US Latina Feminism

In this article, I offer the figure of the snake-bridge as (a) the coiled central metaphor in Gloria Anzaldúa’s masterpiece, Borderlands/La Frontera, (b) the interpretive bridge connecting the early (This Bridge Called My Back) middle (Borderlands) and late (Light in the Dark) periods of her oeuvre, and (c) an alternate unifying metaphor to mestizaje. My first section offers a close reading of Borderlands, locating snake-bridge in the east-west snake of the Rio Grande that queer Chicana borderlanders cross north and south (...) like snakes, while wrestling earthward with snake demons and skyward with snake goddesses. And my second section autopsies the dismembered snake-bridge in Light in the Dark, calling for a healing thereof in pursuit of a coalitional social justice politics that preserves the strengths of mestizaje without its dangers. (shrink)

Carnal Aesthetics presents a phenomenological study of aesthetics grounded in the creative practices of Latinx artists and individuals. For Mariana Ortega, carnal aesthetics offers a way to think about the affective and bodily experiences of racialized selves in their engagements with art and photography. Ortega looks primarily at Latinx photography and Latinx subjects, tracing the transformative potential of artmaking for the self's liberatory growth. Ortega draws heavily on the work of Gloria Anzaldua as well as critical phenomenologists and queer of (...) color theorists such as Linda Martin Alcoff, Helen Ngo, and Jose Esteban Munoz. Ortega explores how creative practices stage encounters with the carnal, ending with an intimate reading of photography through a reflection of her own crossing from Nicaragua to the United States in 1979. Motivated by her own experiences of loss and exile, Ortega argues for the importance of carnal aesthetics in destabilizing and transforming practices of normative, colonial, and decolonial subjects, imaginaries, and structures. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Anger in a Perilous Environment:María LugonesMariana Alessandriin a hundred years, maybe our commonsense beliefs about anger will come from a distinguished line of Women of Color like Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and María Lugones, who make a case for listening to our anger instead of stifling it. But our ideas about anger still come from ancient Greek and Roman philosophers. Their stories about how anger works and why it (...) is bad have been dominant throughout history, and they are not kind to angry women in the twenty-first century. They have created a perilous environment for us, existentially speaking, by painting anger as irrational, crazy, and ugly. They have left us no way to handle our anger that does not amount to trying to control, suppress, or eradicate it. In this short paper, I contrast a philosophy of anger left to us by ancient Western philosophy with a contemporary one offered by Latina feminist María Lugones. Lugones offers a philosophy of anger that assumes it has something to teach us about our perilous environment.1Part I: Anger Seen in the LightPlato compared passions like anger to a hard-to-control, hot-blooded, black-skinned horse that must be reined in by the "charioteer" of reason (Phaedrus, ln. 253E). He thought we should use self-control to contain our anger, and he was not alone. The Roman Stoic Seneca, who described anger similarly, once told a story about Plato getting livid (Potegal and Novaco 9–24). Instead of beating one of his slaves, Plato froze, his hand drawn back in striking position. A friend asked Plato what he was doing. "I am making an angry man expiate his crime," Plato replied (Seneca, De Ira, Book III, section 12). Plato's freezing was his way of acknowledging that rage is weakness. Seneca formulated this scene into a principle: the only appropriate time to express anger is when you are not angry. Otherwise, you are a slave to your emotion. [End Page 23]I became angry during quarantine. I had been promised a year without teaching or administrative responsibility, but everything changed when the schools went remote. Since my kids were home anyway, I decided to home-school them. But I found myself becoming angry almost daily, and it was upsetting. To make sense of it, I went back to my philosophical sources.I consulted Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher whose Handbook I used to read every year. For the fifteenth time, he told me that "an uneducated man blames others; a partially educated man blames himself. A fully educated man blames no one" (13). While I could not control my circumstances in 2020—Epictetus granted that I did not have the power to end a pandemic or reopen schools—I could control my bursts of anger. Instead of blaming my spouse and kids for my troubles, I should blame myself for expecting life to be easier. Better yet, I should blame no one and accept the new normal gracefully. I also reread the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, the second-century Roman emperor and Stoic who believed that yielding to anger is a sign of weakness (Potegal and Novaco 16). Marcus reformulated one of the central tenets of Stoicism: "Disturbance comes only from within—from our own perceptions" (38). His advice? Lower your expectations. Remember that the only person you can change is yourself. To that end, expect people to irritate you daily and you will be ready for it (17). For me, that meant remembering that having kids meant having messes. But expecting a mess did not clean the table every night, load or unload the dishwasher, or vacuum the crumb-riddled floor. Marcus did not send his servants to clean my house. So, I left him for Aristotle.Aristotle's soul was not a charioteer with horses, but it was tripartite: feelings, predispositions, active conditions. Feelings are hard to change, Aristotle thought, so let's not waste too much energy trying. Predispositions just name the likelihood of feeling a particular feeling. Both categories matter, but chiefly because self-knowledge is a philosophical virtue. Mostly, Aristotle urged us to cultivate our "active conditions." Forever a... (shrink)

