, spRtNc/suMMtR

oro

'Ihe University of Nebraska

I'ublished by
Press

Eo Peter Ska{ish
University of California, Berkeley

CRITICAL H U MAN ITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

qu parle

voLUMI r8, NUMaIR

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"Spcaking at rbc BorderMillThese Vords lleach . . ." by Cho Haejoang ard Ueno Chi_
zuko origrnally appearcd in both Korcan and J apanese as Cyunggye-ae.sco mal hantla
(Seoul:Sacng;ak-ui Namu Chr.ran, zoo4) aud Kotoba,ut todok d: Kar.Nichi
fmr
nisuto ofuku shokan lTokyo: Iwanami Shoten, zoo4 ) respcctivcly. Ir has bcen ranslatecl
and reprinred here by pcrmission of the orgnal pubhshers.

carlier foln in rhe journal of thc Sociology Deprtn)cnr of the Universidad Mavor San
Andrs in La Paz, Bolivia,'tenas Sociales 19 lMy ry9 . Rcpriured by pernrissiol of

Pcoples and rr)fomen in

"Tle Norio'r of 'l.ighrs' and rhe Prdoxes of postcolonial Modeflrity: Indigenous

olivia" by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqu onginally appeared in an

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rzo

SpRTNG/SUMMtiR

20ro vol_.rg, No.2

old

Ir; livirg ;hc"ir'",,

rniversity grdures devoed ro,.dropping

ou.. of Japal.s capiralisr
,oLi",
and consumerist sysrens arrd survivirg

P^RLI

liberation),
Grandmcrthels,,series_

65.

designated special areas eserved

fo, tf,e
ties, and pregnant or nursing mothers,

inJapanese.

H"y"o M,y"."kl.

;;;;.'- "

"tde.l

pe.ron,

,_
l,,rr,1-

are terms of endeament atached

afte

In Japan, the English word silzr

is used ro denote sevices creared
especially for rhe elderl perhaps
wih a eference ," ,lr" ,ill""ri..1",
of an elderly person,s hai, ,,Slver scats,,
i" prfrf. ,rrrrprr."

names

64. Both "-don" ad

Valtey o[ tbe Vindt, dir.

,,_cltmt"

63. The reference is rotheanimared frlmKdzeno

tanino Naushia INau_
sicaa of the

in Miwa

62. Thjs-text appears as a cap[ion ]ccompanying

oue of the phocographs
yanagi's .,My

Jrpr""r"

;;r;;io";.ii,n,",r,
thinker and poet, a forentnner of
Japan's wuman ribu lwon'rcn's

of rhe u".U

.."n,
"to do,', but which also gramrnarically
constirutes the acrive part of
rnny other vebs; whereas, for exanpl.,
i" E"glirh ,h;;";;;;. ..r.
love," "to bathe,,, ,,ro stud,, ;n Kor""n
;";";;;;;1,
taching hda to the nout forns
of .,love,,, .,bath,,,
";;;;; ; ",
dr. Bon in r927, Morjski Kazue is a
",rd

i.

jobs. The grou was founded

bf *"*a."u,r,r1ri'r"a*,"
Koichi Kamilaga irr rhe r99os.
J9. Thc rem is takeu frorn the wok of thc anarchist
political
Flakim Be who developed the concept
,,,",;;;,;:;;;;.,".*writer
zones" (T\Zs) frorn a hisrorical
"f pi.are urooir*. " '
analyiis of
6o. Hala.is th.e second_person piL,,.al form

QUr

in decolonial thought, as woman of color, my o*n .Jn..rn

*"',
not only ro engage their thought as potentially useful ro ncw
rrans_

Dussel and Anbal Quijano, organized by "r,d

the Department of Ethnic Studies' Chicana/o Latina/o Srudies program, had produced
in
me, and anothe feminist colleague the impression
thar they knew
little about the U.S. civil rights movements, and mainly abour the
Afican Amrrican struggles. They apparently knew nothing
about
the crucial feminist and queer contributions of U.S.
won e,l"of .ol_
or to the rcial, gender, and sexual civil rights struggles.
As these
encounrcrs were organized to explore intellectual bridge building

