María Lugones

María Lugones was an Argentine-born feminist philosopher and activist who taught at Carleton College and Binghamton University in the United States. Her essay 'Playfulness, "World"-Travelling, and Loving Perception' (1987) proposed that we understand others by travelling into their 'worlds' rather than viewing them with an arrogant gaze. Her book Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes (2003) theorised coalition among women facing multiple oppressions. Later, drawing on Aníbal Quijano, she argued that the modern gender system was itself imposed through colonialism, laying the foundations of decolonial feminism.

Key ideas

• 'World'-travelling, undertaken with playfulness and loving perception, lets us see others as they see themselves.
• Oppressions of race, gender, class and sexuality are intermeshed and cannot be neatly pulled apart.
• Logics of purity split people into fragments, and resistance can take mixed, 'curdled' forms.
• The coloniality of gender: the modern gender system was imposed on colonised peoples as part of colonial rule.

Major works

• Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions (2003)
• Playfulness, 'World'-Travelling, and Loving Perception (1987)
• Purity, Impurity, and Separation (1994)
• Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System (2007)
• Toward a Decolonial Feminism (2010)

In the Book corner

• Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions 2003 · Advanced
  A collection of essays, several revised from earlier journal articles, by the Argentine-born philosopher who taught in the United States. Lugones asks…

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