Decolonial Feminism(s) as Border Thinking

• In Event: Decolonial Theories and Pedagogies of Liberation: Resistance and Re-Existence

Abstract

In this essay, I examine the trajectory of decolonial feminism(s), as a concept and movement, starting with the work of Maria Lugones (2024), who linked European colonialism to gender roles, to the more recent amplifications of decolonial feminism(s) by Karina Ochoa and others (see Lima, Quezada and Roth, 2024). As Ochoa (2018) notes, there is no ‘one’ decolonial feminism. While decolonial theory has had a significant and important role in delinking from monolithic and unitary analyses of global exploitation (capitalism), the concepts of gender and feminism, continue to evolve within this framework, grounded in the lived experiences of women around the globe. While many women writers and activists may not articulate their analyses and movements as decolonial per se, this essay will look more at substance than the politics of naming, to thread the ideas and practices of women who are in the process of building a new conceptual register for understanding and practicing decolonial feminism(s) in formal and informal education. This essay centers the notion of pedagogical relationality in decolonial feminism(s) across geographical boundaries and examines the relationship between the work of women contesting “pedagogies of cruelty” (see Peña-Pincheira and Allweis, 2022), disrupting colonial pedagogies (see Ford and Jaramillo, 2023), and/or advocating for the centrality of “ancestralidad” in higher education (Motta, 2018).The field of decolonial feminism(s) crosses national boundaries and geographic polarities. Of interest to me, in particular, is examining decolonial feminism(s) as a form of border thinking, where women occupy multiple physical spaces, but no less important, philosophical and epistemological spaces as well. In this vein, I will not only examine current forms of decolonial feminism(s) as border thinking but trace this vein back to the work of Gloria Anzaldúa and others within the women of color feminist movement in the United States and abroad, who explored the metaphysical dimensions of ‘being neither here nor there’ as a central aspect of reprieve and transcendence from patriarchal and sexual domination. Of import, is an analysis of the relevance of vision, for a world we may not currently occupy, but one that remains in the realm of possibility to undo the internal and institutional structures in place that sustain patriarchal domination. This essay, therefore, aims to bridge two concepts that fall under the general awning of decolonial thought (decolonial feminism and border thinking) as the conceptual terrain in which feminism(s) emerge, grounded in the lived experiences of women around the globe, in the embodiment of historical and material relations across multiple and intertwined spaces.

Author

• Nathalia E Jaramillo, Kennesaw State University