E, PREZ

In its preliminary vesion this essay was wrirten for a panel

at the
Ameican Academy of Religion in hono of Enrique Dussel,s
im_
portant and necessary work on the occsion of his seventieth
birthday in zoo4.1 Given that I am not a philosopber, theologian,
or
historian, all areas in which Dussel holds clegrees
tJ *i.h
"nda
he has contributed prominentl and that I w, th.n
newcorl_
er to. his work, I could only imagine that I was asked to join
the
panel of his specialists and collaborators n ode to
thar
"nrure
a U.S. feminist of color and queer-centered engagernent
with his
work was represented. Various symposia
l..tures by Enrique

LAU RA

Enrique Dussel's Etica de la liberacin,

U.S. Women of Color Decolonizing practices,
and Coalitionary politics amidst DTfference

disproportionately heteronormative male-centered sp"ces e*ercis_

ing their privileges in this regard, by refusing to seriously engage
with racialized gender and sexuality themselves, unwittingiy repro_
duces these inequities, in assigning feminist queer critique to the
negatively gendered and sexed spaces of intellectual labo.
I have come to think that that labor belongs to us all, regardless
of our own gender, sexualit racialization, and other subject posi_
tionings or identifications. And fom this perspective I want to ar_
gue that gender and sexuality critique is at the heart of decolonizing
politics and that it is a labor that we must unclertake collectively, in
solidarit and alongside the critique of our own subject formation.

cal thought seriously as central to the work of decolonization. How

do we move from agreement that patriarchy and heteonormativ_
ity are oppressive, beyond imagining that this democatizing aim is
accomplished by identifying gender and sexuality in a laundry list
of oppressions? Inviting representative speakers as the exception to

of color's cultural, intellectual, and political work, and especially

effacing women of color,s and queer work.
The rest of the all-male panel in fact did not integrate a Latin
American, Third World, o U.S. Third World (also known as U.S.
women of color) feminist and quee r critique as a common basis for
critique of Eurocentism or as a part of any decolonial project of
liberation. As I was the only palelist to engage a critique of patn_
archy and heteronormativit quite apart from centering this con_
cen in feminist of color queer thought,2 I have hee revisited the
conference presenttion and the longer vesion of the cssay from
which it was excerpted, revised in order to elucidate what it might
mean to engage in coalitions that take feminist queer of color criti_

sist and racist stereotypes that assumed the poverty of U.S. people

circulation of knowledges nor be one-way, reproducing past disen_

counrers between U.S. Latinas/os (Chicanas/os and puerto Ricans)
and Latin Ameican intellectuals, where the latter were paternalis_
tic, condescending, and ill-informed in adopting Eurocentic clas_

rationl resistance novelnenrs, but also to clarify what our move_

i.ncnts had discovered, either ir parallel fashion or differently
than
leftist intellectuals and popular rnovenre.rs from the r96os to the
present in Latin America. I was concerned that the transnational

