The conquest of the Americas took place in several fields: from territorial colonization to cultural, economic, religious, and knowledge impositions. Based on the conquers' logic, language, memory, and the imaginary are forged, organizing time and space as absolutes, within a linear and universal narrative. Such universal narrative is maintained and reproduced by global linear thinking, which inaugurated the idea of modernity and Westernization.

Thus, modernity is not a universal concept, but regional, with the limitations that its historical, cultural, political, and geographical contexts impose. The limitations intrinsic to colonial-Eurocentric paradigms, however, did not prevent modernity from imposing itself as a universal process on plural realities and its parts, allowing only one logic to govern peoples. The production of knowledge becomes homogeneous and detached from local realities and their (internal and external) relationships.

Such hierarchies of knowledge (mainstream/dominant knowledge versus subaltern knowledge) can also be noticed in feminist studies, particularly between dominant/mainstream feminisms, generally from the Global North, and subaltern feminisms from the Global South, considering that the Global North and the Global South encompass geopolitical and ontological hierarchies. Mainstream feminisms are generally produced by privileged (white) women from dominant social groups, and those feminisms work according to these women’s interests and agendas, without engaging in a solid dialogue with marginalized women, such as proletariat workers, women of color, immigrants, lesbians, transgenders, prisoners, and other subaltern women.

Decolonial feminism on the other hand, is focused on the discussions of feminism that is centered on coloniality and colonial differences. Therefore, decolonial feminism seeks to unmask the colonial-social-racial-geopolitical limitations of mainstream feminisms, which are devoted mainly to white, Eurocentric, bourgeois women, denouncing their (intentional or not) silencing of diverse issues faced by marginalized women.

^{Source: “Support is Everything” by Ipsita Divedi, licensed CC BY-NC-SA available at: https://thegreats.co/artworks/support-is-everything}

Within the decolonial perspective, gender issues are focused on coloniality, which naturalizes power structures that produce the subjugation and sufferance of women and LGBITQ+ people. Coloniality of gender also incorporates debates on intersectionality and intersexuality, including critical discussions on the limitations of binary sex logics, hegemonic heteronormativity, hierarchies of race and social conditions. María Lugones explains the proposed feminist agenda for the decolonial perspective, “as I move […] to a decolonial feminism, I think about feminism from and at the grassroots, and from and at the colonial difference, with a strong emphasis on ground, on a historicized, incarnate intersubjectivity”.

Feminism from a decolonial perspective thus questions and brings to light women’s issues with a broader, more inclusive field of action, which is not limited to discussions, for example, of neoliberal feminists (usually White, middle-class women based on liberal, neoliberal and/or and modern paradigms), whose struggle is focused on the under-(or problematic-)representation of women in different contexts, such as the workplace, politics, or international organizations. Without questioning the relevance of these and other struggles fought by mainstream feminism, which do not encompass a decolonial view, mainstream feminisms create new hierarchies, this time between privileged and underprivileged feminists. In fact, they have been proved incapable of discussing issues such as systemic racism, violence against women of color and social and historical issues that are of core importance particular to Latin American plural realities.

María Lugones is considered one of the most important representatives of Latin American feminisms who belongs to the decolonial debate. She is an Argentinian researcher who focuses on the gap in decolonial debates on gender, starting from a critique of Anibal Quijano, thus proposing the notion of a colonial/modern gender system, in which gender itself is a colonial and violent imposition (and, in some cases, gender itself is a modern-colonial creation, as will be briefly discussed in this text, on the considerations of Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí’s contributions), “consistently and contemporarily used to destroy peoples, cosmologies, and communities as the building ground of the ‘civilized’ West”. Her analysis on feminism is mainly on race-and-gender-based oppressions, centered on the colonial difference.

Lugones unmasks ontological (gender) hierarchies naturalized by the colonial/modern system. Modernity organizes the world ontologically in terms of atomic, homogeneous, separable categories, including (Western) men and (Western) women. The colonial “civilizing mission” was represented by the brutal access to people’s bodies through exploitation, sexual violation, control of reproduction, and systematic terror, also using hierarchical gender dichotomy as a judgment. Gender differences were introduced in some places in which no form of gender hierarchy existed before: the gender system imposed through colonialism includes the subordination of females in all aspects of life.