El presente trabajo elucida el axioma de “la pluralidad necesaria” a partir de algunas calas y notas del pensamiento de Judith Butler y algunos cruces procedentes de la filosofía de Michel Foucault y Friedrich Nietzsche, así como el influjo postnietzscheano contemporáneo, en contraste con el pensamiento mestizo subalterno latinoamericano de Gloria Anzaldúa. La hipótesis central es explicada en estos términos: no existe ningún fundamento metafísico que sustente al mundo; todo es una construcción cultural, resultado del poder predominante en un determinado (...) contexto histórico. El poder es el que establece lo que es normal o anormal, lo que está permitido o no está permitido. En este contexto, se postula la necesidad de someter a los dispositivos de poder reinantes, en las sociedades contemporáneas, bajo una revisión crítica que permita transformarlos en dispositivos de poder que hagan posible sociedades plurales e incluyentes. Y justo aquí, en la apertura de un nuevo horizonte postmetafísico y post-humanista es retomada la perspectiva mestiza subalterna de Gloria Anzaldúa como una forma radical de repensar la condición humana más allá del euro-logo-falocentrismo desde los márgenes de América Latina. La pluralidad necesaria, lejos de ser un título contradictorio, es, antes bien, un título que expresa una afirmación, a saber, la necesidad de una realidad social plural, inclusiva, en la que las diferencias entre los seres humanos sean respetadas, siguiendo el ideal de una sociedad democrática en la que se cultive la apertura a los otros, en un ambiente de convivencia y diálogo. (shrink)

Given the various shortcomings of classical phenomenological methods identified by critical and liberatory theorists, this paper considers what phenomenology has to offer theorists of multiply marginalized experience. The paper begins with an account of the major reasons for which Latinx feminists such as Linda Martín Alcoff, Jacqueline Martinez, and Mariana Ortega have found a phenomenological approach useful in their projects. This account reveals that though Latinx feminist phenomenologists have found useful resources for theorizing multiply marginalized theory and identity in the (...) classical texts of phenomenology, experiences unique to those subjected to marginalization remain significantly underdeveloped or absent from classical accounts. Taking seriously the primacy of lived experiences of ‘rupture’, this paper argues, is therefore necessary in the development of a phenomenological approach that does justice to life in the borderlands and the lived experience of being-between-worlds. Informed by the work of Latinx feminist theorists such as Gloria Anzaldúa and María Lugones, this paper closes with a proposed critical feminist phenomenological approach that centers the moment of ‘rupture’ described in such work. Ultimately, this paper argues that the communication and documentation of these ruptures in the form of phenomenological description allows for the examination and interrogation of sedimented logics of oppression on the way to liberatory ends. (shrink)

The author explores the metaphysics of social identities by using non-ideal theory as a method. She aims to understand what social identities are by examining the experiences of marginalized people – the experiences of people having a social identity as X (e.g., “Latina,” “Muslim woman”) in the non-ideal world, where they are marginalized by virtue of being X. To this end, the author delves into the decolonial feminist philosophies of Uma Narayan, Mariana Ortega, and María Lugones, and engages their conceptual (...) frameworks with Asian and Asian American experiences. Drawing on these analyses, she develops an account of social identities as processes of navigating power: A social identity as X can be best understood as the process as a whole, in which the subject lives as an X by navigating power dynamics, bargaining with them, and highlighting different meanings of being X. By employing non-ideal theory, which centers on power-as-oppression as a factor shaping marginalized people’s lives, we can achieve this nuanced understanding of social identity. Ideal theory, by excluding power from its analysis, is incapable of capturing how social identity is experienced as a process. (shrink)

Gloria Anzaldúa’s unfinished poem, “Like a Spider in Her Web,” introduces envisioning a dream world within one’s refuge while simultaneously enmeshed in another realm’s dreamscape, epitomizing Nepantla as a threshold of interconnectedness. This paper, inspired by her poem, proposes the notion I call a “Nepantla-Spider process,” amalgamating Anzaldúa’s Nepantleras, Brian Burkhart’s locality, and José-Antonio Orosco’s pragmatic interculturalism framework. I argue that a Nepantla-Spider process facilitates an expanded understanding of interculturalism that includes the non-living, animals, and the Land as requirements for (...) interculturalism and democratic justice under a pragmatist approach to growth and pluralism. (shrink)

A fenomenologia encontra-se em um momento crítico, enquanto investigadores reinterpretam textos canônicos e reverenciados de Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger e Maurice Merleau-Ponty para tentar demonstrar sua importância política e ética. Mais especificamente, os fenomenólogos desejam demonstrar a relevância da fenomenologia para as análises críticas das diversas identidades sociais. Devido aos compromissos metodológicos com o método transcendental, uma predileção por evidências apodíticas, o apelo para a suspensão da atitude natural e a busca por categorias ontológicas gerais, os investigadores contemporâneos não reconheceram (...) imediatamente a fenomenologia como uma fonte provável para teorizar as estruturas históricas e contingentes. Talvez o problema seja que a própria Filosofia em si, como observa Helen Ngo (2019), tem “uma tendência bem conhecida em direção à abstração e à conceitualização que pode dificultar o reconhecimento da natureza profundamente histórica e da especificidade situada do racismo” (p. 207; grifo nosso). De fato, a descrição de Ngo sobre o “acerto de contas” da raça pela Filosofia é muito apropriada; a Filosofia precisa confrontar suas práticas de omissão e supressão ou, em resumo, seu racismo. Certamente, uma filosofia como a fenomenologia, que leva a sério a experiência vivida e o mundo da vida, precisa teorizar a raça como uma característica fundamental da experiência vivida e da criação de sentidos. Não fazer isso indicaria um profundo fracasso em se envolver com o famoso “problema da linha de cor” que W. E. B. Du Bois (1989) entendeu tão agudamente como o principal problema do século XX, mas que claramente continua a nos assombrar. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Reading the work of Sylvia Wynter and María Lugones together, particularly as it pertains to sex, gender, and sexuality, reveals the limits of popular discourses and frameworks of queer and feminist philosophy that may unwittingly obscure its constructions of sex and gender along the global color line. This article looks at Wynter’s analysis of gender as a category differentially applied across the global color line and Lugones’s analysis of the coloniality of gender. The author concludes to move beyond the (...) coloniality of gender requires intersex liberation, but also that intersex liberation must be understood within a decolonial framework. (shrink)