TZ2- QUI PARI,[ SPRING/SUMME 20IO VOI-.I8, NO.2

diffcrent frameworks of what gers to count as knowledge, how

being is understood, both individual and collective. Therefoe a
decolonizing politics must introduce, engage, and circulate previously unseen marginalized and srigmatized notions of.,spirituality," "philosoph" "gender," "sexualit', ,,art,,' or any orher caregory of knowledge and existence. As it simultaneously advances
political, economic, social, and cultual struggles for grearer democracy, I would also argue that a decolonizing politics resides in
an embodied practice rooted in lived and liveable worldviews o
philosophies and is therefore in decolonizing relationship to our
own bodies and to each other as well as ro the natural world. It
is therefore evident in our thought, scholarshp, and inteactions
with each other, nd it is critical and transformtive not only of the
racialization, ethnocentrism, and classism of Eurocentric capitalist
and imperialist cultures, but also of patriarcbal heteronormativity
as central highly normalized forms of domination that historically
precede these and fundamentally structure the logic of colonization
and its aftemath up to the presenr.
It matters tht we learn to walk ou brave decolonizing talks by
taking upon and into ouselves the lessons of the negatively racialized, the negatively gendered, the negarively sexed in this era of increasingly economic, social, cultural, and legal disciplining (in the
Foucauldian sense) of multiculturalit feminism, and queer cul_
tures, where wealthy subjects of these communities are absobed
best in curent U.S. culture, while the vast majority continue to
be castigated through stigmatization, exclusion, violence, and the
burden of multiple oppression. Coalitions that are productive are
based on principled associatons of mutual understanding and respect, not iust dcclarations of solidarity that mean well but because
of privileges of class, "race" or ethnicity, gender, and sexuality do
not engage the work of transforming such subjectivity. What this
means concretcly is the need to take upon ourselves the challenges
made by the variously subjugated of our rimes. In effect, decolonizing practice cannot simply consist in affirming that we do not buy
negative hierarchies of this rype or we refuse to co-producc reality

I also want to propose that a decolonizing politics must produce

new understandings from culturally and politically or ideologically

Prez: l)usspl's Etica de la liberacin

l)^RL[

SplrNG/SUMMIlr

20lo vOL.rg,
NO.2

gin to discover another way to be ,,male,,

or .,heterosexual,,, for
example. It is to feel there must be another
way of being

untouched ouselves, but rather to recognize

ourselves both
the negatively and positively constructed.
"rn,rng
It is to de_racialize
ou_
. selves, un-gender, unsex, and socially rethink ourr.lu.r.
l, i, a fr._

rs we kn()w it; ir is ro think cr.iricalJy enough about racialization,

ferninism, queeness, and economic exploittion that
we are able
ro disarticulate the false projections in clorninant
cultual
notions
regarding its .,others,', but also the companon
false idealizations
and naturalized super_valorizarions of he positivety
,"fiutir.d,
gendered, sexed, ,,able,'-bodied, and prosperus
within the main_
steamed dominant cultural social imaginaries.
And it is to not go

QUI

own actual and seeming differences may also pe.haps

be part of
the part of ny own porenrial subjectivity ,fru,
pr..."i po*, ,"futions have rendered orher o mute within rn".
tn
to iou,
"tt"ndng
otherness in a way that refuses to reduce
or translate
lt"intJ the
sameness that is the farniliar to me, the
possibilities of me know_
ing some orher parr of me is openecl, such
that lf f *"r" rrrrj",r"

;;;;;,T:,:ffi:"::lil,ii:i:

human
and free (debe haber otro modo de ser).3
rWhat I want
to argue for is a profound solidarity based on a
politics of identification with the othencss
of rn. or..
un i__
bricated, interdependenr part of ou own selves
",
and ;;;.".n
as it is a recognition of the ireducible difference
of the oti",
such. I am not referring to difference subsumed
"s
in u unitf U^.a on
dominant cultural tanslations rhr in effect
represses ,Uil r""
different.and/o challenging, rhar renders diff";.n.;
;r;;';i;rn.,or "Toraliry,,' as rightly criticized by both Levinas
and Ou.J, una
many others.4 It is based on a view tht is
not only native to the
Americas, Asia, and Africa but present possibly
even in pre_Chris_
tian "pagan,' and nondominant European u"rrion.
of rob..rlui,
For me, this concepr comes through Buddhism
urra tn. Uyu.on_
cept of In'Laetch, t eies mi otro y(r, you
re my orher sl
^rithar
has beer ecirculated in the Chicana/o movem*i
,pE
,f_r.
present, as part of an Indigenous American
"i
intellectuai_siiritual_
social woldview. That is, rhat though we are
nor ld.nti.rli*. ur.
nonerheless also one. Vhat tl
fate is tied to my o*;,