Such colonial subordination encompasses cultural realities, religious beliefs, language, and sexuality, themes explored, for instance, by Gloria Anzaldúa, a great influence to María Lugones. However, it is worth mentioning that not all women from the Global South suffer the same forms of coloniality; there are women who experience different dimensions and contexts of oppression and violence creating Norths within the South. Just to cite recent examples in Brazil, the country has been struggling to rescue poor domestic workers, often Afro-Brazilian, from slavery, at the same time, national and international media has exposed stories of abuse involving one of the most famous Brazilian businessmen in the world, Samuel Klein, who sexually explored young poor girls. Lugones thus seeks to forge a feminism from the borders, focused on women who are marginalized and subalternized by such system.

Perhaps one of Lugones’ main contributions to the decolonial perspective was also her understanding on the field’s gap on gender discussions. Despite adopting Quijano’s coloniality of power as the base of her decolonial feminist theory, María Lugones does not consider Quijano’s analysis on gender satisfactory to comprehend potential decolonial feminism discussions. The author considers Quijano's gender analysis reductionist; his discussions, according to her, are limited to the assumption that women are resources, and the exclusively male dispute for the control of sex. In doing so, Lugones believes Quijano reiterates, at least in part, certain Eurocentric understandings about gender and sex, especially with regard to their biological logic, and decolonial feminism should go beyond Eurocentric limitations.

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, a Nigerian sociology professor, who researches from an African perspective, is also an academic who has greatly contributed to the decolonial discussions on gender. In 2020, she published as a chapter in the same book Lugones published her “Coloniality and Gender” paper, entitled “Conceptualizing Gender: the Eurocentric Foundations of Feminist Concepts and the Challenge of African Epistemologies”, in which she re-forges gender and co-related concepts based on African cultural experiences and epistemologies.

But perhaps one of her main contributions to feminist discussions from a decolonial perspectives is related to her idea on “non-gender equality”, found in her own culture and community, Yorubá. As Oyěwùmí explains, colonized peoples were not as homogenic (in sex, sexuality and gender dimensions) as the colonizers’ narrative implies. Modern-colonial history is focused on the male perspective, ignoring women’s participation, even though colonization impacted both men and women. Oyěwùmí argues that, from the beginning of the colonial process, colonized women were excluded from state structures, which were:

in sharp contrast to the state organization Yorùbá, in which power was not determined by gender. The isolation of women from state structures was particularly devastating because the very nature of the state was undergoing a transformation. Unlike the Yorùbá state, the colonial state was despotic. The African males appointed as chiefs by the colonizers had much more power over the people than was traditionally conferred upon them.

Oyěwùmí thus questions the cross-cultural category validity of patriarchy itself, since Yorubá society did not consider gender as a principle to organize itself before the colonization. Therefore, patriarchy, as we know it, is a Eurocentric construct that is not natural or even universal. Western domination not only imposes its interpretation of culture, economy, and knowledge, but also of gender, and the exclusion of women from the political life in societies such as Yoruba facilitated colonizers’ control on the globe. Gender, therefore, is an essential device of dominance, producing hierarchies even where there was none.

As briefly explored in this text, María Lugones and Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí are essential authors to better understand the discussions on gender from a decolonial perspective in African and Latin American plural and subalternized realities. Historically, mainstream feminisms have excluded subaltern women through a universalist discourse, further marginalizing women who suffer with colonial differences, including, women of color, poor women, lesbians, among many others. Additionally, within the decolonial perspective, gender discussions were scarce and, as Lugones in particular has shown, sometimes even replicating Eurocentric paradigms of gender. Therefore, their works’ contributions are vast and essential to a better understanding of feminisms from the Global South.

Laís Rodrigues is a PHD student at the Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra and a PHD candidate at the Business School of PUC-Rio.