalizing and universalizing myths of modernity and coloniality. Rather than seek an outside that is not contaminated by the colonial regime of power and knowledge, nonmodern knowledges and practices help us to understand that being affected by the coloniality of power does not mean that we reside fully inside of its logics (Aparicio and Blaser 2008). Aparicio and Blaser articulate the insight in this way: “The main discontinuity that we are witnessing now is not the emergence of something entirely new but the ‘thinning’ of the modern blinders/stoppers that kept other worlds and other politics invisible and confined” (Aparicio and Blaser 2008). The decolonial feminism called for by Lugones contributes to this decolonizing process of thinning the blinders of the colonial imaginary. Her emphasis on everyday lives gives her the occasion to recognize the possibilities for resisting in the fracture. She calls for an approach that includes tentatively exploring and feeling around (tantear) for alternative optics and practices that provincialize the regime of modernity/coloniality as well as create space for constructing decolonial subjectivities that practice “a new feminist geopolitics of knowing and loving” (Lugones 2010).So, what would it mean to move “toward decolonial feminism”? As Lugones underscores across multiple papers that make up her “decolonial turn,” to move toward decolonial feminism does not necessitate a move away from other forms of liberatory theory, particularly the work of Black, Indigenous, and Latina/x feminists. Rather, in her own words, to move toward decolonial feminism is to move “to a way of speaking that more clearly seeks coalitions among the colonized across vast histories and spaces, always honoring the local, since resistance can be seen and understood only up close” (Lugones 2011, 72). That is to say, to move toward decolonial feminism is to seek out a more encompassing frame with the potential of holding the tenuous and myriad threads of coalition and resistance that have emerged from the fractured locus of coloniality.In this section, we outline what we take to be the contributions that the authors in this special issue make by taking up Lugones's invitation to methodologically move toward decolonial feminisms. Specifically, here we aim to sketch out the contours of the decolonial feminist philosophies that we take to be emerging within this particular special issue. We have identified five key themes that we believe augment and add philosophical depth and richness to the decolonial feminist methodology that Lugones calls for: (1) abandoning the quest for grand narratives; (2) the centrality of multiplicity, impurity, and complex communication; (3) the cultivation of decolonial sensibilities; (4) the need for decolonial imaginaries and decolonial desires; and (5) the imperative to forge “deep” decolonial coalitions. We use the rest of this section to further describe these important themes.One key theme arising from the articles contained in this special issue is a wariness about the philosophical proclivity to search for origins or master narratives that offer a definitive account of “decolonial philosophy” or “decolonial feminism.” Indeed, as two of our authors show, to approach a decolonial feminist methodology in this way is to utilize the tools of coloniality in the form of a desire for mastery, comfort, or belonging. Despite the allure of these colonial comforts, Shireen Roshanravan contends that as decolonial feminists we must “reroute our yearnings for wholeness and mastery” as well as the desire to be a “good decolonial feminist.” The desire to be a “good decolonial feminist” is also the central focus of Ofelia Schutte's paper. Thinking across Lugones's body of work, Schutte carefully considers the shift in Lugones's own philosophical voice as she engages with the work of decolonial patriarchs like Mignolo and Quijano. What does it mean for Lugones, a self-described streetwalker theorist, to take up the philosophical voice from above that thinks in terms of world-systems?11 As Schutte asks, “what is lost and gained in the transition”? This is particularly important, as Schutte and Roshanravan contend, because the quest to be a “good decolonial feminist” can rapidly turn into its own form of gate-keeping in ways that hinder the praxical and coalitional imperative of decolonial feminism. Following in Lugones's footsteps, the authors in this special issue demonstrate that feminists interested in decolonization must give up quests for grand narratives and instead attend to multiplicity and impurity as we work to dismantle the structures of coloniality at institutional, social, inter-personal, and personal levels.Deeply connected to the imperative described above is a call to hold space for multiplicity, impurity, tension, and contradiction. Indeed, as our authors demonstrate, to do so requires what Lugones elsewhere calls “complex communication” in our decolonial theory and praxis. As Lugones explains, “The communication is complex since in asking for a response, it does rule out reduction, translation, and assimilation” (Lugones 2006, 81). Sarah Hoagland and José Medina engage Lugones's concept of complex communication in order to argue for its importance for decolonial struggles that can potentially generate subversive, coalitional, and transformative politics. Hoagland offers transformed practices of engagement through the development of “our critical epistemic skills/virtues not to know, not in order to be right, but in order to engage, in particular outside dominant constructions, constructions that cover over oppressing ←→ resisting subjectivities.”Linda Martín Alcoff contends that taking seriously the challenge of Lugones and other Latina feminists to think of the “positive political and moral valence” of multiplicity, “changes how liberation can be defined.” As she continues, “Liberation is defined, then, as changing perceptual and analytical practices so that multiple worlds of sense can be revealed.” Kathryn Sophia Belle, too, insists on the multiplicity of worlds as well as critical philosophical lexicons for both better understanding oppression as well as understanding the liberatory possibility of affirming multiple worlds of sense. Intervening into a set of debates about the uptake of vocabularies developed by Black feminists and Latina feminists (and their crossing into one another's philosophies), Belle argues against engaging in unhelpful competitions in the “academic marketplace of ideas” that are often driven by the logics of scarcity—another aspect of the coloniality of power. As she warns, “If we allow them to competitively cancel each other out, then everyone loses as attentions default back to the historically exclusive and limited vocabularies and concepts contained within the myopic Western Philosophical canon—a canon that was not designed with our personal and/or political projects in mind.” The authors in this special issue show that multiplicity, impurity, and complex communication must be centered in decolonial feminist methodologies in order to combat the monologisms and false universalisms that are the ruse of coloniality. To do so requires cultivating the complexity and differences among decolonial imaginaries, desires, and sensibilities.Both feminist philosophy and decolonial philosophy emphasize and demonstrate the importance of theorizing from within transgressive and subaltern imaginaries for the task of thinking beyond and outside of the delimited arena of the dominant symbolic order. Indeed, transgressive and subaltern imaginaries are necessary conditions for developing new liberatory rhythms and possibilities in thinking and praxis. The authors in this special issue offer examples of how to begin to philosophize from what Emma Pérez has termed “the decolonial imaginary”(Perez 1999). For Pérez, the decolonial imaginary is an aggregation of histories, experiences and images, something like a rich, critical apparatus for recovering the voices and experiences of Chicanas. The decolonial imaginary presents a transgressive space-time through which decolonizing gestures find purchase.12 By emphasizing the importance of this imaginary, a decolonial feminist approach and manner of seeing and thinking highlights the structures, practices, and images in w