Colonial Matrix Of Power Research Articles

The Many Lives of Oscar Niemeyer’s Column: The Legacy of Brasília, Coloniality, and Heritage in the Works of Lais Myrrha and Talles Lopes

This article examines contemporary artists’ appropriation of the city of Brasília to critique Brazil’s continued reliance on the “unfinished” project of modernity. Exploring the construction of the scenography of Brasília and its resonance with the architecture and organization of space in the colonial plantations, the works of contemporary artists Lais Myrrha (Estudo de Caso [Case Study], Estudo para um Futuro Construído [Study for a Constructed Future]), and Talles Lopes (Construção Brasileira [Brazil Builds]) allows us to reconnect Brasília with the backdrop that gave rise to this ideal. These works invoke the reconciliation of the colonial matrix of power in Lucio Costa’s discourse about modernist architecture in Brazil, of which Brasília is the culmination. Myrrha’s and Lopes’ works show that the history and legacy of Brasília, not only as an idea but also as form, are embedded in the Brazilian imaginary and built environment in the contemporary moment.

Roving consumers of pleasure: at the conceptual intersection of sport tourism and sex tourism

ABSTRACT Mega sporting events, such as the FIFA World Cup, Olympic Games and Super Bowl, are often constructed as corresponding sites of bodily tourism, with a shared motivation among some tourists to purchase and consume both commercialized sport and sex. This paper begins by deconstructing the ‘common sense’ connection between sport tourism and sex trafficking. It recognizes, however, that both sport and sex tourism are grounded in bodily consumption and conquest. That is, both sex and sport tourism rely on the commodification and consumption of the body as currency and fantasy, defined as a libidinal economy. As such, this paper explores the colonial systems of power that enable and perpetuate the commodification of colonized bodies at the intersection of sport tourism and sex tourism. The paper situates this intersection within the colonial matrix of power and the structural hierarchies maintained through the colonial framing of power, race, gender and sexuality. In this sense, tourism is defined as roving colonialism [Sykes, H. (2017). The sexual and gender politics of sport mega-events: Roving colonialism. New York, NY: Routledge]. Using the colonial matrix of power as a theoretical framework, then, we evaluate the libidinal economies of sport tourism and sex tourism and propose a conceptual understanding of bodily labor and exploitation at this unique intersection. By using this conceptual framework, this paper calls for further empirical study that explicitly evaluates the impact of corresponding systems of sport tourism and sex tourism simultaneously at play within national and international sporting events.

Hierarchies among intertextual references: reading Reggaeton Ilustrado’s digital humour through the colonial matrix of power

ABSTRACT This article examines intertextuality in digital humour through a combination of tools from pragmatics and decoloniality. The study draws on a dataset of Spanish image macros that intertwine highbrow and lowbrow intertextual references. The analysis is framed by key theoretical concepts at the discursive and hierarchical levels. Specifically, three domains of the colonial matrix of power (knowledge, humanity and governance) are used as analytical categories to identify specific intertextual strategies and hierarchies present in the data. The visual and verbal components of the items are analysed through critical discourse analysis with attention to their salient signs. The use of the colonial matrix of power as an analytical tool for identifying hierarchies in intertextual references stands out as a methodological application with the potential to be further replicated in discourse analysis.

Decolonial Healing and Epistemic Disobedience in Ana Castillo's So Far from God

Abstract: Ana Castillo's So Far from God draws attention to the effects of global toxicity on female bodies as the characters of the novel fall victim to various forms of social, economic, and environmental injustice such as war, AIDS, cancer, and rape. This essay engages theories on decoloniality to illustrate how Castillo textualizes spiritual practices and alternative forms of knowledge to weave an epistemically disobedient narrative. By constructing Chicana figures who embody hybrid, subversive spiritualities enabled by the syncretic space of the US-Mexico border, Castillo offers avenues for liberation from colonial and patriarchal ideologies that are textualized as physical, sexual, and spiritual transformations. Notably, the characters who refuse to see the colonial difference are consumed by the colonial matrix of power, eventually falling victim to war and industrial toxicity. By weaving spirituality, curanderismo, and the supernatural into the lived experiences of the female characters in So Far, Castillo constructs Chicana subjectivities that enact body politics of knowledge and decolonial forms of being in the world.