r24
lberuuu

cultural understanding of "female" and "feminine" as difference

(to the "male," "masculine") would open up the so-called femaleness in me, just as so-called maleness opens ne up to a part of lny
"femaie" self, to some degree, and just as queer politics opens up
the queerness within heterosexuality as well as different and earlier
constructions of a femme or butch lesbian or male gay identit For
me, then, solidarity and coalition inevitably entail the de-gendering
and de-heteronormativizing of our conscious subjectivities, alongsidc class consciousness and awareness of racialization as the idealization and rendering invisible and normal of ',whiteness,, and
the negative marking of Third Vorld difference as b site of the
enactment of racial difference.
Addressing the hidden politics of privilege (evident in the refusal
to see our imbrication, our direct tie to the interests of ,,the other,,)
in and anong ourselves is crucial to rhe task of understanding what
decolonization itself might mean and therefore entail fo a decolonizing practice, or a "praxical" or "theoretico-pracrical,, tlinking
as philosopher Mara Lugones has called it,r because gender and
sexualit alongside class and racialized ethnic differences, are at
the core, not the margin of, or epiphenomenal to, mutually constitutve geopolitical, economic, social, and cultural oppressions.
The feminist critiques of patriarchal racialized imperialism and
capitalism are basic observations in Chicana and African American
feminist thought dating at least to the late r96os and throughout
the r97os. The imbricated, mutually constirutive and simultaneous
functions of these oppressions and their root in the colonial encounter have been analyzed in essays originally published throughout the late 196os and the r97os by Chicanas Anna Nieto Gmez
and Elizabeth "Betita" Martnez, Afr\can Amejcan feminists
Audre Lorde oi the Combahee River Collective ft977) and Angela
Davis and in the landmark anthology Ths Bridge Called My Bck:
t ritirgs by Radical V/omen of Color 98r).6 The powerful contribution of these and other women of color feminisrs of the civil
rights struggles to decolonizing liberation struggles and to decolonizing thought has been carefully reflected upon and theorized, in
its common characteristic "differential consciousness', by which
to survive dominant multiple cultural oppressions and to in turn

f)rczr Dusselt Etica de la

r26

sPRINC/SUMMlR

20rO VOL.l8, NO.2

of contextualizing my approach to, and dialogue with, the work

of Dussel in his Etic de Ia liberacin and a disclosure of my pro_

The panelorganizer invited the panelists to discuss how we had be_

come familiar with Dussel's wok. This account allows for the elucidation of my location and my ideological fomation s a means

Interrupting (Neo)colonizing Inequities within

Latin American and U.S. Latinalo Studies

for the interests of heterosexual men rather than the universal lib_
eration of humanity, as most women have been marginalized from
equal power and burdened with double labor (at home and work),
while queers have been criminalized as degenerates or closeted.

"unknown," uncited, or unengaged in the work of Latina/o and

Larin American male thinkes and dominant cultural Euro_Amer_
ican feminists, with the notable exception of queer male scholars,
like Luis Len, Pedro Di Pietro, and Randy p. Conner. This itself
is symptomatic of the patriarchal, hcteronormative lens still domi_
nating libetatory thought and practice in geopolitically and nationally margtnalized thought as among dominant cultural feminisms
and other progressive thought. Patriarchl and heteronormative
privilege has characterizcd the failues of the Nicaraguan and Cu_
ban socialist revolutions, as it has the U.S. Left and nationalist o
ethnc/"racial" civil rights movements of the United States, as the
emancipation of "mankind,, has literally turned out to be most

liberatory.T
Ghettoized as minority women's o queer reading, U.S. wom_
en of colo feminist and queer decolonal thought remains largely

theory of the "coloniality of power" that nturalizes heteronorma_

tive patriarchy in its use of seemingly universal categories of gender
and sexuality that are in fact ooted in colonialism and are unlike
precolonial and non-Western gender formations tht apper more

