Decolonial Feminism: Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso

In this intervention on decolonial feminism, Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso moves the critique beyond the question of who is represented. We must also ask who is authorized to produce theory, which experiences are treated as general knowledge, and which histories are marked as merely particular. The concept of coloniality helps examine how hierarchies inherited from colonial rule continue to organize institutions, categories and standards of intelligibility after formal colonialism has ended.

Her critique reaches the seemingly universal figure of “woman.” When part of feminism turns certain trajectories—often white, urban and middle-class—into everyone’s experience, racialized women appear as an added difference rather than as thinkers who also make concepts. Espinosa locates her intervention within a long history of Black, Indigenous and other racialized women challenging racism in movements and forms of knowledge that speak on their behalf. The problem cannot be solved by expanding a list of identities if the rules deciding who speaks and what counts as theory remain unchanged.

This turn is epistemic and political at once. Revisiting the sources of feminist knowledge also changes how inequality is understood: gender hierarchies do not operate apart from race, class, colonial histories and the organization of labor. But the argument should not harden into a simple opposition between a uniform “North” and a homogeneous “South.” Latin American genealogies are diverse and contested; naming coloniality requires tracing concrete historical relations and listening to differences within movements. Decoloniality works best as an uncomfortable question about how knowledge is produced, not as a new badge of moral superiority.

The intervention remains useful because it does not offer a list of authors that closes debate; it asks us to change how we read archives, curricula and movement histories. GLEFAS’s overview of decolonial feminism places Espinosa’s work within debates on epistemic critique, while the Colectiva 110 interview from UACM offers more of her intellectual trajectory. The talk can be read alongside A Decolonial Black Feminist Theory of Reading and Shade, while keeping their distinct arguments in view.

Talk and further reading

• Recording by ProyectoECOS
• GLEFAS: Decolonial Feminism
• Colectiva 110, Autonomous University of Mexico City