Under the light of ancient Western philosophies, our darker moods like grief, anguish, and depression can seem irrational. When viewed through the lens of modern psychology, they can even look like mental disorders. The self-help industry, determined to sell us the promise of a brighter future, can sometimes leave us feeling ashamed that we are not more grateful, happy, or optimistic. Night Vision invites us to consider a different approach to life, one in which we stop feeling bad about feeling (...) bad. -/- In this powerful and disarmingly intimate book, Existentialist philosopher Mariana Alessandri draws on the stories of a diverse group of nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophers and writers to help us see that our suffering is a sign not that we are broken but that we are tender, perceptive, and intelligent. Thinkers such as Audre Lorde, María Lugones, Miguel de Unamuno, C. S. Lewis, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Søren Kierkegaard sat in their anger, sadness, and anxiety until their eyes adjusted to the dark. Alessandri explains how readers can cultivate “night vision” and discover new sides to their painful moods, such as wit and humor, closeness and warmth, and connection and clarity. -/- Night Vision shows how, when we learn to embrace the dark, we begin to see these moods—and ourselves—as honorable, dignified, and unmistakably human. (shrink)

Curanderismo is an Indigenous healing tradition in Chicane communities and throughout Mexico. Using such a lens, this paper analyzes the metaphysical nature of trauma as a splitting (susto) of the self and community. First, this paper explores the Indigenous philosophical principles that form the metaphysics of curanderismo. Second, three reactions to susto will be explored including what Gloria Anzaldua calls the Coyolxauhqui imperative, a re-membering of a split self towards healing. Through the second aim, the third aim of this paper (...) is to lay out a road map of the Coyolxauhqui imperative in hopes that it will save more communities from total annihilation. That road involves integrating traumatic memory and history into a sense of self/community, weaving new relationships, and orienting a new self with a decolonized spirit. (shrink)

La teoria dell’oppressione di Lugones è incentrata sulla necessità per l’oppresso di coltivare una diversa logica della realtà. Le condizioni per l’emergere di una coscienza resistente poggiano su un’ontologia pluralista e sull’idea di un sé molteplice capace di viaggiare tra «mondi». Un ruolo fondamentale viene occupato dallo spazio del _limen_. Il limen costituisce un portale verso la liberazione, ma non ne garantisce l’esito. Il progetto politico di emancipazione dalle oppressioni multiple richiede la creazione di coalizioni. Un obiettivo che può essere (...) raggiunto solo attraverso una comunicazione complessa, che abbandona la logica liberale della trasparenza. (shrink)

In this essay, I focus on Lugones’s relatively lesser explored notion of playfulness. I weigh in on the debate about whether playfulness is necessary for what Lugones calls “world-traveling,” which enables one to recognize another person as a full subject. I argue that although the attribute of playfulness may not be necessary for world-traveling, it is necessary for collaborative world-making––creating a new, shared world that is opened through the activity of play.

This chapter discusses some contributions that Mexican and Latinx phenomenologists have made to the critical phenomenology of home, i.e., the experience of “being at home in the world”—an experience that has always been both deeply cherished and bitterly contested. Tracing a line of thought that runs from the work of two Mexican phenomenologists in the 1940s and 1950s (Jorge Portilla and Emilio Uranga) to the work of two contemporary Latinx phenomenologists in the U.S. (Gloria Anzaldúa and Mariana Ortega), we find (...) a shared view that the Mexican and Latinx experience has been marked by zozobra, an anxious condition characterized by the inability to be at home in the world. However, these philosophers disagree about the source of this zozobra, and even whether zozobra is something that should overcome or embraced and celebrated. Reading these thinkers together, we learn that home is several things simultaneously: an essential foundation for human existence; an illusory ideal whose pursuit leads us to exclude vulnerable others and vulnerable parts of ourselves; and a site for the negotiation of the circumstances in which one finds oneself, in the tragic and beautiful hope of creating a life to call one’s own. (shrink)

This dissertation offers an account of linguistic practices of Latinx people in the United States through the lens of critical feminist phenomenology. It examines how Latinx people are racialized on the basis of their language use, the normative logics that structure those processes of racialization, and the practices by which Latinx people resist and transform those logics. In this project, I develop a critical feminist phenomenological approach that locates itself within a tradition of Latina feminist phenomenology—a tradition that has prioritized (...) the articulation of situated, embodied experiences of oppressing⇔resisting relations lived by Latinx intersubjectivities in the context of the United States. I propose the concept of “linguistic rupture” in order to name the specific kind of experience at the center of this analysis. The analysis allows for a reconceptualization of language and linguistic practices that constructs Latinx speakers as actively resistant rather than just passively oppressed. While I do argue that linguistic rupture is particularly significant in understanding the racialization of Latinx populations in the United States, the account of linguistic rupture developed in this project has potential for application across a broad range of racializing processes and events not limited to U.S. Latinx experience. It thus invites further examination and critical engagement with the various ways in which ruptures experienced by minoritized and marginalized subjects in general expose hegemonic logics operating in multiple directions, as well as the ways in which linguistic engagements specifically anchor embodied intersubjectivity existentially. (shrink)

