Decolonial Feminism. Thinking-with María Lugones

Open Lecture by PJ DiPietro & Melina Gaona

About the lecture

PJ DiPietro builds on the language that confronts the legacy of what María Lugones calls “colonial gender” and its imposition of human-centered metaphysics across women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. In this lecture, DiPietro introduces a three-pronged classification to differentiate between (capitalized) Gender, (lowercase) genders and (lowercase, between quotation marks) “genders.” Gender allocutions mark Man or Woman as coloniality’s primary bodily dichotomy within the domain of the human; genders allocutions mark the unattainable status of men or women for those who were formerly colonized. Finally, “genders” allocutions underscore the ongoing emergence of unassimilable embodied differences who remain neither men nor women, living betwixt and between not-quite-human and not-quite-animal.

Engaging decolonial feminism and Latin American cultural critique, Melina Gaona explores the creation of collective selves across political practices in Argentina and the ways they interpellate the historical relationship between the State and society. The archive of social organizations shows that collective projects of difference challenge the autonomous, homogeneous and univocal individual holder of rights as the main site of political action. The history of these difference-affirming projects outlives the many mechanisms of domination, harm, and injury, and the modern logics of sexuality, gender and race with which the state seeks to manage impossible subjects. This presentation focuses on the ways that ethnic, racial, sexual, and gender differences mobilize testimony and political narrative on behalf of those who are no longer here.

About the speakers

Melina Gaona (PhD) is a Researcher in the National Council of Scientific and Technological Research (CONICET, Argentina) at National University of Quilmes and an Adjunct Professor at National University of Jujuy. Her main areas of research are Social Movements, Intersectionality and Feminist and Postcolonial Theory, focusing mainly on Experience and Collective Practice in South America.

PJ DiPietro (PhD) works at the intersection of decolonial feminisms, women of color thinking, Latinx studies, and trans* studies. They are assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies in the department of women’s and gender studies at Syracuse University, New York. With a transdisciplinary approach, they engage anthropology, human geography, and philosophy. They are one of the co-editors of Speaking Face to Face: The Visionary Philosophy of María Lugones (SUNY 2019). They collaborate with various organizations committed to social justice, including the Democratizing Knowledge Collective, the Association for Jotería Arts, Activism, and Scholarship (AJAAS), the decolonial philosophy collaborative REC-Latinoamérica, and the travesti collectives Damas de Hierro and Futuro TransGenérico.

Please register by 18^th October 2021 via email to roan.schmid@unibas.ch

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