Abstract

This chapter provides an analysis of the work of Rita Segato and María Lugones’s assessment of Segato’s approach to gender and questions of decoloniality. The chapter examines the concepts of “patriarchy” and “gender” from within several critical paradigms among communities of color, including, specifically, indigenous and Afro-descendant communities within Abya Yala (a Puna term for the geographic lands of the Americas). Lugones proposes that terms of analysis such as “patriarchy” and “gender” undermine the complexity of the relations of power constituted in and through coloniality, including specifically the racialization of gendered terms. European women were racialized, but colonized females were not. Retaining the use of gender as a category of analysis thereby leaves decolonial activists and scholars working toward coalitional struggle with indigenous and Afro-descedent communities unable to sufficiently affirm the embodied, erotic, intersubjective, and otherwise distinct modes of communal relations not bound by dimorphic gender categories that continue to exist among these communities. The conclusion of the chapter then traces Lugones’s contributions to decolonial feminism, responding to the concerns she raises in the previous sections.