The Coloniality of Gender as a Radical Critique of Developmentalism (original) (raw)
To co-write this piece has meant for us to put in words the deeply personal, painful and fruitful process that has meant to engage with the ideas of María Lugones. An ongoing process in which our subjectivities are shifting and some kind of joint perspective emerges from the vestiges of what is left in each of us as products of gender-specific developmentalist policies in Latin America. This pain allows us to feel/think/sense the coloniality of Eurocentric social sciences and of some feminisms (Icaza 2013a, 2013b). In this text, we co- construct an engagement from this troubled and ongoing process to think together coloniality through a critical re-consideration of ‘gender’. We will show how 'gender' is an analytical category that has been widely used and misused in development discourses and interventions during the last three decades. Our central aim is to explain why and in which ways the notion of coloniality of gender call for a reflection on how we approach the epistemic grounds of white feminism, of development studies and also the modernity/coloniality debate. In particular, we understand that the notion of the coloniality of gender shifts the perspective of knowledge from the abstract disembodied position of male and western centred paradigms to a view from the historical embodied experience. This shift in the perspective of knowledge is enabling a move beyond the analytic of gender towards recognizing coalitional practices of liberation and resistance. Gender is thus acknowledged as an important analytical category to understand the modern/colonial system of oppression, but is also seen as what needs to be overcome by the decolonial practices of coalitional resistance. Thinking the coloniality of gender means to think from an embodied experience, it is to think from the ground up, from the body. It is a thinking that averts the generalizations that are common to abstract modern thought. It helps us to understand the limits of feminist anti-essentialist discourses that praise the performativity of identity as holding the only possibilities for desestabilization. We see decolonial feminism as an invitation to thinking/being/doing/sensing that exceeds the dominant discourses about women, gender, sexuality and the body. In order to develop these ideas, the text is divided in the following sections. The first section presents a historical background of the trajectory of the category “gender” within development studies literature, including its mainstreaming with the emergence of the Gender and Development paradigm (GAD). The second section discusses three key ideas advanced by Maria Lugones in her text “the Coloniality of Gender“: a) the ahistorical and universalist understanding of the category “gender”; b) the relevance of decolonial resistances to radicalize the category “gender”; c) the limits of the category “gender” in order to see decolonial resistances. The final section is a concluding reflection that highlights some of our thoughts and intuitions on the possible implications for critical feminisms agendas aiming to question the cross- cultural relevance of gender analyses of developmentalism.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.