Toward a Decolonial Feminism

TLDR

The paper situates colonial relations within gender, race, and sexuality, arguing that colonial gender impositions intersect with ecological, economic, governmental, spiritual, and epistemic domains. The study aims to reframe modern capitalist colonial modernity by offering a decolonial feminist lens that reveals hidden intersections of race, gender, and normative heterosexuality. The author introduces a decolonial feminist framework grounded in lived experience, functioning as a lens to uncover hidden intersections of race, gender, and normative heterosexuality.

Abstract

In “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System” (Lugones 2007), I proposed to read the relation between the colonizer and the colonized in terms of gender, race, and sexuality. By this I did not mean to add a gendered reading and a racial reading to the already understood colonial relations. Rather I proposed a rereading of modern capitalist colonial modernity itself. This is because the colonial imposition of gender cuts across questions of ecology, economics, government, relations with the spirit world, and knowledge, as well as across everyday practices that either habituate us to take care of the world or to destroy it. I propose this framework not as an abstraction from lived experience, but as a lens that enables us to see what is hidden from our understandings of both race and gender and the relation of each to normative heterosexuality.