Coloniality of gender

The coloniality of gender is a concept developed by feminist philosopher María Lugones, which she defines as "the analysis of racialized, capitalist, gender oppression", while the process of potentially overcoming this phenomenon can be defined as "decolonial feminism". Central to these terms is the definition and recognition of indigenous social structures and their relation to land, and the articulation of how these epistemologies occupy an oppositional consciousness to colonial systems of social, sexual, ecological, spatial, and temporal hierarchy. María Lugones describes this difference as the 'oppressing ←→ resisting' relationship.

According to Glen Sean Coulthard in his essay For the Land: the Dene Nation's Struggle for Self-Determination, Indigenous resistances against "capitalist imperialism" can be understood as struggles surrounding the question of land and knowledge-based practices encompassing the "relation to one another and our surroundings in a respectful, nondominating and nonexploitative way." Coulthard defines this system of relationality as "grounded normativity" stating, "the late Lakota philosopher Vine Deloria Jr. argues that one of the most significant differences that exist between Indigenous and Western metaphysics revolves around the central importance of land to Indigenous modes of being, thought, and ethics." Further to this, Coulthard argues that Indigenous "philosophies of nonoppression" are defined through spatial as well as temporal relationships. Lugones refers to these Western-versus-Indigenous epistemologies as 'cosmologies' in her essay Toward a Decolonial Feminism, where she analyzes these structures in relation to the colonial imposition of gender binaries on Indigenous communities.

According to Lugones, colonial modernity is positioned as "the dichotomous hierarchy between the human and the non-human", summarized by Lugones' use of the term "colonial difference". Lugones states that within the context of colonization in the Americas and the Caribbean, this hierarchy was employed as a tactic of subordination of the colonized to "Western man". Lugones argues that related hierarchies were constructed by colonizers to create a binary division between men and women, describing this distinction as "a mark of the human and a mark of civilization. Only the civilized are men or women," which excluded Indigenous peoples and Africans as being non-human animals, while upholding the status of "bourgeois European women" as passive reproductive servants of "white bourgeois" male colonizers. According to Lugones, colonial relations of power constructed through such binaries comprise the "colonial difference", a term with open-ended origins that Lugones attributes to Walter Mignolo's book Local Histories/Global Designs.

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