Juan José Nieto Gil, artistic practices and the genealogy of coloniality in Colombia

ABSTRACT As an artistic intervention, the exhibit ¿Suficientemente Negro? (Black Enough?) critically examines ‘whiteness’ and ‘racialization’ in Colombia. With the purpose of analyzing their impact on the figure of President Juan José Nieto Gil (1804–1866), this exhibit and consequently this article reveal the colonial cultural constructions that worked to whiten, conceal, and erase his image and legacy from Colombia’s official history because of his ethno-racial, social, and geographic origins. The artistic approach adopted proved relevant to better understand the weight of the colonial matrix of power in the present and across the various aspects of daily life. I uncover the relationship between race and nation in Colombia as constructed by the Creole elites and intellectuals around the turn of the 20th century. I center the history of the presidential portrait of Nieto Gil within Colombia’s racial hierarchy and the ideas around whiteness that characterize the colonial period. As racial ideas remain steadfast in the biographical and genealogical trajectories of many families in Colombia, I show how Nieto Gil’s legacy and erasure overlaps with my own family’s history. I describe a collaborative artistic project that interrogates the social constructions of whiteness.

Towards an intersectional literary criticism: Cross-Identity representations, social location, and Shani Mootoo’s intervention

ABSTRACT This article explores how literary critics can approach cross-identity representations in a way that addresses the complex use of alterity by authors who re/construct pluralistic societies and are also marginalized by the colonial matrix of power. Recent theorists such as Mark Bracher have noted that social justice is as imperative to literary scholarship as the late 20th- to early 21st- century aesthetic turn (identified by Ruth Gilligan) that decried an overemphasis on political readings. It is argued here that literary criticism should use an intersectional approach. Key elements of intersectionality, as articulated by Sirma Bilge and Patricia Hill Collins, are applied to literary study and in particular to Shani Mootoo’s Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab. Such a framework makes the question of “good” and “bad” representations irrelevant and uses authorial identity as but one piece of a larger literary approach that honours the complexity of literature alongside undeniable power dynamics.

Do Queer Theory and Victorian Studies Still Have Anything to Learn from Each Other?

This essay argues that an antiracist, anticolonialist Victorian studies must remain open to universalizing claims of the kind found in early works of queer theory, particularly Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet (1990). Although recent work in queer studies (as well as literary studies generally) finds inspiration in Sedgwick's late-career turn to the more modest notion of “reparative reading,” strong knowledge claims are necessary to disrupt the colonial matrix of power that systematically renders both racism and heteronormativity invisible. Rereading Epistemology in light of postcolonial theories of comparison, I argue that, although Sedgwick does not address how the late Victorian “crisis of homo/heterosexual definition” takes place within the overall colonial system of power, she nevertheless inhabits a critical position remarkably similar to what Walter Mignolo calls “the border epistemology” of “decolonial thinking.” This entails making universalizing claims that promote the emancipation of disenfranchised groups but also rejecting the imperialist fantasy of critical neutrality in favor of political commitment and historical self-awareness. I end by putting the Sedgwick of Epistemology in dialogue with critical race theorist Sylvia Wynter to suggest how scholars might integrate their respective critical approaches by analyzing the figure of “the human” in Victorian literature and culture.

Cultural Thought in the Caribbean? Arts’ Theory in Cuba, And Its Epistemic Status from a Historical Sociology of Scientific Knowledge Perspective

Although History of Art studies within academia, began in the late thirties of the Twentieth Century, Arts’ Theory in Cuba has been an underdeveloped discipline. For this paper, we use the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge in its historical perspective, as a tool for analyzing Jorge Mañach’s cultural thought. This was one of the most important Cuban intellectuals of his time, who wrote some of the most notorious essays of Cuban Literature. We analyze his cultural essays, and also, the cultural institutions, intellectual initiatives and networks that supported his theoretical ideas. Essentially, the early Cuban 20th century reproduced some of the colonial matrix of power but, surprisingly, the Mañach’s theories featured relative epistemic autonomy and, therefore, decolonial thinking features yet to be studied. Therefore, we place the focus on the social conditions and cultural structures that might have enhanced the Cuban cultural thought in order to show its epistemic status.

