Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System

Introduction

María Lugones, an Argentine-born philosopher teaching in the United States, published the article in 2007 in the feminist philosophy journal Hypatia. She criticises Quijano for treating gender as biological sex and taking a patriarchal, heterosexual understanding of it for granted. Drawing on Oyěwùmí and Paula Gunn Allen, she argues that colonialism imposed a gender system with a “light side” – the binary ideal of white bourgeois femininity – and a “dark side”, in which colonised women were treated as non-human “females” and subjected to violence and forced labour. Gender is thus itself a colonial category. The article is regarded as a founding text of decolonial feminism, which Lugones developed in “Toward a Decolonial Feminism” (2010).

Connections

Builds on

• The Invention of Women1997 · Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí

Criticizes

• Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and Latin America2000 · Aníbal Quijano