Abstract:Queer Chicana author Gloria Anzaldúa often used visual art to develop and teach her theories, which address issues relating to social identity and institutions as well as creativity and spirituality. Her large collection of archived sketches at the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers at the University of Texas demonstrates her drive to visually express ideas. The archive also holds unpublished works and talks in which Anzaldúa discusses her concepts of creativity and the image-making process. Despite the prevalence of images in her (...) work, few scholars have analyzed her artwork or her writings on creativity. To address this gap, I explore the question: How do Anzaldúa's sketches inform her theoretical concepts of creativity and image-making? Analyzing her visual work significantly contributes to academic scholarship, especially for scholars looking to engage with Anzaldúan theorizing beyond that of her written works. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Decolonial Movidas: María Lugones’s Notion of Decolonial Aesthesis through CosmologiesDenise Meda CalderonIntroductionMaría 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.Moving to “Seeing” ColonialityLugones’s 2010 essay “Toward a Decolonial Feminism” constitutes a methodological intervention or movida in gender scholarship. Referring to the [End Page 22] 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.2 [End Page 23]Decolonial AesthesisLugones’s decolonial aesthesis is not concerned... (shrink)

_Many scholars argue that the spiritual dimensions of aesthetic practices and resistance have been undertheorized or omitted. This paper examines aesthetic processes taken up by Amelia Mesa-Bains (1994, 1999) and Gloria Anzaldúa (1987, 2015) to theorize how some Chicanx artists employ an aesthetic based on spirituality as relational, memorial, and material practice to critique colonial ideologies embedded in dichotomies such as man/woman, subject/object, fine/folk art, and individual/community. By focusing on Mesa-Bains’ altar installations and Anzaldúa’s writing process, I draw out how (...) social relations and memory work operate to interpret the relationship between aesthetics and spirituality. I argue that the relational dynamic of their aesthetic sensibilities and techniques show ways some Chicanx scholars and artists subscribe to a sense of spirituality that maintains interconnected relations with others who have been disempowered and marginalized._ _ __To support this position, in the first half of the paper, I analyze the relational sensibilities central to_ _Chicanx aesthetic sensibility of _rasquache domesticana,_ which highlights the concrete spaces in which Chicanx, their aesthetic perception, and techniques generate a communal resistance that is sustained through spirituality. The second half turns to Mesa-Bains’ altar installation for Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (1994) and Anzaldúa’s writing process described in Borderlands (1987) to clarify ways in which aesthetics and spiritual relations engender practices of resistance to social dichotomies. _. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that Gloria Anzaldúa’s own philosophical concept of la facultad captures a form of active, embodied, epistemic agency. I further argue that when an agent uses la facultad, they acquire a novel form of knowledge, one that is only accessible through this capacity. In Section II, I define la facultad as consisting in the active integration of conscious self-awareness, bodily experiences, motor skills, and sensory information with the rational mind to engage with and navigate the world. (...) As such, the actions we choose to are not solely determined by reasoning or mere mental states but are fundamentally shaped by the dynamic interplay between our bodies, sensory perceptions, emotions, and the situational context in which we find ourselves. In Section III, I elaborate on the epistemological contribution of la facultad. Finally, in Section IV, I conclude with some questions for further research. (shrink)

El derecho a descansar es una reivindicación de justicia de primer orden. Es una demanda dirigida al núcleo de la organización social de nuestras necesidades. La caracterización de este derecho se presenta, la mayor de las veces, a partir de los conceptos de trabajo productivo -remunerado- y de cuidado -en gran parte no remunerado. La defensa del ocio y también de la pereza es convocada tanto por los trabajos creativos como por los industriosos. Pero, qué pasa cuando el derecho a (...) descansar no se dirige a cuestionar qué entendemos por trabajo, sino a qué entendemos por actividad y a qué llamamos reposo. ¿Qué ocurre si el derecho a descansar muestra la necesidad de iniciar un proceso de descolonización de nuestros cuerpos? La propuesta de Gloria Anzaldúa, y esto es lo que artículo defiende, consiste en mostrarnos que para poder pensar el descanso y hablar de él, la materia prima está en nuestros cuerpos, en atender a las formas de sujeción colonial que aún los habitan. (shrink)

Este texto se sitúa en la juntura de los feminismos del sur que señalaron el encubrimiento de la heterogeneidad de las mujeres indo-afro-latino-americanas. Desde las cadencias y los ritmos de las voces de mujeres de Nuestra América cuyos saberes interrumpen, disrumpen e intervienen muestra que los problemas del feminismo blanco burgués del norte no son los de todas las mujeres puesto que algunas mujeres escapan a la fragilidad femenina que justifica el paternalismo y los micromachismos dentro y fuera de la (...) academia, incluso dentro y fuera de la misma clase, etnia o generación. Desde los feminismos del sur se propone habilitar un diálogo entre/con “las otras” de nosotras no sólo para articular teóricamente y coalicionar políticamente nudos epistémicos que pongan en crisis el modelo de la representación y con ello una revisión del punto de vista, sino también para desmontar, paralelamente desde la ontología relacional que suponen, el privilegio epistemológico, la violencia epistémica y el extractivisimo académico que ubica y posiciona a unas sobre otras en la reproducción de “las otras de nosotras”. A partir de los posicionamientos de María Lugones, Rita Segato, Aura Cumes, Lorena Cabnal y Julieta Paredes, se propone visibilizar los nudos epistemológicos venidos de los feminismos comunitarios e indígenas que habilitan ampliaciones metodológicas desde las que podrían configurarse una historia de las resistencias de las mujeres de Latinoamérica en la exterioridad de los paradigmas euronortecentrados. (shrink)

