User:Catherine.lehmkuhl/Maria Lugones

María Lugones (January 26, 1944 – July 14, 2020) was an Argentine feminist philosopher, activist, and Professor of Comparative Literature and of women's studies at Carleton College in Northfield, MN and at Binghamton University in New York State. She identified as a U.S-based woman of color and theorized this category as a political identity forged through feminist coalitional work.

Lugones advanced Latino philosophy in theorizing various forms of resistance against multiple oppressions in Latin America, the US and elsewhere. She was known for her theory of multiple selves, her work on decolonial feminism, and for developing the concept of the "coloniality of gender," which posits that gender is a colonial imposition.

Research
Lugones is the author of Pilgrimage/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions (2003) a seminal, highly-praised collection of essays, many of which were originally published in Hypatia, Signs and other journals. Among the essays included are “Playfulness, ‘World’‐Travelling, and Loving Perception,” which addresses the experience of navigating hyphenated identities from a phenomenological perspective. Lugones posits “a plurality of selves” that literally shift from being one person to being a different person, with each shift producing a corresponding new world. In another essay, “Purity, Impurity, and Separation,” Lugones introduces the concept of curdling as an intersectional practice of resistance that works against an oppressive logic of purity. Examples of curdling include: code-switching, drag, gender transgression and multilingual experimentation.

In her later work, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System” (2007) and “Toward a Decolonial Feminism” (2010), Lugones turns her attention to coloniality: its impact on gender formation, as well as various strategies of resistance which could contribute toward its eventual dismantling. Combining Anibal Quijano’s theory of the coloniality of power with a feminist, intersectionalist framework, Lugones concludes that gender is a colonial imposition. Drawing on historical examples of pre-colonial, gynecratic Native American tribes, Lugones situates gender as a colonial classification system that divides and subjugates people differently depending on multiple intersectional factors including class and ethnicity.