Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System

TLDR

Quijano’s coloniality of power frames global capitalism, structuring society around race and modernity and naturalizing hierarchies of superiority and inferiority, while the gender system similarly reflects light and dark relations that justify violent abuse. The essay aims to present a systemic view of gender shaped by colonial/modernity and multiple power relations. Lugones develops this view by analyzing how colonial/modernity constructs gender through intersecting power relations. He concludes that gender is a colonial, violent construct employed to dismantle peoples, cosmologies, and communities, underpinning the West’s civilizing project.

Abstract

The coloniality of power is understood by Anibal Quijano as at the constituting crux of the global capitalist system of power. What is characteristic of global, Eurocentered, capitalist power is that it is organized around two axes that Quijano terms “the coloniality of power” and “modernity.” The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social classification of the population of the planet in terms of the idea of race, a replacing of relations of superiority and inferiority established through domination with naturalized understandings of inferiority and superiority. In this essay, Lugones introduces a systemic understanding of gender constituted by colonial/modernity in terms of multiple relations of power. This gender system has a light and a dark side that depict relations, and beings in relation as deeply different and thus as calling for very different patterns of violent abuse. Lugones argues that gender itself is a colonial introduction, a violent introduction consistently and contemporarily used to destroy peoples, cosmologies, and communities as the building ground of the “civilized” West.