U.S. women of color ferninist and queer thought, the philosopher

Mara Lugones has made an important critique of, and interven_
tion to, the development of Peruvian sociologist Anbal
euijano's

wield agile movement through these, in Chela Sandoval's Methodol<;gy of the Oppressetl (zooo). Most ecently, nd also rooted in

QU p^[Lr]

Llira /e Ia Itl.eracin

found investment, my stake, in his iutellectual work in ny local

and gl<-rbal coalitionary concerns.
In doing so I reject the criticism that disclosure of the personalthat is, that rnaking use of the a utobiogra phical as so many women
of color writers have in the United States-unwittingly reinforces the
feminizing by dominant cultural intelligentsia of people of color's intellectual work (whether artisric or scholarly), relegating it to something beneath the philosophical "1" or "we." The historically specific
embeddedness and the interests behind the pretension to transhistorical universalit reason, and rrurh are insights common to U.S.
women of color as they are in posrstructurlist thought. \lomen of
color's autobiographical wriring and locating of self wirhin scholarly
texts has often staked a claim to theory and philosophizing itself,
but through a consciously different protocol thn rht imposed by
academia or Iiterry canons yer knowingly positioning these as altcrnative rchives of knowing nd being. Futhermore U.S. women
of color repeatedly speak from the heart in defense of love, the humane, and against tht which is dehumanizing,
I perhaps first heard about Dussel from Larin American scholrs in the early r99os t the Universiry of Michigan, Ann Arbor,
where I began my teaching career. There I developed and tught
compartive twentieth-century Latin American and U.S. Latina
feminist and queer literatures, as a joint appointment in the De:
partment of Romance Languages and Literarures and the Program
of American Cultures. I had just written a dissertation studying the
relationship between art and political thought and practice among
the right-wing Nicaraguan literary avant-gardists of the late rgzos
and r93os, intending by this focus to contribute to broadening of
the Latin American cnon of literary scholarship that marginalized
Central America and the Caribbean in fvor of Mexico and parts of
the Southern Cone. I had also just emerged from years of graduate
student activism at Harvard University that included opposition to
U.S. military intervention in Cental America and leadership in the
student-led Anti-Apartheid movement. My key contribution was
to lead the successful nonvjolent demand for divestiture through a
petition drive gathering thousands of signatures at the shanty town
we eected in the middle of campus.

I'cre: Dusscl!

r27

fzg

^n,l]

sPItNG/SUMMDIt

20rO VOI-.r8,
NO.2

Latin Ameican classist racism and sexism, alongside patriarchy

with their heroes mocking the cabecits negrds, the black_haired

popular classes as Cortzar put it in Rayuela, more often than not,
I encountered not a liberating miror but rarher the paradox of a

middle class, or in the so-cllcd Boonr writers of Latin America,

enous peasnts as mute objects, foregrounding the white_identified

slow-moving sons of the Indigenous and Afrcan, or in rhe support_

ers of the Mexican Revolution, who largely rendered the Indig_

and thus renrained Eurocentric.

For even in the inspired writings of the great Cuban poet and
political figure Jos Mart, in his descriptions of the thick-blooded,

