María Lugones advances a decolonial feminist methodology that allows one to see both dehumanizing social reductions of colonized peoples and the resistant relations operating within non-dominant socialities. By exploring this double “seeing,” I articulate the relationship between resistant socialities and Lugones's notion of decolonial aesthesis. In her only published text on decolonial aesthesis, Lugones states: “Thinking about aesthesis, I think about the body and permeability and all that permeability allows us to reconceive about the world we live in” (qtd. in Ortega 275). Lugones promotes a notion of decolonial aesthesis that engages a resistant permeable sensing and, I argue, is exposed by her distinct approach to cosmology.1My analysis begins with Lugones's decolonial methodology to articulate a “seeing” of coloniality that I contend leads to her development of decolonial aesthesis. In particular, I show that Lugones sketches a view of decolonial aesthesis as a sensing that grounds resistance to dehumanizing social reductions and reveals a non-dominant social relationality expressed through concrete sensuous movements. I suggest that Lugones theorizes a communal interconnected dimension of resistance as decolonial aesthesis through cosmologic relation. To flesh out this point, I turn to two interlocutors central to Lugones's intellectual genealogy: Gloria Anzaldúa and Rodolfo Kusch. I conclude by interpreting Lugones's reading of Anzaldúa as a coalitional movida performing decolonial aesthesis.Lugones's 2010 essay “Toward a Decolonial Feminism” constitutes a methodological intervention or movida in gender scholarship. Referring to the expansive global power system, Lugones argues that gender is historically implicated as part of the colonial/modern project and sustains a dominative closure that marks alternative socialities as unintelligible. The colonial/modern system established norms that did not previously inform social communities. A gender binary was imposed onto colonized peoples, erasing the existing socialities that informed the everyday of those peoples. Lugones's analysis of gender exposes the deep social fissures that emerge from coloniality, and the tremendous harm sustained by reading gender across all social arrangements and onto all knowledge systems.According to Lugones, the colonial/modern category of gender shows a pervasive subjugation to non-humanity of peoples whose sex status does not conform to binary logics. Regarding these reductive processes, Lugones writes: “This dehumanization and bestialization occurred precisely because these people were not understood by the colonizers and enslavers as social agents, and thus their sexual difference [was] not socializable. Thus, one does not find gender; animals do not have gender” (“Gender and Universality” 44). Since gender is assigned to humans, reading gender onto colonized peoples covers up dehumanization, even in calls for gender-based liberation.It is precisely through seeing coloniality that we can track the concealed social arrangements and see the worlds of sense that do not conform to the colonial/modern system. Lugones suggests this point in the following quote: To see the coloniality is to see both jaqi, the persona, the being that is in a world of being without dichotomies, and the beast, both real, both vying under different powers for survival. Thus to see the coloniality is to reveal the very degradation that gives us two renditions of life and a being rendered by them. (“Toward a Decolonial Feminism” 751–52)As Lugones's words indicate, seeing coloniality involves a complex sensing that goes beyond seeing from dominant social norms and gender roles.Lugones's methodological movida of seeing coloniality reveals the dichotomous categorization as part of the immense violence committed against peoples as colonized subjects with non-human status. This move urges a recognition of the superimposed categories that continue to harm and separate colonized peoples from their fluid relations with cosmologies (Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism” 746). Seeing the coloniality of gender elicits a transition to the possibilities of sensing from the positionalities deemed animal, in search of socialities that are not mediated by modern/colonial categories. Subsequently, seeing coloniality is a pivotal methodological movida to theorizing resistance in non-dominative socialities, or what Lugones calls decolonial aesthesis.2Lugones's decolonial aesthesis is not concerned with the modern/colonial aesthetic of sensation or with mental faculties, nor is it merely attentive to an individual's sensory perceptions. Aesthesis, instead, generally defined as “a ‘sensation of touch,’ is related to awareness, sense experience and sense expression, and is closely connected to the processes of perception” (Transnational Decolonial Institute). Omar Rivera describes aesthesis as “the sensing and sense that accompany pre-reflective physicalities like corporeal postures and dispositions, affects, emotions, embodiments of identity, perceptions and memories” (87). Likewise, for Lugones, decolonial aesthesis senses complex movement