The category of woman presents itself as universal, a natural kinship stretching across cultures and centuries. Yet this apparent universality, María Lugones insists, is one of colonialism's most durable achievements—a category forged in the encounter between European conquest and the peoples it sought to dominate.

Lugones, an Argentine philosopher who spent decades thinking between languages, traditions, and activist communities, developed a body of work that refuses the tidy separations between race, gender, and coloniality. Her writing does not merely critique Western feminism; it reconstructs the terrain on which feminist analysis becomes possible.

To read Lugones seriously is to accept that gender is not a stable substrate onto which racial or colonial differences are added, but rather a scheme of intelligibility produced through colonial violence itself. This reframing carries consequences that reach far beyond academic feminism—into how we conceive solidarity, subjectivity, and the very grammar of political life.

Building on Aníbal Quijano's concept of the coloniality of power, Lugones argues that gender itself is a colonial imposition rather than a pre-existing structure that colonialism simply modified. Before European conquest, many Indigenous societies organized social life through categories that do not map onto the male-female binary or its accompanying hierarchies of rationality, embodiment, and civility.

The colonial gender system, in her analysis, operates through a dark side and a light side. On the light side, European bourgeois women were constructed as fragile, sexually pure, and confined to reproductive labor—simultaneously subordinated and elevated as the standard of humanity. On the dark side, colonized women were rendered non-human, hyper-sexualized, and available for labor and violence in ways that placed them outside the category of woman entirely.

This asymmetry matters because it exposes how mainstream feminism, when it takes the light side as its implicit starting point, inherits the very colonial logic it claims to contest. Demands for equality with men presuppose a subject already legible within a gender system whose intelligibility was purchased through the dehumanization of others.

Lugones is not offering a historical footnote but a methodological challenge. If gender is coloniality, then feminist analysis cannot proceed by isolating gender from race, from indigeneity, from the ongoing dispossession of land and epistemologies. The categories themselves are the site of struggle.

Takeaway

Gender is not a neutral structure that colonialism happened to bend; it is one of colonialism's central instruments, and to treat it otherwise is to inherit the conquest we claim to critique.

Before her decolonial writings, Lugones developed the notion of world-traveling in a 1987 essay that remains one of feminist philosophy's most quietly radical contributions. A world, in her usage, is not a geography but a construction of social life—a set of practices, meanings, and possibilities within which one is a particular kind of person.

Those situated at the margins of dominant worlds, she observes, learn to travel between worlds as a condition of survival. A woman of color moving between her family's kitchen and a predominantly white academic seminar is not simply changing contexts; she is inhabiting different constructions of herself, sometimes finding herself playful and fluent, sometimes rigid and unintelligible.

Lugones contrasts this traveling with what she calls arrogant perception—the imperial habit of perceiving others only as they appear within one's own world, reducing them to what serves one's own purposes. Against this, she poses loving perception: the willingness to travel into another's world and encounter them as they construct themselves there.

The concept refuses the false comforts of empathy-as-projection. Loving perception is neither identification nor understanding-from-outside; it is the difficult, sometimes failing labor of being with another in the terms of their own self-construction.

Takeaway

To perceive another lovingly is to travel to their world rather than summoning them into yours—a practice that requires accepting one's own strangeness in the encounter.

The political payoff of Lugones's framework emerges in her later concept of coalitional consciousness—a mode of collective struggle that does not require homogenizing its participants under a single identity or oppression. Coalition, for Lugones, is not the aggregation of pre-formed subjects but the practice through which resistant subjectivities are formed together.

This matters because traditional coalition politics often demands a temporary suspension of difference in the name of unity, only to find that the suspended differences reassert themselves as internal hierarchies. Lugones's alternative treats difference not as an obstacle to solidarity but as its condition: we ally precisely because our worlds are non-identical and our situated knowledges partial.

The framework draws on her lived participation in feminist activism among women of color, where the failures of both liberal and radical feminism to hold space for colonial difference generated the need for new theoretical tools. Coalition becomes a form of resistance to coloniality itself, insofar as coloniality operates by fragmenting and hierarchizing the oppressed.

What emerges is an ethics of solidarity that is neither universalist nor separatist. It insists on the reality of shared struggle while refusing to purchase that sharing through the erasure of the specific worlds from which each participant travels.

Takeaway

Solidarity worth its name is not the discovery of sameness beneath difference but the ongoing practice of resisting together while remaining differently situated.

Lugones's work does not offer a finished theory so much as a practice—one that demands we hold gender, race, and coloniality together as a single knot rather than parsing them into separable variables. This is a considerable intellectual and political demand.

What she gives us in return is a feminism that can name its own historical conditions without collapsing into paralysis. The coloniality of gender is not a wall but a diagnosis, and diagnosis is the first movement toward otherwise possibilities.

To engage her thinking is to accept that our categories of self-understanding are contested terrain. The question is not whether to think from within that contest, but how to do so with the loving perception her work models.