María Lugones (Buenos Aires, Argentina, 26 January 1944 — 14 July 2020, Syracuse, New York) was an Argentine-American philosopher and activist, Professor of Comparative Literature and Women’s Studies at Binghamton University. Her intellectual path weaves together political philosophy, feminist theory, and Latin American decolonial thought in a genuinely singular way: rather than applying Eurocentric categories to the experience of women of the Global South, Lugones set out to refound those categories from what colonization destroyed and what the resistance of the colonized preserved. Her work brings together the women-of-color feminism of North America — especially that of Gloria Anzaldúa — with the decolonial critique of Aníbal Quijano, producing a theory in which race and gender are not separate variables that add up, but dimensions fused within a single structure of colonial power.
Lugones’s writing is at once analytical and activist in character. In her best-known essays, she argues that the binary biology of sex and compulsory heterosexuality are not natural universals but colonial technologies imposed on populations that, before the conquest, organized the relations among bodies, labor, and cosmology in quite different ways. This radical claim places her in critical dialogue with both Western white feminism — which she charges with reproducing colonial privilege by universalizing particular experiences — and with masculinized decolonial studies, which tend to neglect the specificity of gender oppression.
Key Concepts
- Coloniality of gender (“Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System,” Hypatia, 2007; “Toward a Decolonial Feminism,” Hypatia, 2010): an extension and critique of Aníbal Quijano’s concept of the coloniality of power; Lugones argues that the modern/colonial gender system imposed the masculine/feminine binary and compulsory heterosexuality as instruments of racial and economic domination over colonized peoples; prior to this imposition, many cultures recognized categories of gender and sexuality that cannot be reduced to the man/woman pair.
- World-travelling (“Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception,” Hypatia, 1987): the capacity — often forced upon women of color — to move between different “social worlds,” that is, different systems of meaning, norm, and perception; Lugones transforms this skill, initially lived as imposition, into a philosophical and ethical method for recognizing the other.
- Loving perception (1987): opposed to the “arrogant perception” that reduces the other to the observer’s own categories, loving perception involves seeing the other within their own world, accepting the ambiguity and displacement this demands; it forms the ethical foundation of world-travelling.
- Intersectionality as fusion: against additive readings that treat race, gender, and class as independent axes whose sum explains oppression, Lugones insists that these axes are fused — mutually constituted within the modern/colonial structure; to separate race analytically from gender is already to reproduce the colonial logic that fragments colonized bodies.
- Resistance and active subjectivity (Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, 2003): against theories that define colonized subjects solely as victims or absences, Lugones highlights everyday practices of resistance — the “limen,” creativity at the margins — as forms of agency that elude the hegemonic frame without needing to deny the reality of oppression.
- Decolonial feminism: a collective rather than individual project aimed at dismantling colonial structures and patriarchy simultaneously; it is not enough to “add women” to decolonial analysis, nor to “add race” to feminism — both agendas must be rebuilt from the standpoint of colonized women.
Influenced by
- Aníbal Quijano — the coloniality of power and racial/social classification
- Gloria Anzaldúa — borderlands, nepantla, and Chicana women-of-color feminism
- Frantz Fanon — colonial phenomenology and the racialization of bodies
- Enrique Dussel — the philosophy of liberation and critique of Eurocentrism
- Women-of-color feminism (This Bridge Called My Back, Anzaldúa and Moraga, 1981)
Influenced
- Latin American decolonial feminism (Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, Rita Segato)
- Gender and coloniality studies in the Global South
- Decolonial queer theory
- The Modernity/Coloniality research program (Mignolo, Maldonado-Torres)
- Afro-feminist researchers in Latin America
Works
“Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception” (Hypatia, vol. 2, no. 2, 1987) — her seminal essay; Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions (2003), a collection bringing together her foundational texts; “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System” (Hypatia, vol. 22, no. 1, 2007); “Toward a Decolonial Feminism” (Hypatia, vol. 25, no. 4, 2010).
See also
Aníbal Quijano, Enrique Dussel, Frantz Fanon, Gayatri Spivak, Iris Marion Young