Rethinking global nuclear politics, rethinking feminism

Abstract This article serves as an introduction to the International Affairs special section, ‘Feminist interrogations of global nuclear politics’. In this article, we argue that feminist International Relations scholarship on the global nuclear order and its discontents should be revitalized, in ways that reckon more fully with the colonial matrix of power and its contemporary realignments. As the initial step in such a task, the first part of the article explores some of the distinctive insights that are generated about global nuclear politics by a feminist approach that takes coloniality seriously. We show that such an approach reconceptualizes nuclear destruction as a lived reality for many, within a broader history of domination; exposes the racialized, gendered and colonial dimensions of nuclear discourses; and casts fresh light on the material colonial relationships at the heart of the global nuclear order. In the second part, we reverse our focus to critically think through how the content of feminism, and its relation to coloniality and struggles for self-determination, might be understood differently if we start from a concern with global nuclear politics. The third and final part surveys the articles in the special section, highlighting where they pick up on the themes we have explored and some future lines of enquiry.

Transmodern Heritage as Radical Delinking from Modernity

AbstractGuided by decolonial border thinking (Mignolo, 2007), this conceptual paper questions the rhetoric of alternative modernities proposed as a way of reclaiming the place of post/colonial heritage of Africa alongside the modern heritage in Africa. Interrogating modernity's European legacy, its precepts and the associated values, it proposes instead to define African heritage of the 19th and 20th century from the standpoint of “exteriority” and as an expression of transmodernity, in a move to delink it from the colonial matrix of power. Transmodern heritage, transversal and rooted in the decoloniality movement, represents an alternative to modernity that accounts for alterity affirmed as difference and provides space for manifold cultural expressions produced by African people liberated from modernity's colonial foundation and its vexing binary opposition of “traditional” and “modern”.

‘They Call Me Babu’: the politics of visibility and gendered memories of Dutch colonialism in Indonesia

ABSTRACT The 2019 documentary film They Call Me Babu utilises historical film footage including the home movies of one Dutch family with a voiceover in Bahasa Indonesia to narrate the fictionalised experiences of a former female domestic worker in the colonial Netherlands East Indies in the closing decades of Dutch colonial rule from 1939 to 1949. By centring the experiences of ‘babu’, women who worked as nannies and nursemaids for families holding European status, the Dutch-Indonesian director Sarah Beerends endeavours to make these women visible and to narrate their viewpoints. In this paper we argue, however, that the director’s aspiration to centre the women’s stories is haunted by the spectres of the colonial matrix of power. This leads to the unintended replication of nostalgic images of, and tropes about, the colony that has characterised earlier Dutch memory work. The film does not offer a critical engagement with colonial violence and the colonial structures of power are instead positioned as contributing to the nanny’s gendered emancipation. Furthermore, we reflect on why, in the context of recent vociferous debates about colonial violence, a film which serves to soften images of Dutch colonialism, was generally well received.

Decolonial Feminisms, Power and Place: Sentipensando with Rural Women in Colombia by Laura Rodríguez Castro