These, the second half <f the 198os, werc years of building rnulticultural coalitions in both student and community activism. On
campus, many worked together in a Third Vorld student coaliriou, jusr as off-campus, multiethnic ctivisrs worked in Jesse
Jack_
son's historic national Rainbow Coalition, which reached our to
disenfanchised poor white fames and unen.rployed steel work_
ers, as well as to the oppressed ethnic minority groups from which
it sprang. I worked in both of these and orher oganizarions as a
campus and communiry activist.
My undergraduate and graduate training in the field of Larin
American literary studies was both a choice made through my love
of the arts and my desire ro understand their relationship to the
creation of better world, and an affimation against the blatantly
racist marginalization of the Spanish-speaking culrures that I had
experienced in Chicago growing up during the r96os and r97os.
And yet my study of Latin Ameican literature, histor and eco_
nomics, as well as my growing interactions with Latin Americans
and travel to Latin America, lcd me to the painful and repulsive
observation rhat racism and a particularly sharp form of classism
operated there, too. l spire of leftist .,anti-imperialist', cririque of
the United States and its racism, I found that Latin American dis_
couses of mcstizo and mulato or mixed-,,race" national identity
were whar I have since come to call theories of Euromestizaje and
Euromulataje. They were theories of,,racial,'o ethnic and cultu_
al hybridity that maintained European and Euro-American cultural
and physical standards as measuring sticks of progress and beauty

QU

have decimated our harcl-earned and highly successful department.

system through the policy of no longer guaranteeing renewal of

faculty losses. In our already small department, our losses wold

of the neoliberal downsizing of the public and private universiry

Ybarra-Frausto, at Stanford and began developing Chicana/o, U.S.

Latina/o and comparative U.S. Latina/o and Latin America literature and then, later, visual and performance art couses. Dussel,s
Etica de la liberacin en la ed.ad d.e la globalizcin y la exclusin
(Ethics of lberation in the age of globalization and exclLrsion), was
published the year lrefore the Department of Ethnic Studies studentled r998 strike, the 6rst University of California, Berkele protest

Accordingl in the r96os and r97os Chicana/o, alongside African

A.merican, Asian American, and Native American, intellectuals,
with the help of other progressive allies, were pioneering a decolonizing route of studies and consulting Third World sources to build
their knowledge of the histories of oppressed, negarively racialzed
ninority communities and to disarticulate acialized oppressions.
As I learned more bout the interdisciplinary field of U.S. ethnic
studies in rhe r98os, I gravitated toward it iltcreasingly. I took a semester in graduate school to study with a Chicano professor, Toms

and heteronormativity. Funherurore in the fielcls of litcrary and art

historical studies the assumption was, and renrains, that Chicanos
and Puerto Ricans, in parricularr would progress beyond our unimportant or unsophisticatcd cultural ancl intellectual productions
in the United States, once we chieved more "culture." But, we'd
no doubt lways be lagging behind the alrcady anxiously lagging
Latin Americans themselves.
To me the dominant culture of Latin America, frorn which proceeded a good portion of its leftist individuals, was two steps backwad. Unlike those in Latin America who could pass as such and
actually thought of themselves as white, and who evidently contrued to buy into a Eurocentric model of cultural progress and expeienced class or racialized privilege, the U.S. civil rights movements
tught us to not be ashamed of being rz estizo, rhat is, partly Indigenous or African-diasporic, "mulato," or of simple or humble social o economic origins, but rather to be ashamed of trying to pass
for "white" or non-Latino at the expense of rhose who could not.

Itrcz: f)usscl's lllira lc la lil', raciin

t29

20ro vo-.rg, No.2

Lrtln

A...."n

feni;is;;';;j;r..,

b".n,o ..otonlrl ,fr.

embedded as these have

studies programs in the Unired States has

epistemologies tht we hve been handed,

absorption of its historically crucial and trrn.for_utu.

r.holr._
ship and theory. perhaps the mosr difnculr
irnpo.t"nt t"rk of
"rrd
rhe rgjos and r96os civil rights__era erhnic,

ment of Ethnic Studies.

