Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System
2007
First Published
4.48
Average Rating
23
Number of Pages
"In a theoretico-praxical vein, I am offering a framework to begin thinking about heterosexism as a key part of how gender fuses with race in the operations of colonial power. Colonialism did not impose precolonial, european gender arrangements on the colonized. It imposed a new gender system that created very different arrangements for colonized males and females than for white bourgeois colonizers. Thus, it introduced many genders and gender itself as a colonial concept and mode of organization of relations of production, property relations, of cosmologies and ways of knowing. But we cannot understand this gender system without understanding what anibal Quijano calls “the coloni- ality of power” (2000a, 2000b, 2001–2002). The reason to historicize gender formation is that without this history, we keep on centering our analysis on the patriarchy; that is, on a binary, hierarchical, oppressive gender formation that rests on male supremacy without any clear understanding of the mechanisms by which heterosexuality, capitalism, and racial classification are impossible to understand apart from each other. The heterosexualist patriarchy has been an ahistorical framework of analysis. To understand the relation of the birth of the colonial/modern gender system to the birth of global colonial capitalism—with the centrality of the coloniality of power to that system of global power—is to understand our present organization of life anew." — Maria Lugones
Avg Rating
4.48
Number of Ratings
44
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