unmediated by sense perception. In this way, Lugones promotes a sensing beyond a cognitive-centered receptivity of the bodily senses and away from presumptions of an autonomous individual detached from their surroundings (Ortega 277).Decolonial aesthesis makes overcoming the impositions of coloniality possible by drawing attention to and inhabiting the alternative socialities that occur within the liminalities of the colonial/modern social categories. To underscore the inhabitation of those resistant socialites, Lugones writes: Everything and everyone continues to respond to power and responds much of the time resistantly—which is not to say in open defiance, though some of the time there is open defiance in ways that may or may not be beneficial to capital, but that are not part of its logic. From the fractured locus, the movement succeeds in retaining creative ways of thinking, behaving, and relating that are antithetical to the logic of capital. Subject, relations, ground, and possibilities are continually transformed, incarnating a weave from the fractured locus that constitutes a creative, peopled re-creation. (“Toward a Decolonial Feminism” 754)In this view, Lugones emphasizes the “fractured locus” as an inhabited space consisting of tense and dynamic movement within social differentiations, including that of the human/non-human. The tense movements, as constituted by “a creative peopled re-creation,” reveal a sociality that evades reduction and exhaustion (Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism” 748). As an interactive relationality, the senses involved are capable of perceiving both the profound violence of colonial/modern social arrangements and the active resistance that is illegible from them. The different socialities elicit a distinct sensing that is necessarily communal and engaged in a relational dynamic that is socially interconnected and interdependent rather than dichotomous, hierarchical, and dehumanizing.As I read Lugones's interpretation of decolonial aesthesis, I find her promoting a methodological intervention of seeing coloniality and a relational mode that re-creates a communal sense from a colonized positionality. The re-creation at the “fractured locus” is not legible from colonial/modern, human socialities. This point is clear in her work when Lugones writes: “I move to read the social from the cosmologies that inform it, rather than beginning with a gendered reading of cosmologies informing and constituting perception, motility, embodiment, and relation” (“Toward a Decolonial Feminism” 750). Theorizing from the “cosmologies that inform,” Lugones's decolonial aesthesis is attentive to the bodies moving from particular socialities of resistance to build coalitional communities of resistance that do not adhere to dominative logics. Specifically, she turns to cosmologies to see the interrelationality constituted by resisters constantly creating shared space for coalitional possibilities (Lugones, “Toward a Decolonial Feminism”). In the two sections that follow, I contend that Lugones, inspired by Gloria Anzaldúa and Rodolfo Kusch, theorizes a communal interrelated dimension of resistance through cosmological organizations and activities.Cosmology in Lugones's usage denotes a communal sharing of worlds of sense that involve multiple meaning-making strands enacted to resist dominative logics. As a coalitional theoretical approach, decolonial aesthesis invokes a cosmological sense to recognize re-creative communal socialities that enliven resistance. Regarding this point, I pivot toward Anzaldúa's aesthetic resistance engaged in cosmic relation to underscore Lugones's development of decolonial aesthesis.In Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa pursues an autoteoría methodology enacting resistance from a subjective experience at the fracture between the human/non-human. Inspired by the metaphysical dimensions of Aztec philosophies, Anzaldúa interprets a Nahua concept, nepantla, meaning “in-between,” to invoke the liminal space she dwells within. Within nepantla, Anzaldúa re-creates a cosmic relation to transform her fractured space as a queer Chicana living along the US-Mexico borderlands.The relational dimension of Anzaldúa's writing as itself a performance of decolonial aesthesis reveals a cosmological orientation of resistance performed in a mode of communal and sensuous relationality to generate transformative social possibilities beyond the human/non-human dichotomy. This is evident in Anzaldúa's description of the writing process: “[W]hen invoked in rite, the object/event is “present”; that is, “enacted” as both a physical thing and the power that infuses it. It is metaphysical in that it “spins its energies between gods and humans,” and its task is to move the gods. This type of work dedicates itself to managing the universe and its energies” (Anzaldúa 89). By invoking a sensuous writing aesthetic, Anzaldúa re-imagines a reciprocal relationality between human beings and non-humans that includes gods, the universe, and humans. Anzaldúa treats writing as a rite that is informed by Aztec socialities and dedicated toward balancing out the