This article explores Sylvia Wynter’s analysis of gender as a category differentially applied across the global color line and María Lugones’ account of the coloniality of gender. While Wynter’s and Lugones’s work offer consequential insights for queer, trans, and intersex studies and activism, they have deliberately engaged these particular discourses and histories of struggle in limited ways. Wynter analyzes the contradictions of Western feminists’ organizing against female genital cutting in Africa, but she does not link her conclusions to their ramifications (...) for activism against genital cutting on children deemed intersex. Lugones uses the existence of intersex people as a turning point in her critique of Aníbal Quijano when developing her concept of the coloniality of gender, but she does not go further to connect global intersex activism and decolonial feminist struggles. This article explores the work of Wynter and Lugones for their compatibility with trans and intersex studies and activism, and the places where their work can be furthered through insights from trans and intersex studies. It concludes that to move beyond the coloniality of gender requires trans and intersex liberation and that trans and intersex liberation must be understood in a broader decolonial feminist framework. (shrink)

Resumo: O artigo objetiva refletir sobre as concepções de gênero, poder, multiplicidade e multiculturalismo, em María Lugones, analisando o modo como sua teoria se associa ao pensamento pós-colonial. Para tanto, aborda a perspectiva do pensamento pós-colonial e a noção de colonialidade do poder, considerando o sistema moderno/colonial de gênero. As teorias pós-coloniais criticam o paradigma epistemológico do Ocidente e a hierarquização baseada na distinção entre humanos e não humanos, colonizador e colonizado. Em sua análise do sistema moderno/colonial, María Lugones introduz (...) a ideia de gênero na reflexão acerca das relações de poder. A teoria de Oyèronké Oyӗwùmí é uma referência para María Lugones, que desenvolve uma concepção de intersecção de raça, classe, gênero e sexualidade, propondo um feminismo decolonial baseado na identificação de formas de resistência e coalizão para emancipação.: The article reflects on María Lugones’s concepts of gender, power, multiplicity, and multiculturalism, analyzing the way her theory is associated with postcolonial thought. In order to do so, it aproaches the perspective of postcolonial thought, and the notion of coloniality of power, considering the colonial/modern gender system. The postcolonial theories criticize the Western epistemological paradigm, and hierarchy based on the distinction between human and non-human, colonizer and colonized. When analyzing the colonial/modern system, María Lugones’s perspective introduces the concept of gender in the analyses of the power relationships. Oyèronké Oyӗwùmí’s theory of gender is a reference to María Lugones. In the analysis of the coloniality of power, Lugones develops the idea of the intersection of race, class, gender, and sexuality, proposing decolonial feminism based on the identification of forms of resistance, and coalition in social movements for emancipation. (shrink)

Abstract:Jessica Elkayam asks Mariana Ortega about the influence both Latina feminisms and Martin Heidegger have had on the development of Ortega's mestiza theory.

Resumen: La poeta mapuche-williche se autodenomina “champurria” como forma de alejarse de la pureza lingüística y cultural en que se desenvuelven la lengua hegemónica y el mapudungun formal. Este posicionamiento, más el reconocimiento de que la poeta es portadora del mapuche kimün porque también es machi, sugieren la posibilidad de comprender sus textos como una morfogénesis comunicativa, atendiendo a las nociones de mestizaje que nos ofrecen Gloria Anzaldúa, María Lugones y Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. La lectura de la poeta-machi nos interpela (...) a profundizar en el conocimiento del mapuche kimün para comprender los mundos que crea en su trance morfogénico, mientras disloca el español y el mapuzugun, en una unidad textual múltiple, intercultural, impredecible, inconmensurable. Abstract: The mapuche-huilliche poet Adriana Paredes Pinda calls herself “champurria” as a way to distance herself from the linguistic and cultural purity of both the hegemonic tongue and formal mapudungun. This position, plus the knowledge of the poet as a bearer of the mapuche kimün as a machi, suggest the possibility of understanding her texts as communicative morphogenesis, taking heed of the notion of “mestizaje” proposed by Gloria Anzaldúa, María Lugones and Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui. The reading of the machi-poet demands of us a deeper knowledge of the mapuche kimün to understand the worlds created in her morphogenetic trance, as she dislocates both Spanish and Mapudungun on a measureless, unpredictable, intercultural, multiple textual unity. (shrink)

Latin American and Latinx philosophers have a long and rich history of deep engagement in public life through a variety of different projects and venues. This chapter offers a brief survey of the historical development and practice of philosophy in public life in Latin American and Latinx traditions. Because of their unique histories, it engages public philosophy in Mexico and Argentina separately. The chapter shows that a guiding thread in Argentinian public philosophy is a deep‐rooted concern about the threats created (...) by political and intellectual authoritarianism and strategies for pushing back against this oppression by developing emancipatory practices and democratic alternatives. This work runs through a long line of Argentinian philosophers from José Ingenieros and Alejandro Korn to María Lugones and Diana Maffía. Public philosophy is clearly a vibrant and ongoing enterprise in contemporary Mexico. Argentina also possesses a long and rich tradition of public philosophy. (shrink)

A recent (2020) special issue in Critical Philosophy of Race dedicated to Maria Lugones illustrates and thematizes the continuing challenge of (re)constructing coalitions among Latina and Black feminists and their allies. As one proposed solution to this challenge, in their guest editors’ introduction to that special issue, Emma Velez and Nancy Tuana suggest an interpretive “dancing with” Lugones. Drawing on my own “dancing-with” interpretive method (which significantly predates that special issue), in the present article I choreograph an interpretive duet between (...) Lugones and Saidiya Hartman. My first section retraces Lugones’ essay on queering tango as a decolonizing practice, and how the latter echoes Marta Savigliano’s Tango and the Political Economy of Passion. My second section then utilizes Lugones’ queering of tango as a lens for interpreting her magnum opus, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, emphasizing the dance-resonance of its central concepts, including “playfulness” reinterpreted as a “dance-fulness” that empowers the peregrina’s “world-traveling.” My third section identifies this dancing peregrina’s world-traveling with the wayward young Black female chorus member, or “chorine,” at the center of Saidiya Hartman’s tour de force history, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. And my conclusion names chorines of color in Afro-Latin social dance communities today as exemplary agents for empowering coalitions among Latina and Black feminists and allies. (shrink)

