Decolonial Feminism
Overview
María Lugones, pictured, coined the phrase “decolonial feminism” in 2010 to express the idea that our society’s conception of gender was forced on people of color through historical and continued colonialism. Colonists imposed a “hierarchical, dichotomous distinction between human and non-human” on the colonized to classify indigenous peoples and people of color as subhuman along with other dichotomous hierarchies such as man and woman. Lugones believes that gender will never be separated from its colonial history, and colonialism is continuing through our culture and through capitalism.
Lugones conceives the act of decolonizing gender as “enact[ing] a critique of racialized, colonial, and capitalist heterosexualist gender oppression.” She writes about an “oppressing ←→ resisting” relationship to look at systems of oppression in a way that gives women resources to tackle the systems and understand the situation they are in and work against it. Decolonial feminism is looking at the persisting colonial systems, their history, and understanding how they continue to oppress so that women comprehend that they are oppressed and use tools to work against the oppression they face. Decolonial feminism is rooted in theory, but does have room for praxis in the resistance camp. By definition, decolonial feminism is resisting the dominant culture of continued colonialism through analysis, learning, and discovering the tools to stop colonialism instead of succumbing to it and accepting it as the inevitable reality.
Key Voices
In Maria Lugones’s article Structure/Antistructure and Agency Under Oppression, she explains how in theories, oppression is depicted as “inescapable”, therefore we need to find ways to constantly resist them. One of these ways is through ontological pluralism, which is the recognition of intersectionality in individuals. Ontological pluralism allows us to see people as more than one identity, and she explains how this concept is often used in theory of racial oppression by men and women of color, Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera is an example of this.
Donna J. Haraway writes about false dichotomies that stem from colonialism in her article A Cyborg Manifesto. Like Lugones, she describes these dichotomies as a way to create hierarchies that place Whites above Blacks, males above females and humans above machines in today’s age, but in colonialism, it would be humans above non-humans. Haraway’s manifesto lays out how socialist-feminism should work and ties it to cyborgs of both science fiction and modern medicine. She believes we are cyborgs and therefore pluralist like Lugones describes and uses the futurism as a kind of queer decolonial feminism.
In Maria Lugones's writing Indigenous Movements and Decolonial Feminism, Lugones talks about the effects of colonization of indigenous peoples and how that ties into today’s view of oppression. She goes on to point out that in modern times, reality is organized in dichotomies, each standing in the evaluation if the next. These dichotomies stand to hide the oppression and violence. They are used as an excuse. However, Lugones believes that oppression cannot exist without resistance. A large part of this resistance lies in intersectionality. “Thinking specifically of women of color, intersectionality marks their erasure from the social, but women of color live resistantly in a social world that finds them inseparably racialized.” Lugones explains how decolonial feminism is moving to encourage this resistance so that the dichotomies created by colonization start to blur and intersectionality becomes celebrated and accepted.
Relevance Today​
We are entering a new wave of feminism, and even though we have made a lot of progress since the first wave, there is still much to consider. The most important of these things is to include intersectionality in this movement. Feminist groups have left out women of color, LGBTQ women, disabled women, and many others for too long. Decolonial feminism combats this and welcomes intersectionality and includes issues of all women and allies. Decolonial Feminism also brings in a fresh way of battling oppression with Maria's oppressing ←→ resisting strategy that is applicable to everyone and everyday life.
Check It Out
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Indigenous Feminist Resource
https://www.indigenousgoddessgang.com/
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Maria Lugones on Decolonial Feminism
https://vimeo.com/151868195
https://vimeo.com/225597052
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