It was quite clear to me before doing so tht a full_time
affiliation with rhe Department of Ethnic Studies would
.orrrtitot" u to*
of intellecrual capital in a largely Eurocentri.
U.C. S.;k.l"y, I
knew that the eld of ethnic studies has ,"nrfor_"I
"1."
of the humanities and social sciences, though it
"u.ri'Ur"n.t,
is discipliniay ,fr"
routine ngation, marginalization, caric"tu.izatiorr,
a'd uncedited

Iiterary studies were housed, to a fulfappointment

ln the Depan_

The strike, called on the thirtieth anniversary of the

foundation of
our department, was unanimously supported by the
Ethnic Studies
facult and I took an active parr in it. Soon after, as a further
act
of solidarit I switched what had been a joint uipoirrtrn"r,t
*itf,
the Departnent of Spanish and portuguese,
*h.r"

QUI pRr,! SRINC/SUMMUR

the r95os,

activism in

,"rria"

b.."lfr",

driven from_ the university. This is the tott

,t u, *ort ing i" irof.,
constantly delegitimizing envionmenrs takes.
Throughut rh;dis_
ciplines, there are still too few of us fo- oppr.rr.a
oi-li;;;;r_

ed.

to frustation, stress, and bouts of defe"tism. er

*.." .l
color, in particular, have encountered haassment
hounJing
even from ou own ethnic srudies colleagues
"nd
and have

*i.i",
,if_.r"-..f",_

The oad to erlnic studies scholaship is lined

*irf, ,i"
graves of drop-outs, even ar rhe professorial
t.u"t, *itt
and eatly deaths, with psychological and physical

the face of entrenched, sometimes subtle,

hegemonic Eurocentrism.

shortly after the annexation tf Mexico in r g4g.

Ethnic srudies s.holarship and teaching are
iiterally

*:",
Mexicrn -oIn.n *ritin!
,p.1,",
1i1 -O:Pl.
"ven.among
about
thetr cultural
", Anglos
disencounters with uncouth. usurping

been

in sexst, homophobic, and racist cultural DarwinisrnThe

critique of Euocentrism has been a foundational
buildins block
of our intellectual and activist work since ,"
,gror-r";in ,1,.
earlier thought of Du Bois ar rhe beginning.f
,h; ;";;;;.*_
tur Amrico Predes in the Texas of the rgzos through

(3O
Etici dc kt Iiberd.itl

with Mexico's Native Anerican and mestiza/o popular

classes,

Stuart Hall, Edward Said, and Gayatri Spivak which has sinilarly
attempted to grapple with the condition of, and democratic possibilities for, the oppressed minority or the ex-colonial within the
center has been very useful.
But with respect to Latin America, Chicana/o intellectuals and
rtists of the r96os and r97os identified with the subjugated there,

duced particularly rch, intellectually coalitionary thought in these

6elds. For ethnic studies, for example, anti- and postcolonial studies, in particular the work of Frantz Fanon, Ngugi \a Thiong'o,

At the University of California,

housed
in
the
state
with
the largest Mexcan American
Berkele
in
the
country
whose
origins
as part of the United
population
States date to the imperlst annexation of Mexico in r848 and
before that, for some, to Indigenous anccstors native to the territor I am the only female Chicana professor in the entiie College
of Letters and Sciences. The numbe of other oppressed rninority
women and queer professors and graduate students on campus is
likewise indefensible. The logic that there aren't enough of us who
are good enough to teach at the best universities, whether because
of supposedly inadequate training or because of racialized and sexst bias against us that holds us to higher standards while simultaneously minimizing and sub-estimating our achievements, is a selffulfilling, self-serving, and unworthy assumption rooted in, and
propagating, the living legacy of patriarchal, racist imperialism.
Part of my practice as an activist intellectual, meaning a consciously decolonizing scholar and teacher, has been to read and
honor and thus incorporate the work of fellow ethnic, gender, and
sexuality minority scholars, not only because they are still the principal experts in these elds but quite pointedly because of their
marginalization in mainstream academia, where their wok is often appropriated or tokenized. To cite them extensively outside of
their own fields has often produced a loss of cultural capital in
the mainstream of a still patriarchal, heteronormative Eurocentic
academy since it won't acknowledge what it doesn't want to know.
But ethnic, gender, and sexuality minority scholars have looked
widel indeed anywhere we might find allies, and this has proed against minority communities.