pSara Ahmed’s emWillful Subjects/em develops an account of willfulness as a site of simultaneous oppression and resistance: a diagnosis attributed to particular (not-quite-)subjects and to modes of behavior that are thereby diminished, pathologized, and controlled, and a “diagnosis” that may be positively affirmed as a way of living and doing otherwise. This essay puts Ahmed’s work on willfulness in conversation with María Lugones’ decolonial feminism, particularly her theory of active subjectivity. With Lugones, we offer, one can better understand the resistant (...) potential of willfulness, not simply as the willful subject possessing an oppositional “will of her own” (which risks reinscribing a unitary notion of the self), but rather, as exercising a different kind of subjectivity altogether—one that relies on multiplicity and arises through relationships across non-dominant difference. Extending the connections that Ahmed herself draws between willfulness and “madness,” we further explore the willful elements in experiences relating to mental illness and cognitive disability, categories of experience that we understand to be important (and undertheorized) aspects of what Aníbal Quijano has termed “the coloniality of power.”/p. (shrink)

The three volumes I am considering in this review essay constitute a living archive of the political and epistemic movement called decolonial feminism. Together, Tejiendo de Otro Modo: Feminismo, Epistemología, y Apuestas Descoloniales en el Abya Yala, Feminismo Descolonial: Nuevos aportes metodológicos a mas de una década, and Decolonial Feminism in Abya Yala, collect the principal contributions to the profoundly important production of critical theory and radical politics. The editors and contributors include a diversity of key figures in decolonial feminism, (...) reuniting intellectual-activists mostly from Latin America and US Latinxs, a geohistorical landscape denominated Abya Yala, an Indigenous Kuna category that stands for “the territory of all of us.” The publication of this review essay as part of a special issue of Hypatia is a meaningful move because it was in this journal that María Lugones published her foundational articles on what she termed “the modern/colonial gender system,” as well as an invitation to cultivate decolonial feminism. (shrink)

El presente trabajo elucida el axioma de “la pluralidad necesaria” a partir de algunas calas y notas del pensamiento de Judith Butler y algunos cruces procedentes de la filosofía de Michel Foucault y Friedrich Nietzsche, así como el influjo postnietzscheano contemporáneo, en contraste con el pensamiento mestizo subalterno latinoamericano de Gloria Anzaldúa. La hipótesis central es explicada en estos términos: no existe ningún fundamento metafísico que sustente al mundo; todo es una construcción cultural, resultado del poder predominante en un determinado (...) contexto histórico. El poder es el que establece lo que es normal o anormal, lo que está permitido o no está permitido. En este contexto, se postula la necesidad de someter a los dispositivos de poder reinantes, en las sociedades contemporáneas, bajo una revisión crítica que permita transformarlos en dispositivos de poder que hagan posible sociedades plurales e incluyentes. Y justo aquí, en la apertura de un nuevo horizonte postmetafísico y post-humanista es retomada la perspectiva mestiza subalterna de Gloria Anzaldúa como una forma radical de repensar la condición humana más allá del euro-logo-falocéntrismo desde los márgenes de América Latina. La pluralidad necesaria, lejos de ser un título contradictorio, es, antes bien, un título que expresa una afirmación, a saber, la necesidad de una realidad social plural, inclusiva, en la que las diferencias entre los seres humanos sean respetadas, siguiendo el ideal de una sociedad democrática en la que se cultive la apertura a los otros, en un ambiente de convivencia y diálogo. (shrink)

This book provides an introduction to the key arguments in decolonial feminism, particularly, the coloniality of gender, the critique of white and Eurocentric feminisms, the imbrication between gender, race, and colonialism, feminicides, and the coloniality of democracy and public institutions.

Informed by María Lugones’s understanding of the “logic of purity,” this essay analyzes the race for critical phenomenology. It suggests how Lugones’s analysis of such a logic may guide us in developing phenomenological analyses of complex social identities such as race. It also shows how traces of the logic of purity remain even in critical phenomenological analyses of race. Specifically, the essay analyzes the methodological call for a reduction of quasi-transcendental structures. Ultimately an attitude and practice of critical criticality and (...) a mode of critical impurity are suggested so as to avoid problematic traces of the logic of purity. Ultimately, the discussion reveals how Latina feminist theorizing stands to enhance critical phenomenology. (shrink)

The rhetoric of decolonising feminism has been increasingly connected to reformism rather than a radical intervention. Problematising the idea of finality in the calls to decolonise, I suggest that decolonial feminism should be understood as an experiment, a risky, unfinished project rather than a fixed location, and I argue that it should be based on a more radicalised notion of what María Lugones calls ‘learning from other resisters’. I draw on my experience working with feminists across the vast and diverse (...) Indonesian nusantara and reflect on Lugones’s concept of ‘other resisters’ in her essay ‘Toward a decolonial feminism’. Learning from feminists from places such as Nusa Tenggara and West Papua who challenge the singular imagination of the Global South, I advocate shifting the debate away from Euro-American academia as the locus of knowledge production by centring other resisters on the path towards decolonial feminism. I propose three aspects in learning from other resisters: actively engaging in the process of creating feminist linkages, acknowledging borders and friction within the Global South and interrogating the notion of resistance. (shrink)