Reviewed by: Decolonial Feminisms, Power and Place: Sentipensando with Rural Women in Colombia by Laura Rodríguez Castro Elena Tjandra Laura Rodríguez Castro Decolonial Feminisms, Power and Place: Sentipensando with Rural Women in Colombia. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. xiii + 208 pp. 83,19 € hardback (ISBN 978-3-030-59439-8); 67,40 € ebook (ISBN 978-3-030-59440-4). Decolonial feminisms, power and place is a formidable illustration of Laura Rodríguez Castro’s commitment to decolonial praxis in research. “Feeling-thinking” alongside women in Colombia’s countryside, Castro charts rural territorial struggles and strategies of resistance in the context of on-going neoliberal and colonial violence. In this book, women’s voices are not included as supporting evidence to illustrate some broad theoretical claim; instead critique and decolonial praxis are articulated through the words and practices of rural women themselves. In dialogue with rural women, the book addresses two main projects: the coloniality of gender—as coined from María [End Page 205] Lugones’ extension of Aníbal Quijano and Walter Mignolo’s coloniality of power—and colonial, white feminisms. Castro’s work draws upon ethnographic and participatory research primarily based in Toca, Boyacá, north of Bogotá, and Minca, in Magdalena, southeast of the Santa Marta coast. Her interlocutors include women who work in agro-tourism industries, rural social leaders, activists, and NGO staff. However, the book is organized less as a traditional ethnography than a carefully arranged set of themes in seven chapters. In Chapters 1 and 2, Castro provide an overview of women’s struggles in the context of Colombia’s recent and contested peace accords and agrarian reform, noting the institutionalized feminisms that exist within continuing, colonial matrices of power, and the decolonial feminisms that challenge them. The two chapters provide a clear overview of Lugones, Quijano, and Mignolo’s fundamental concepts of the colonial matrix of power and the coloniality of gender, as Castro explains the violence inherent within colonial and institutional feminisms such as that which arises from the cleaving of gender from race that positions Indigenous, Black and campesina women as both holders of ancient ancestral knowledge, and in need of saving. These chapters caution against the dissolving of difference in appeals to the universal, and views difference as a source of strength to work across in decolonial practice. The concepts of sentipensar (feeling-thinking), veredear (walking through rural places) and territorio cuerpo-tierra (territory body-land) are also introduced at the beginning to serve as foundation for later chapters. With these concepts, Castro maintains a critical self-reflexivity that cuts across the volume, but is elaborated in Chapter 3, Sentipensando and Unlearning, where Castro details her own process of dismantling coloniality from within that unfolds into her epistemological and methodological approach of sentipensando. Enriched by insights from critical race scholars and Black and Indigenous feminists and geographers, Chapter 3 implicitly addresses feminist geography’s longstanding concerns around accounting for positionality. Considering that “mainstream feminist reflexivity and identity politics [that] have hyperfocused on the self ignore the structures and processes that sustain the coloniality of power” (p. 64), Castro states point-by-point four ways her “positionality is entangled within the coloniality of power” in the context of the Colombian countryside. Although she does not name classic geographic provocations from Audrey Kobayashi, Gillian Rose, Linda Peak and Kim England, her work speaks to their ideas by showing that decolonial feminism goes beyond “writing in” positionality or adopting a feminist methodological framework. Instead, Castro sets out to develop a decolonial feminist praxis, that begins with unlearning and moves toward sentipensando working with rural women. Through this commitment to work alongside, not on, Castro herself is present in the following chapters but rural women are at the center of the narrative. This unpacking of positionality is an important contribution to debates around reflexivity in feminist geography. Chapter 4 offers a refreshing take on the geographies of place as it draws on [End Page 206] Doreen Massey’s theorization of place as multifaceted and relational, as an aperture to re-imagine place and place-making “as a process [that] allows for openness [and] provides an opportunity to dismantle the discourses of modernity as...

Black Lives Matter and the Contemporary African Novel: Form and the Limits of Solidarity

Abstract In June 2020, a group of more than one hundred African writers published a statement of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter uprisings that emerged around the world in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. In this statement are a number of claims around the extension of Black internationalism and solidarities and the uneven—and sometimes uneasy—interrelation between the violence of white supremacy as evidenced in the United States and the larger violence of coloniality experienced globally today. This essay, taking these claims as its spark, explores how the contemporary African literary novel, as a form, registers a response to the historical degradation of Black lives under the colonial matrix of power, which, while often sympathetic with the analytic framework of Black Lives Matter, does not always cohere with it. Reading a broad range of texts, the essay argues that the ambivalent relationship to Black Lives Matter engendered in these works stems from a persistent cleaving of coloniality from an America-specific reading of white supremacy and violence against Black lives, which these texts sometimes perpetuate. Critics such as Ashleigh Harris and Sarah Brouillette have described the novel form in an African context as both “exhausted” and “residual,” inextricably implicated in the violence of neoliberalism. By drawing on comparative readings of non-novelistic work such as Marechera's House of Hunger and the Chimurenga Chronic, this essay concludes by considering the extent to which the ambivalence registered in the African literary novel is itself an inevitability of its own formal parameters and their entanglement with concepts of nation, extroversion/extraction, and coloniality.

Emerging professional practices focusing on reducing inequity in speech-language therapy and audiology: a scoping review protocol

