Argentine feminist philosopher. The coloniality of gender, “world”-travelling, and what decolonial feminism asks of you.
María Lugones (1944–2020) was born in Argentina and spent her career in the United States, where she wrote some of the most useful philosophy anyone has produced about moving between worlds you do not fully belong to. Her 1987 essay Playfulness, “World”-Travelling, and Loving Perception is about exactly that: what it takes to see a person as they are in their own world rather than as they appear in yours.
Her later work names the coloniality of gender — the argument that gender as we inherit it was not a neutral fact that colonisation happened to carry along, but part of the apparatus itself, imposed on peoples who organised themselves otherwise. Decolonial feminism, in her hands, is not an add-on to feminism. It is the claim that you cannot undo one without undoing the other.