Why Am I A Woman? Or, Am I? Decolonizing White Feminism and the Latinx Woman Therapist in Academia

Abstract

From the perspective of decolonial feminism and the coloniality of gender, in Spanglish, I develop an analysis of the Latinx woman as a racial and gender category of modernity/coloniality. My analysis unfolds through a narrative on my experiences as a Colombian immigrant, Spanglish speaker, and family therapist in academia in the United States. I am guided by an ethic of liberation and the central inquiries for decolonial feminists that contest bourgeois, White, and heterosexual feminism’s universal conception of the woman when exploring its European invention and purpose. I discuss modernity’s imposition of gender as a Eurocentric colonial system of oppression, inseparable from race and class. I provide a conceptual framework for my analysis that includes an overview of ethics of liberation; decolonial linguistic considerations responding to Anglo, White feminism in untranslatable Spanglish; discussion on decolonial and postcolonial analysis of the Latinx category; and key concepts of decolonial feminism and the coloniality of gender. I seek to make visible the operations of colonial power implicated in the Eurocentric, racialized, gendered, and classist configuration of the Latinx and the woman, to detach from it, and to consider other possibilities of existence.