cosmological through aesthetic activity in which power manifests differently and is experienced differently.Furthermore, performed as a ritual, Anzaldúa's writing is an embodied activity invoked to maintain cosmological balance with others. This is important for Lugones's development of a decolonial aesthesis because it consists of a sensuous affective experience rooted in the body, both human and non-human. Anzaldúa's writing reflects this point: For only through the body, through the pulling of flesh, can the human soul be transformed. And for images, words, stories to have this transformative power, they must arise from the human body-flesh and bone-and from the Earth's body-stone, sky, liquid, soil. This work, these images, piercing tongue-or ear lobes with cactus needle, are my offerings, are my Aztecan blood sacrifices. (Anzaldúa 97)As she theorizes from the lived body, Anzaldúa describes it not merely as a vehicle that can store the mental faculties and operate bodily sensations, but as a source of knowledge related to cosmological activity. The body in Anzaldúa's writing is imagined as a multidimensional organism including the human flesh and the flesh of the earth dedicated as a cosmic offering. The aesthetic activity emphasizes a somatic knowing that is dynamically interconnected with ecological knowing and yet does not adhere to hierarchical and dichotomous socialities.Anzaldua's embodied aesthetic helps elaborate Lugones's interpretation of decolonial aesthesis because moving from an embodied sense as Anzaldúa does reveals an affective sensibility aware of its surroundings and an internal knowing. Lugones writes: The journey from the border to the borderlands is then a coming to be both incarnate and aware without separation: to sense, perceive, relate, know within the flesh. Its core is the active/static, the germinative moment when we realize that the possibility of transformation away from our subjected selves lies in the power of our knowing embodiment: away from granting epistemic authority to distance. The knowing is from within our bodies, its senses felt from within when sensing the outside; the imagination open to sexual/social callings. (Lugones, “From Within” 98)As a decolonial aesthesis, the journeying to the borderland involves fluid sensuous activity that is experienced through a close interactive relationship within the body. Specifically, the body moves from a non-binary position to know from its multiplicity in both the self and its surroundings. Thus, as a cosmological embodiment, not informed by or orientated toward dominative systems, the sensuous journeying reveals transformative social possibilities.Lugones, motivated by interrelated communal relations, shifts toward relationality as informed from Andean cosmological orientations and through another interlocutor, Rodolfo Kusch. In an introduction to the translation of the Argentine anthropologist's work Indigenous and Popular Thinking in America, Lugones and Joshua M. Price begin with a discussion of the social arrangements and the communal relations that inform Andean cosmology. By way of Kusch's work, the co-authors interpret Aymara and Quechua socialities as grounded in the interconnected, inseparable, and fluid relationships across peoples and their habitats. These socialities are informed by cosmological relations.Andean cosmological senses are attuned to an unstable communal being that is not rooted in essentializing social and ontological logics. Lugones and Price write that “the indigenous cosmos is an organism, an ‘organic totality’ in a state of instability, fluctuating toward the extremes of growth and disintegration” (Lugones and Price lvii). An alternative modality of being within, and sensing the fluctuating cosmos, centers relationality and a concrete interconnected mode of being, which is referred to as estar. In Andean cosmologies, estar is related to how one is sensuously in the world: “Estar points to the unstable relation among the elements of the cosmos and the search for stability. . . . As one lives daily in this unstable reality, one senses the favorable and unfavorable possibilities, one está” (Lugones and Price lviii). Through estar, one senses affectively the instability of reality and is situated concretely within it. This grounded dynamic sense, or decolonial aesthesis, is directed toward cosmological balancing and maintaining intersubjective relationality.Estar bien, a relational activity of estar, is concrete being with others and the ecosystem toward equilibrium. Lugones and Price interpret estar bien as a “peopled way of being” in which “the community holds together and constitutes a habitat in equilibrium. It balances the instability, but it does not make it disappear” (Lugones and Price lvii). Estar bien is a relational being that is intersubjectively engaged, yet not only in anthropomorphic relations. It is being in one's habitat, in community and moving affectively in and with the fluctuating cosmos. Moreover, the relational dynamics of estar and estar bien allow one to see equilibrium in human-scale microcosms, which helps to inhabit communal arrangements in active everyday