On the De-Colonial (II): Gender and Decoloniality
Maria Lugones, Coordinator
To understand feminism in a de-colonial vein is to do several things at once, the doing itself requiring a multiple perception/vision. The multiplicity in the exercise is constituted as a sensing/perceiving/understanding of the structural as well as the nuanced intimate in layers of dominance and resistance in tension, in a gamut that constructs and is constructed by selves, practices, the fabric of everyday living. At the same time, the multiple sensing/understanding takes up colonialism as a complex, variable, nuanced, textured relational historical dynamics of domination and subordination met by resistant, insurgent, agents in the process of being molded, turned, de-animated, dehumanized, gendered in the de-humanizing process. The over and over process of making/being made subordinate itself a crossing and remaking of multiple cosmologies, framings of reality, including social reality. If confession is a Christianizing tool instilling a framing of reality in the Manichean division between good evil that is a gendering instrument for subjects both understood as beasts and brutally punished for the sins of the turned sexed sinful flesh, it is also an Andean female taking confession from her ayllu (community) and instructing her people to confess to Spanish priests, the confession not just “arranged” but felt/known from a framing of the real where good and evil, being inscribed in the knowing flesh, lack sense. (see Silverblatt, cf. Marcos)
The many tasks: Decolonial feminism takes up the task of uncovering the colonial practices of gender imposition and formation (the coloniality of gender) as marking the colonial divide differentially, inseparably from the processes of racialization and from the processes of emptying the colonized souls/bodies of the relational, cosmological practices constituting them as social, and inseparably from the processes of turning them into docile instruments of capital accumulation. Thus, as decolonial feminism takes the imposition of gender as a colonial imposition, it takes up pre-colonial cosmologies, practices, knowledges in their constitution of the social and in their giving meaning to embodied differences, often fluid, non-dichotomous, largely conceived in communal rather than individual terms, and often connected to the largely germinative, rather than narrowly tied to the narrowly reproductive. Decolonial feminism, concomitantly, takes up the constitution of modern European colonial knowledges/ideologies/framing structures and the constitution of modern practices of manipulation, control, molding of the bodies/subjectivities within the gamut of power from colonizer to colonized as inseparable from the coloniality of power. These knowledges, framing structures, and practices of manipulation and control all come into focus in the deep reduction of selves in social and cosmological relation that constitutes colonial gender. Decolonial feminism also, concomitantly, inseparably takes up the resistant and insurgent active inhabitation of to-be-reduced/in-the-process-of-reduction embodied desire, knowing bodies, embodied memory, animated flesh, peopled subjects. These are inseparable tasks, as the processes and makings form an intricate texture, una trama, that permeates the social and within which springs an active non-eurocentered decolonial animation and imagination.
These tasks are being done, lived, at risk by those of us who inhabit that to-be-seen, covered-over-and-over terrain of the coloniality of gender, the soul, body, nature, community, destructive imposition of the subordinate and less than human in her lacks and excesses construction of us, our dispossession. The invitation, pressing towards decolonial being in relation, is to cultivate the uncovering as constitutive of all decoloniality.