BackgroundHuman communication is essential for socialising, learning and working. Disabilities and social disadvantage have serious negative consequences on communication which can impact development from early life into adulthood. While speech-language therapists and audiologists (SLT/As) have an important role to play in addressing communication disability and disadvantage, services continue to be inaccessible, unaffordable and unattainable for the majority population. In order to support this large population, it is necessary to reimagine SLT/A practices in line with equity and social inclusion. Recently in the literature, there have been increasing calls for professions to reduce inequities in practice as indicated by the sustainable development goals, human rights and social inclusion approaches increasing in prominence. For the scoping review, equity is understood using the colonial matrix of power to understand how intersections of race, gender, class, disability, geography, heteronormativity and language create the context for inequity. As such, the aim of the scoping review is to address the following question: what are the emerging professional practices in SLT/A focused on reducing inequities?MethodsFollowing the Joanna Briggs Institute guidelines, this scoping review will focus on systematically mapping the documented emerging clinical practices in SLT/A in the literature to identify how the professions are developing equitable practices. The search will include electronic databases and grey literature including PubMed, Scopus, EbscoHost, The Cochrane Library and Dissertation s International, Education Resource Information Centre from their inception onwards. Published and unpublished literature including all evidence sources will be considered. There should be a clear focus on clinical practice addressing equity in SLT/A. There will be no language limitations for the study. The authors will endeavour translate to have abstracts of articles translated. There will be no time restrictions on date of publication of the literature.DiscussionWe aim to review the current literature on emerging professional practices in relation to equity in SLT/A to identify emerging trends in clinical practice. It is our goal to provide a synthesis of emerging directions for practice, particularly to inform future practices in the Global South.Systematic review registrationOpen Science Framework (osf.io/3a29w).

ESSENTIALIZED REPRESENTATION OF THE EAST: A REORIENTALIST STUDY OF SELECTED PAKISTANI DIASPORIC ANGLOPHONE FICTION

The present study is oriented to sift the theory of reorientalism that the Pakistani diasporic writers use as a tool to represent an essentialised and glorified picture of their native land. Unlike orientalism, reorientalism deals with how the East is presented as a spectacle of consumption in the West by the Eastern writers themselves. This study examines the issue of literary representation at the global level which goes through Western gatekeepers for publication. Pakistani diasporic writers are instigating a simulated truth instead of a holistic portrayal of 21st century Pakistan by culturally appropriating and mimicking their native cultural and regional aspects. This study proposes that these writers are marketed as insiders by the West but in actuality, they are outsiders as they have lost touch with their roots. The critique of the selected text highlights that contemporary Pakistani fiction requires radical epistemic delinking from the colonial matrix of power and aims to highlight the establishment of epistemic pluriversality and calls for an end of cultural and epistemic exploitation and hierarchies among several epistemologies Keywords: commodification, cultural appropriation, epistemic pluriversality, essentialism, mis-representation, reorientalism

The coloniality of Holocaust memorialization in post-apartheid South Africa

Abstract This article investigates local endeavours for Holocaust memory in post-apartheid South Africa in their relation to global memory imperatives that are, among others, produced by supranational organizations such as UNESCO and the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Drawing on a larger case-study on globalized memory, I analyse to what extent a generalized mnemonic framework is reflected in South Africa's 2007 curriculum reform, namely its inclusion of the Holocaust and subsequent memory politics. In order to illuminate the coloniality of memorialization, I trace the epistemic location of the narrative that suggests that Holocaust memory nourishes democratic values and human rights—maybe even more so than local memories of violence and oppression such as colonization and apartheid. In this regard, I found that while many activists for Holocaust memory continuously and sometimes uncritically advocate for its global implementation, a decolonial perspective enables us to understand the power dynamics constitutive of universal moral norms around Holocaust memory that tacitly transmit global demands to local contexts. I therefore suggest that, within the global colonial matrix of power, a universally advised practice of memorializing the Holocaust to specific ends can be regarded as a technique of governmentality, because it risks limiting utopian thought beyond the Euro-modern paradigm.

Reclaiming Transgender Identity Through Intersectionality and Decoloniality: A Critical Autoethnography of an Academic-Activist Performance

ABSTRACT As a Malaysian Muslim transwoman and a social justice researcher, exploring her transgender identity in a conservative society positions Aisya within a long history of oppression and injustice alongside other global marginalised and vulnerable assigned-male-at-birth transgender groups. This paper offers reflections on Aisya’s lived experience of discrimination arising from her trans identity. It focuses on linking critical theory (decoloniality and intersectionality), methodology (autoethnography) and theological epistemology (a progressive Muslim standpoint), while the analysis ‘tells’ the autoethnographic ‘transgender identity’. By exploring her lived experience in a heterocisnormative neocolonial setting, this paper encourages a critical discourse of decolonising Aisya’s transgender identity by using intersectional feminist theory and critical authoethnography as methods of decolonial performance. This paper contests the colonial matrix of power by dismantling colonialism through rebuilding and rediscovering ancient and pre-colonial knowledge of Indigenous and colonised people to decentre heterocisnormativity, gender hierarchies and racial privilege. Ultimately, this paper invites readers to come along on a social justice journey through decolonial intersectional feminism, arise together in critical solidarity, and carry compassion, care, love, and the desire to heal from the grievances of colonialism.

