Maria Lugones
María Lugones is a philosopher and popular educator. She works at the Escuela Popular Norteña in New Mexico, a popular education center that she cofounded in 1990 and at Binghamton University, where she teaches at the Comparative Literature Department and directs the Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture. She is the author of Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Again Multiple Oppressions (2003). She is currently working on Decolonial Feminisms, an elaboration of her article “Heterosexualism and the Modern, Colonial Gender System” (Hypatia 2003)
Conference abstract
Decolonial Revisiting of Gender
The paper considers the imposition of a Modern, colonial, capitalist gender system on the domination of the conquered and colonized during the 16th century. The Spanish introduced the notion of race the conception and treatment of the colonized as inferior by nature to the European colonizers. The paper argues that gender, the concept, cannot be used to understand the societies of the colonized in the present or at any other time, since gender is a creation of modernity that the paper will show to be deeply problematic.