Informed by Gloria Anzaldúa's and José Carlos Mariátegui's work, as well as by Andean cosmology, Omar Rivera turns to Inka stonework and architecture as an example of a "Cosmological Aesthetics." He articulates ways of sensing, feeling and remembering that are attuned to an aesthetic of water, earth and light. On this basis, Rivera brings forth a corporeal orientation that can be inhabited by the oppressed, one that withdraws from predominant modern/Western conceptions of the human. By providing an aesthetic analysis of (...) cosmological sensing, Rivera sets the stage for exploring physical dimensions of anti-colonial resistance, and furthers the Latinx and Latin American tradition of anti-colonial and liberatory philosophy. Seeingaesthetic involvements with the cosmos as a source for embodied modes of resistance, Rivera turns to the work of María Lugones and Enrique Dussel in order to make explicit the aesthetic dimensions of their work. Andean Aesthetics and Anticolonial Resistance creates a new dialogue between art historians, artists, and philosophers working on Latin American thought, phenomenology, and hermeneutics. It weaves together a Latin American philosophy that connects pre-Columbian cosmologies with contemporary thinkers. Rivera's original approach introduces us to the living, evolving and aesthetic alternatives to coloniality of power and of knowledge, overhauling current understandings of decolonial theory and opening the tradition in transformative ways. (shrink)

One way to track the many critical impacts of women of color feminisms is through the powerful structural analyses of gendered and racialized oppression they offer. This article discusses diverse lineages of women of color feminisms in the global South that tackle systemic structures of power and domination from their situated perspectives. It offers an introduction to structuralist theories in the humanities and differentiates them from women of color feminist theorizing, which begins analyses of structures from embodied and phenomenological st¬¬andpoints--with (...) the day-to-day concerns of our lives. The essay is divided into three sections. In section one, I discuss theories of structure in the humanities and sciences, differentiating them from women of color’s analysis of structure as diagnostic of the ways colonial power relations are functionalized through social structures. In section two, I discuss the diverse contexts of interpretation that background women of color feminisms, outlining key themes and ideas related to theories of structure. I argue against a unified theory of women of color structural feminisms that supplants difference, favoring a rehabilitated concept of structure for the purposes of making targeted interventions in contemporary radical anti-colonial politics. I offer the example of systematic marginalization produced by colonial violence and mythology as one reason to take up this approach. In section three, I outline four provisional characteristics of women of color structural feminisms. I conclude that, when divested from colonial myths that guide mainstream notions of structure, it can be a useful hermeneutic tactic in the fight for liberation from ongoing colonial violence. (shrink)

"This volume gathers selected academic and creative works from the 2019 meeting of the Society and recognizes the importance and sustained impact of Anzaldúa's work. The productions for these edited conference proceedings have been organized into distinct categories that align with the conference tracks in El Mundo Zurdo: each work speaks to the one next to it, emphasizing the manner in which Anzaldúan thought travels across communities-from the personal to the political, from the academic to the activist, from the creative (...) to the spiritual. Part I, Anzaldúa in and out of Academia: Theory & Pedagogy, focuses on sustaining Anzaldúa's legacy and teaching her work both in academic and public settings. Part II. Telling Lives: Testimonios, Autohistoria, Oral History, and Autoethnography brings together authors who are participating in the legacy of storytelling and theorizing from personal experience, history, creative expression, and social observation in the tradition of Anzaldúa. Part III, Philosophy, Theory, Culture, explores the interconnectedness of Anzaldúa's contributions to these three fields of study. Part IV, Anzaldúa and Healing: Art, Music, and Poetry, as the final section, brings together the creative works and cultural production born out of Anzaldúa's work. The poetry and artwork included in this section focus on the border reality of the artists and the way they connect their work to Anzaldúa"--. (shrink)

Our paper examines Gloria Anzaldúa’s critical appropriation of Mexican philosophical sources, especially in the writing of Borderlands/La Frontera. We demonstrate how Anzaldúa developed a transnational Philosophy of Mexicanness, effectively contributing to what has been recently characterized as the “multi-generational project to pursue philosophy from and about Mexican circumstances” (Vargas). More specifically, we recover “La Mexicana en la Chicana” by paying careful attention to Anzaldúa’s Mexican sources, both those she explicitly cites and those we have discovered while conducting archival research using (...) the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers from the Benson Latin American Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. The three sections of our paper: 1) define the terms Mexican and philosophy in conversation with Anzaldúa’s work, 2) examine the Mexican philosophical sources that Anzaldúa cites in Borderlands/La Frontera, and 3) present the other major Mexican philosophical influences on Anzaldúa that we have found in her archive. The eight Mexican philosophical sources we discuss here include: José Vasconcelos (1882-1959), Miguel León-Portilla (1926-2019), Juana Armanda Alegría (1938- ), Octavio Paz (1914-1998), Samuel Ramos (1897-1959), Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974), Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz (1648-1695), and Jorge Carrión (1913-2005). (shrink)

Determinations of ability/disability are rooted in coloniality, specifically in categorizations of race, gender, and animality as they bear on social formations. I elucidate this rootedness by weaving the “coloniality of ability” into María Lugones’ accounts of the coloniality of gender and the colonial-modern system as founded on the “human-nonhuman” difference. This enables me to reveal an “ability system” based on the “ability-bestiality” difference and delineate with more specificity liminal sites of oppression and resistance across the heterogeneous socialities of coloniality-modernity. From (...) the perspective of the coloniality of ability that I develop, I focus on the liminality of the white woman Victorian invalid and that of the colonized “bestial” body in order to distinguish between two forms of colonial-modern liminality—“light” and “dark.” I also draw from this discussion two forms of colonial-modern oppression—“dehumanizing” and “bestializing”—and two related modalities of anticolonial resistance—“humanizing” and “decolonial.”. (shrink)

