Decolonial Feminism: A Critical Epistemological Turn in Latin America

This essay, published by Afterall on July 1, 2020, is a revised version of a text originally appearing in Revista Solar. It argues for decolonial feminism as an epistemological break from Western, white, bourgeois feminism. The author, Yuderkys Espinosa Miñoso, synthesizes contributions from thinkers such as María Lugones, who first proposed the term and developed the concept of the modern/colonial gender system, building on Aníbal Quijano's coloniality of power. Decolonial feminism questions the universalist assumptions of mainstream feminism, including the idea of a single origin in the European Enlightenment and the goal of women's rights as a linear progression. Instead, it insists that gender, race, and coloniality are co-constitutive, forming a single matrix of oppression. The essay reviews work by Breny Mendoza on the coloniality of democracy, Ochy Curiel on decolonial methodology, Rita Segato on patriarchy and coloniality, Aura Cumes on Mayan cosmovision, Celenis Rodríguez on gender policies as colonial technologies, and Iris Hernández on citizenship and sexual diversity movements in Chile. The author calls for a feminism that is complicit with decolonization movements in Abya Yala (the Americas) and that reinterprets history from a critical perspective on modernity's racist and Eurocentric nature.