The colonial matrix of power: Image ontology and the question of blackness

The question of blackness has always featured the intersectionality of race, gender, sexuality and class. Blackness as an ontological speciality has been engaged from both the social and epistemic locations of the damnés (in Fanonian terms). It has thus sought to respond to the performance of power within the world order that is structured within the colonial matrix of power, which has ontologically, epistemologically, spatially and existentially rendered blackness accessible to whiteness, while whiteness remains inaccessible to blackness. The article locates the question of blackness from the perspective of the Global South in the context of South Africa. Though there are elements of progress in terms of the conditions of certain Black people, it would be short-sighted to argue that such conditions in themselves indicate that the struggles of blackness are over. The essay seeks to address a critique by Anderson (1995) against Black theology in the context of the United States of America (US). The argument is that the question of blackness cannot and should not be provincialised. To understand how the colonial matrix of power is performed, it should start with the local and be linked with the global to engage critically the colonial matrix of power that is performed within a system of coloniality. Decoloniality is employed in this article as an analytical tool.Contribution: The article contributes to the discourse on blackness within Black theology scholarship. It aims to contribute to the continual debates on the excavating and levelling of the epistemological voices that have been suppressed through colonial epistemological universalisation of knowledge from the perspective of the damnés.

7 - Para (re)pensar política científica no Brasil: uma contribuição feminista contra-colonial


 
 
 This study aims to share some reflections on how the colonial matrix of power underlies the constitution of the Brazilian scientific politics. The perspective used is that of the feminist contra-colonial theory, in order to mark and support the analysis on how the mechanisms of oppression based on race, gender and class exploration can be institutionalized and enter in the disputes that serve as a base for the production of scientific knowledge. Such reflections are the results of a walk which can be thought in terms of two avenues of research. The first considers the politics of higher education as a part of the scientific-political field. It has to do with research previously realized with women scientist working in universities of the Brazilian scientific periphery. The second seeks to think of aspects to be considered in the history of the institutionalization of the scientific politics, using a documental research, whose sources are represented by an analysis of legislation, statistical data and other documents. Among them it is worth remembering the analyses coming from documents belonging to the data-base of the main research funding agency of the national decisional scientific, technological and innovation system: the National Committee for the Scientific and Technological Development – CNPq. Through these investigative paths and starting from a feminist contra-colonial criticism, this research reveals the multiple systems of domination which configure an intersectional nature of the oppressions which also compose the scientific politics of the country.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 Vivian Matias dos Santos, Professora Adjunta (dedicação exclusiva), Programa de Pós-Graduação em Psicologia, Departamento de Serviço Social, Universidade Federal de Pernambuco (UFPE), Brasil. Email: vivian.matias@ufpe.br
 
 

Teachers’ Transnational Identities as Activity: Constructing Mobility Systems at the Intersections of Gender and Language Difference

AbstractWhile studies following a translingual orientation have demonstrated the potential for decolonial pedagogical practices (Cushman, 2016), including teachers’ self‐decolonization by drawing on their translinguistic identities (Motha, Jain, & Tecle, 2012), a translingual paradigm and pedagogy also has the potential to address “the intersection of several structuring nodes in the colonial matrix of power” (Cushman, 2016, p. 238). Some studies have put forth women’s narratives and lived experiences as teachers (Motha, Jain, & Tecle, 2012; Park, 2017); however, few studies have investigated identity construction at the intersections of language and gender when teachers are asked to explicitly engage in translingual and transnational labor. Drawing on mobility systems (Fraiberg, 2018), Individual Networks of Practice (INoPs) (Zappa‐Hollman & Duff, 2015), and translingualism (Canagarajah, 2012), this qualitative study offers a detailed account of how four emergent teacher scholars construct their teaching identities when they were encouraged to scrutinize transnational spaces and identities. In particular, the study has two purposes: 1) to investigate the decolonial potential of translingual and transnational paradigms as emergent teacher scholars reflect on their identities at the intersections of language and gender and 2), to document identity reconstruction in relation to the environments and sociocultural contexts of their transnational experiences. Besides the affordances of narrative and/or autobiographical writing through translingual and transnational perspectives, the study demonstrates the benefits of identity reconstruction through mobile systems (Fraiberg, 2018) in creating opportunities for agency within oppressive discourses of language and gender in the TESOL field.