This essay uses Maria Lugones’s account of the colonial/modern gender system to analyze the retro-use of “biological sex” in recent anti-trans legislation. The retro-use of sex refers to the role of sex in legislation that has been widely described by critics as moving the U.S. backward in time, or as a rollback of trans rights. The essay argues that Lugones’s theorization of the sex/gender distinction in the context of colonialism offers a better way of understanding the retro-use of sex in (...) this legislation than white Anglo-American feminist theories. While Lugones does not explicitly engage with this legislation, the essay shows that her racialized material history of the concept of biological sex not only allows for an expanded sense of the pasts that are at work in the present use of sex but also sharpens the need for feminist and trans responses to the retro-use of sex that are explicitly anti-racist and decolonial. -/- . (shrink)

The work of Gloria Anzaldúa has not typically been read in concert with utopian studies. Much of her writing, however, offers a rich resource for utopian critique. This is a significant omission given that much of Latin@ speculative fiction has been deemed inherently utopic. Latin@futurism is a field of inquiry by which to focus on the utopian as a broader category of visionary, speculative forms. Anzaldúa draws on techniques of defamiliarization to usher a change of consciousness in the reader, exemplified (...) by her theories of conocimiento, el cenote, and nepantla. This article discusses Anzaldúa's theory of el cenote as a powerful heterotopic space of renewal and transformation in Yuri Herrera's novel Signs Preceding the End of the World. Anzaldúa's theories of conocimiento and nepantla flesh out culminating aspects of borderlands dreaming in the novel that connect to a discourse of apocalypse and its relationship to historical renewal and social justice. (shrink)

Intersex—the fact of bodies neither typically male nor female, together with the grim history of its medical management—was a topic for feminist theory before there was such a thing as intersex activism. Indeed, critical academic scholarship about intersex supported the consciousness raising that made an intersex activist movement possible. Activist engagement, in turn, has expanded the understanding of the theorists whose work is responsive to that activism. Central to the thinking about intersex are the questions of identity and its limits (...) that are an important focus of the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, whose narrative suggests she had a condition associated with intersex. While her work largely predates intersex activism, it powerfully encapsulates the tensions displayed in contests over identity that have become central over the last 15 years, and furthermore offers insight into the challenges that lie ahead. (shrink)

Queer, Chicana feminist scholar, Gloria Anzaldúa, describes the U.S./Mexican borderlands as una herida abierta, an open wound, a liminal space of negotiations, which births a unique type of consciousness. Border consciousness is generated in this ambiguous space that exists between two cultures, two countries, two languages, and is marked by a unique mode of identity production and meaning making. I argue that her border theory supplies the necessary tools for thinking critically about the social and political situation of our present (...) border crisis, a crisis of home, identity, history and future. In particular, I would like to bring her philosophy to bear on the symbolic nature of the border wall, to explore and address its function and harms for our social, cultural and national identities as well as our everyday lived experiences and interpersonal interactions. My claim is that Anzaldúa’s border philosophy offers a healing process, which functions to destroy desconocimiento [ignorance], dismantle false oppositions, cultivate a tolerance for ambiguity through her non-binary, connectionist mode of thinking, and decolonize myths and minds. It is through taking up her process of healing that we may shift and rethink our approach to the borderlands themselves as a therapeutic landscape with the capacity to promote the health and well-being of its inhabitants and neighboring nations. (shrink)

María Lugones was a feminist philosopher whose work spanned four decades, two continents, and multiple languages. Over the course of her career, her writing made major contributions to feminist ethics, the philosophy of race, lesbian epistemology, and decolonial thought. She passed away on July 14, 2020, after many years of poor health, leaving behind an influential legacy and a substantial body of unpublished work.

In a 1983 interview with Christine Weiland, Gloria Anzaldúa posited that human and nonhuman connectivity exists outside hierarchical arrangements. Some twenty years after Anzaldúa’s interview, the “Speculative Turn” emerged in continental philosophy which critiques anthropocentrism in modern philosophy and reconceptualizes nonhuman subjectivity. While Anzaldúa’s scholarship addresses core issues that are highlighted by the speculative turn, little scholarship exists that places her into conversation with these new trajectories in continental philosophy. In this essay, I aim to contribute to this nascent scholarship (...) and explore the question, How can Anzaldúa’s creative work contribute to and expand scholarship of the speculative turn? I investigate how Anzaldúa’s work can help bridge connections between differing veins of speculative turn thought, specifically Graham Harman’s object-oriented philosophy and Jane Bennett’s vital materialism. Conversations between Harman and Bennett demonstrate a split in understanding nonhuman autonomy and relationality and represent incompatibilities between OOP and VM. Interested in these departures, I posit that Anzaldúa’s creative works, such as poetry and drawing, offer ways to challenge problematic human/nonhuman relations and bridge philosophical divides within the speculative turn. (shrink)

Serene J. Khader’s Decolonizing Universalism presents a vision for how feminism might be decolonized for transnational work by doing without traditional Western feminist values and focusing instead on opposing sexist oppression. This paper presents a challenge to the idea that feminism consists in opposing sexist oppression, claiming that it instead consists in opposing gender oppression, where that includes combating cissexism and heterosexism. More specifically, it argues that critiquing cissexist criteria within gender categories as well as critiquing harms that follow from (...) having a queer sexual identity are decidedly feminist tasks. Furthermore, cases of these harms where group identities cannot arise in the social ontology due to a lack of hermeneutical resources challenge the idea that feminism is concerned only with oppression. The second half of the paper extends Khader’s critique of the Western liberal moral vocabulary of feminism by proposing a radical decolonization of the feminist canon as it is usually conceived in the global North. (shrink)