Sep 15, 2020

Understanding Colonization’s Role in the Social Construction of Gender and Race

By Maria a Norris / medium.com
Understanding Colonization’s Role in the Social Construction of Gender and Race

Since the passing of renowned feminist scholar and philosopher María Lugones, I wanted to revisit and remember some of her lessons regarding gender's relationship to colonization. I had the privilege of studying under Professor Pedro DiPietro in the Women & Gender Studies program at Syracuse University, and they often incorporated Lugones’ teachings in class. Among many of her accomplishments, Lugones also provided us with ways to de-code some of the implementations of colonialism on different categories of people. When it comes to gender, Lugones asserted that it wasn’t just a social construct but a colonial imposition; she called this idea the coloniality of gender.

There are many systems of oppression that construct our reality in the western world; they shape our experiences and dictate the way we interact, categorize, and understand our fellow human beings. White supremacy, capitalism, and sexism are some of these systems of oppression, all of which are encompassed by colonialism. The coloniality of gender provides a framework for us to unpack our constructed realities and think critically about the origins of social problems and the legacy of colonialism. With a better understanding of the results (and full history) of racism and sexism embedded in our culture, the more work we can do to unlearn it, and the more we can move towards constructing improved societies, new epistemologies, and realities.

Feminist epistemologies have long identified the contrasts in which the identities of white women and women of color are constructed. Philosopher Kimberlé Crenshaw gifted us with the theory of intersectionality back in 1989, and queer feminist scholar Moya Bailey coined the term “misogynoir” to describe how both gender and race play roles in bias directed towards black women. But how does the coloniality of gender help explain this difference?

 

Lugones describes what she calls a “Colonial/Modern Gender System” in which European colonizers and BIPOC are categorized into a dimorphic gendered “light side” and a non-human (and therefore non-gendered) “dark side”. In other words, women of color are categorized as genderless and dehumanized by Western society as a result of the imposition of colonization, while white women are in a category of gender that is understood as everything that white men are not. It’s in this way that the Colonial/Modern Gender System serves as an explanation for the specific gender violence and sexism experienced by women of color.

 

To understand this concept further, let’s first take a look at the “light side”. Lugones lists biological dimorphism, heterosexualism, and patriarchy as characteristics of the light side, but what does she mean by white women being seen as everything white men aren’t? Sociologist and gender scholar Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyèwùmí has a great article that further explains the notion of the gendered categorization of white bourgeoisie women as a negation of white men, and why white women were given the category of gender in the first place.

 

Nuclear family structures are another social construction leftover from colonialism. In Eurocentric capitalist society, the nuclear family is headed by the man, with his wife and children as his subordinates and there is a dichotomy that exists between the woman and the man in a nuclear family. The man is physically strong, resourceful, dominant, the property owner, who operates in the public sphere, and therefore the woman (mother/wife) is not. Instead, she is fragile, delicate, submissive, the property owned, operating in the private sphere of the home.

 

The identities of upper-class women were constructed based on their relationship to (or the presence or absence of) men. For example, even today we still put the prefix “Miss”, “Ms”, and “Mrs” in front of women’s names while men only have “Mr”. Traditionally, taking the man’s last name in marriage is meant to show the man’s ownership over the woman. Again, this is a Euro-centered cultural phenomenon that has been imposed.

 

The negatively defined category of “woman” as being “everything that men aren’t” also illustrates the patriarchy and sexism that thrive in upper-class white nuclear families. In Professor DiPietro’s class, we concluded that if a definition of something relies on the definition of something else in order to define it, and if it’s merely a negation of something else, it’s a weak definition and points to nothing.

 

The dichotomy of the man and the mother/wife is the staple of the nuclear family institution, and mothers/wives serve as reproductive machines to enforce the continuation of this institution and white supremacy. In other words, European upper-class women were gendered because of their ability to have children which would assist to continue the rule of white supremacy. They fit within the framework of the upper class Euro-centered nuclear family because of this function, and it’s one of the reasons why we have such a heavily enforced gender binary system still today, so much so that transgender and nonbinary people face abhorrent levels of violence and discrimination, while intersex people are forced to be “corrected” into the binary with unethical surgeries.

With white men on the highest point of the hierarchy of colonialism, women subordinate beneath them, black and brown bodies of the “dark side” are genderless and left out of the hierarchy completely.

There are several ideas and examples in Lugones’ “Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System” that further explain why and how the colonial gender system places the colonized in the dark side of dehumanization and genderlessness. Lugones uses two main frameworks in her analysis, one gathered from various third world women of color feminists and the other from sociologist Anibal Quijano’s idea of “coloniality of power”. Quijano’s coloniality of power tells us that colonizers created the category of race through the domination of the colonized, with “European”, and “Indian” and “African” as “racial’ identities” that became a part of every aspect of social existence as it spread across the globe. Lugones expanded and improved on Quijano’s idea to include gender.

It’s crucial to re-position and reframe our knowledge to the pre-colonial societies before colonialism befell them. Before colonization, many indigenous societies operated with women at the center of communities. Sexualities outside of what we’ve come to understand as “heterosexual” not only existed but were often widely accepted and honored. But with colonization, heterosexualism, Euro-centered capitalism, the coloniality of power categorization system dismantled every aspect of these societies.

 

Colonizers eroded and systematically destroyed the structures of the women-centered communities and societies and left white supremacy and patriarchy in its wake. Colonized people were regarded as being closer to animals than men and women, and were closer to nature than to humanity. This is what is meant by the genderless dark side. Operating under the coloniality of power, colonizers were free to access the bodies of colonized women, and they were seen as “unrapable” since they were not seen as human.

 

It wasn’t until later on through the centuries that colonized women of color were shaped into “othered” women — women who were highly eroticized with “insatiable” sexualities, and therefore still always sexually accessible to white men. This is why stereotypes like the Jezebel served as further justification for colonizers to continue to use sexual violence as a means of domination of the colonized.

Culturally, domestic workers, sex workers, and proletariat working-class women of color — societies ‘undesirables’ aren’t viewed as pure, delicate, and feminine in the same way as wealthy white women are. Because working-class women lacked the delicate, fragile, gendered female traits of the upper-class white woman, they did not fit into the counterparts within the Eurocentric upper-class nuclear family.

The main takeaways from Lugones’ coloniality of gender are the importance of understanding its main purposes: to help maintain domination over sex, authority, labor, intersubjectivity (how people psychologically relate to each other) as well as their resources and products. As a society, fully understanding our history in regards to gender, sexuality, and race and the impact of colonization is the first step in healing the harm of the past and building a just future for every human being. We have María Lugones and many other feminist scholars to thank for initiating these realizations and helping us begin to take that step. 

Rate article 
Gender
Trending Articles
Videos that Explain Things
Honest Government Ads
New Videos
Subscribe for $5/mo to Watch over 50 Patron-Exclusive Films

Become a Patron. Support Films For Action.

For $5 a month, you'll gain access to over 50 patron-exclusive documentaries while keeping us ad-free and financially independent. We need 350 more Patrons to grow our team in 2024.

Subscribe here

Your support helps grow our 6000+ video library, which is 99% free thanks to our patrons!