resistance.Lugones's and Price's attention to estar offers one example of how Lugones reads socialities of resistance and collective activity from a cosmological perspective. Through their engagement with estar, the authors move us closer to the alternative socialities of resistance that interest Lugones's coalitional orientation in “Toward a Decolonial Feminism.” In that essay, Lugones writes: One resists it [coloniality of gender] from within a way of understanding the world and living in it that is shared and that can understand one's actions, thus providing recognition. Communities rather than individuals enable the doing; one does with someone else, not in individualist isolation. (754)Through shared spaces, communities bolster the doing and make possible a concrete and relational understanding. It is the community experienced as a peopled sense of the world that grounds the individuals experiencing the instability of the cosmos. Lugones contends that through decolonial aesthesis, as a cosmological and communal sense, resistance can be sensed affectively.Intersubjective relationality engenders resistance performed in the daily enactment of living and toward balancing the cosmological tearing. Cosmic activity in this sense requires constant attention and constant invocation. In these repetitious resistant modalities, social and embodied transformative possibilities can be sensuously performed with others as decolonial aesthesis. To illustrate this point, in the next section, I return to Anzaldúa and explain how her work helps clarify Lugones's notion of decolonial aesthesis as engaging an embodied sense while struggling for cosmic balance and coalition.Through Anzaldúa's writing, Lugones sees not only coloniality, but also the active subjectivity of the border dweller performing an embodied praxis vital to feeding an “alternative communal source of sense” (“Toward a Decolonial Feminism” 755). In a coalitional gesture, Lugones reads Anzaldúa rigorously to locate the resistant sensibilities taking place in the borderlands where the multiplicity of an active subjectivity without the support of colonial socialities is irreducible. To do this coalitional work, Lugones herself must undergo a similar transformative journey committed to a shared resistant sensibility. Lugones describes the coalitional activity: “I allow myself to dwell in the strategies that permit germination, strategies of accepting stasis toward an interiority that seeks to steady itself as it departs dominant sense into the making of one's face” (Lugones, “From Within” 88). The steadying process involves a cosmic sense that includes a relational affective sense, or a decolonial aesthesis.Lugones views the particularity of the cosmology that informs Anzaldúa's interpretations of Aztec socialities and perceives the aesthetic activity as dedicated toward cosmic stability. Lugones senses Anzaldúa's intricate resistant movements by seeing coloniality. She sees the tension between Anzaldua's reduction to animality as well as the sensuous perceptivity involved in Anzaldúa's multiplicity. Lugones follows Anzaldúa's journeying to the borderlands, engaging the resistant sense of Anzaldúa's cosmic activity, thereby performing a coalitional praxis. Lugones bears witness, to use Anzaldúan language, and identifies herself in a resistant position relating to Anzaldúa's journeying through a decolonial aesthesis. This shared resistant positionality engages a cosmological sense that makes knowing each other possible, but that requires continuous upkeep. Said differently, the resistant movements involved are in perpetual relation with others. Lugones writes: From within this position, I learned to block the effectiveness of oppressive meanings and logics. This blocking is a constant, recurrent, first gesture in coming to understand the limits of the possible. . . . It is also a coming into intimate relation with Anzaldúa's path to resistance. (“From Within” 85; emphasis in the original)Lugones's coalitional reading indicates that her shared and close relation with Anzaldua's resistance is one that requires continuous activity. As decolonial aesthesis, Lugones invokes and maintains a series of interconnected resistant modalities.My interpretation of the Lugones-Anzaldúa relation sees the coalitional work that Lugones performs in reading Anzaldúa. The alternative sense involved in Lugones's coalitional reading is enacted through a distinct communal sense that is affectively sensed and known through the body. I suggest that the interconnected relationality and constant affective activity that engender a coalitional practice engage a shared world sense of non-dominative resistance. In my reading, I locate the shared intersubjective activity to underscore how Lugones's decolonial aesthesis reveals and engages a constant blocking of dominative socialities to sense concrete resistant activity dedicated toward cosmological balancing. It appears to me that in order to identify decolonial aesthesis as crucial to decolonial feminist methodology, we can learn from the coalitional sense that Lugones herself performs by carefully attending to the cosmologies that inform it.