“Gender itself is a colonial introduction”
So who is Maria Lugones and who is Anibal Quijano and what do they say? Have a JSTOR preview:
The coloniality of power is understood by Anibal Quijano as at the constituting crux of the global capitalist system of power. What is characteristic of global, Eurocentered, capitalist power is that it is organized around two axes that Quijano terms “the coloniality of power” and “modernity.” The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social classification of the population of the planet in terms of the idea of race, a replacing of relations of superiority and inferiority established through domination with naturalized understandings of inferiority and superiority. In this essay, Lugones introduces a systemic understanding of gender constituted by colonial/modernity in terms of multiple relations of power. This gender system has a light and a dark side that depict relations, and beings in relation as deeply different and thus as calling for very different patterns of violent abuse. Lugones argues that gender itself is a colonial introduction, a violent introduction consistently and contemporarily used to destroy peoples, cosmologies, and communities as the building ground of the “civilized” West.
That could all be about gender as the rules for how people of each sex are supposed to act, look, talk and all the rest of it. There certainly are such rules, and it’s highly likely that colonizers considered the rules of the colonized to be all wrong and in need of correction by the enlightened Europeans who wanted to exploit and enslave them. (Lugones seems to be saying the very idea of rules of any kind was a European invention, which seems highly unlikely.)
That does not, of course, translate to “men are women if they say they are.” I suspect we’ll find that Butler relies on equivocating between the two – gender as The Rules and gender as “sexual dimorphism.”
Stay tuned.
Yeah, I’d agree that this means that she considers having gender-based norms/rules/concepts at all to be colonial inventions. I point you to “deeply different”, suggesting that she doesn’t believe that males and females are deeply different. This would be consistent with the radical blank slatism associated with Butlerian nonsense.
I suspect you’re right.
As for colonialists introducing rules on gender to the countries they conquered, I can think of a couple right off the bat. When England ruled India, they imposed two very unpopular laws regarding the sexes. First, they outlawed sati, a “ historical practice in which a widow sacrifices herself by sitting atop her deceased husband’s funeral pyre.” Then, they mandated universal education for all, including not only the lower castes but women, who were to be sent to school to learn reading, writing, history, math, etc.
The deposed authorities, particularly the religious authorities, and particularly men, were horrified. I’m not sure the women were equally appalled at what the beastly British had done to destroy the gender norms of their culture.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised, as the entire genderist enterprise seems to be entirely dependent upon a combination of exactly that conflation, bait and switch (where a genderist will switch gears and meanings from one to the other mid-argument), and what Bjarte Foshaug has characterized as “bad puns,” such as TWAW. All heavily fortified with a generous heaping of “because SHUT UP!”
So much of this stems from questions about just how much of a window (if any) our limited, fallible senses offer on what we might call “the real world” external to our selves, and by extension, if there is any such “real world” at all. Maybe we’re just making stuff up as we go along, with various competing narratives vying for dominance, with an arbitrary, jury-rigged, threadbare, patchwork “reality” imposed by fiat on the rest of the universe by the most recent victor in the constant power-struggle for momentary, provisional, epistemic hegemony, and that any thoughts of a real world somehow underpinning anything are naive, mawkish, wishful thinking.
We are indeed fortunate that we live at a stage in our cultural and intellectual development that we can entertain such debates at all; for the vast majority of our lineage’s time on this Earth, an individual indulging in such esoteric cogitation for any length of time would have been soon eaten by a hungry lion unburdened by any such immobilizing doubts or second thoughts.
Heh. Excellent surprise punchparagraph.
Or would he/she? Perhaps that notion itself is just a colonial imposition of epistemic dominance.
So much of this pseudophilosophical pablum is just a variation on radical skepticism. Instead of being a brain in a vat or in the midst of a dream sent by Descartes’s demon, we’re unable to access reality because of narratives. Hierarchies of power fill the same role of interfering with knowledge production. Only where radical skepticism usually questions the reliability of perception, this version attacks knowledge itself.
Of course, it’s a truly sophomoric and self-defeating idea in the same way as the claim that there’s no such thing as objective truth. Logical contradictions have never stopped people from spouting that nonsense, either, though.
It’s funny how they think their own truth claims are somehow magically immune to the effects of the universal acid of doubt and nullity that they so eagerly apply to everyone else’s.
[…] a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on “Gender itself is a colonial […]
Amazing to contemplate how many mediocre academics have built careers on overly complicated versions of the ‘noble savage’ myth.
Call me cynical, but I’m inclined to doubt that there has ever been a cultural expression of power that hasn’t attempted to impose “naturalized understandings of inferiority and superiority” (though of course just what counts as natural is subject to infinite variation).
This kind of thing is basically a sort of uncritical and unserious cottage industry producing, out of a tangle of ambiguities in which nothing is what it seems and there is no foundation in truth, anything you wish. Western colonialism has, of course, largely shaped the modern world, and it is a foolish and ignorant prejudice to pretend that it was necessarily benign, for it definitely was not, or that it does not have continuing effects, which, again, are certainly not necessarily benign. But one might ask the Vietnamese about the constant pressure and attempts at conquest on the part of China over the centuries. Or consider the present Chinese suppression of the Uighurs, or Burmese suppression of the Rohingya. Or about present Indonesian behaviour in western New Guinea. Or any number of things. The colonial expansion of imperial Russia, and its continuation under the Soviet Union, seems never to come into the debate, either. It uncritically parrots the unexamined idea that the West, because of colonialism, is responsible for all the ills in the world, and in fact rests on the sentimental fantasy, fundamental to both the extreme right and the extreme left, that real power and agency have resided, and continue to reside, only with the West.