Coloniality and Gender

If gender institutions were themselves constituted through colonial domination, a promise to achieve national liberation first and address women’s problems later can preserve colonial relations inside liberation. María Lugones begins her 2008 essay with an uncomfortable question: why can men subjected to racial oppression remain indifferent to violence against women in their own communities?

Gender is not an additional layer

Lugones brings women-of-color feminisms into conversation with Aníbal Quijano’s account of the coloniality of power. Colonial rule organizes labor, knowledge and authority as well as occupying territory. Yet she challenges an account of gender that starts with control over sexual and reproductive resources between already constituted men and women. Such an approach can take binary sex, patriarchy and heterosexual organization for granted instead of explaining their historical production and imposition.

The Spanish essay proposes the modern/colonial gender system. Racialization and gendering are mutually constitutive processes, rather than independent systems subsequently added together. This is a theoretical intervention drawing on historical arguments and other research, not a multinational survey with a uniform sample. It changes which relations require explanation.

Who is recognized as a woman?

Lugones distinguishes visible and concealed sides of the gender system. White bourgeois women were represented as fragile, sexually pure and in need of male protection; these constructions restricted their authority and movement. Colonized and enslaved women could instead be animalized and treated as bodies available for hard labor and sexual violation, without comparable protection. These were connected classifications allocating resources and vulnerability differently, rather than simply different degrees of the same treatment.

Exclusion from the category of woman describes colonial dehumanization. It does not endorse that classification. The argument challenges an apparently universal claim that women are expected to be weak: which women are allowed vulnerability, and which are presumed impervious to injury? Universalizing white middle-class experience can erase other women’s labor and exposure to violence once again.

Solidarity cannot be presumed

Lugones uses women of color as a coalitional term, not a closed biological identity. Sharing one form of oppression does not eliminate gender domination within a community. Being called women does not automatically establish an equal sisterhood either. Coalitions require recognition of particular betrayals, interests and responsibilities, rather than declarations of a common enemy alone.

Her discussion of precolonial societies draws on work by Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, Paula Gunn Allen and others. It unsettles the presumed universality of European gender categories, but does not warrant imagining every precolonial society as the same egalitarian social order. Differences of region, period and political organization remain indispensable to historical judgment.

Read alongside Curiel’s antiracist feminist argument to examine how anticolonial movements confront their own gender politics. Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes offers another route into Lugones’s thinking about coalition and multiple oppression. The enduring question is whose continued subordination is demanded by the community that liberation promises to build.