Itrez: l)ussel's

VOI-,I8, NO.2

Etica is a major work, hailed by philosophers as his most important

work, nd demonstrting the constnt evolution of his thought.e It
is, however, ultimately a work fo philosophers trained in European intellectual histor partcularly in the philosophy of those with
whon.r Dussel's work is nost in dialogue, including Marx, Levinas, Foucault, and Karl-Otto Apel, though Dussel takes care in his
opening pages to note his intention thar it not be for,,minoas,"
but rather that it be an "tica cotidiana, desde y en fauor de las inmensas mayoras de la humanidad excluidas de la globalizacin,,,
a quotidian ethic from and in favor of the immense malorities of
globalization's excluded humanity (8, r 5; my translation).
Arnong many objectives, in Eticd Dussel furthe develops his belief that philosophy is ultirnately erhical, as the most basic task of

Sexuality Make in Liberatory Thought and Struggle

Dussel's Etica, and the Difference Gender and

ican feminists?

so familiar to Chicana intellecruals and artists in conf.rence,

"ni
panels with condescending, upper-middle-class, and,,white,' Mex-

rarher than with its racist elites. Mtry tried to build bridges with
Latin Americau fellow artists, intellectuals, and activists to be lnet
with racist classism. Why should we bother to read more Euocentric Latin American heterosexist and elitist men and wonren? From
Paz to Canclini, the egurgiration of seemingly-in-the-know lelirtling appraisals or dismissals of our work, though shockingly uninformecl, continues to be churned out.s Even among recent Latin
American feminist nd queer theorists, the generalizations or aporias based on little to no knowledge remains srriking about Latinas
and other U.S. women of color.
My interest in Dussel's work, the possibility of coalition with
it, therefore has to begin with how he conceives of gender, sexuality, racism, and social change. I wondered what Dussel,s attitude
to rs ws, and I hoped it would not be yer another condescending
lecture on what we U.S. Latinas/os should do, without having informed itself deeply of what we have done. Would this be yet another U.S. Latina/o-Latin American desencuentro or dis-encounter

QUI PAR,L SPIIN/SUMMIiI 20IO

Dusscl\ Euca dc la lthcracin

color and queer-centered perspective, however also indentifying elements of his work that call for further reflection. I will limit myself to addressing five major tenets of his work, comparing these
whenever possible to similar positions rhat emerge from the U.S.
racial, gender, and sexual civil rights movements and their intellectual and political achievements. I also will discuss the latter in
some detail, when useful.
In El Dussel recognzes the importance of oppression beyond
class or simultaneously with it by other forms of exploitation, exclusion, and marginalization that rende a wide range of people,
uictims, s he puts it.r0 In the U.S. civil rights srruggles organized
through coalitions that cut across differences with greater or lesser
success, in both cases, however, yielding important lessons rhat ae
refevant to my reading of Etic.'fo the degree that coalition across
differences within a negatively racialized group, such as rhe Chicano or African American/Black Power movements, marginalized
and exploited women, and were homophobic, tley were citicized
internall by women of color wthin each of the different groups,
for reproducing patrirchl heteronormativity. To the degree that
the former failed to addess class exploitation, they also produced
a small percentage of economic and social successes aginst the

of intellectual solidarity with his project, from a U.S. feminist of

nd just.
My focus in reading Etica has primarily been to locate key nodes

with both the ethical and the economic, as both ae c<ncerned with
the most basic necessities that make existerce possible. He therefore wites against the unethical and irrational core of capitalist
ideology and the current multinational corporate globalizaton
that in enriching the relatively few impoverishes rhc world,s hungry masses even unto the death. Given the global hegemony of the
European ancl Euro-American of rhe last ve hundred years rhat
ground the misery of the Thid Sorld and of the rnost exploited
within the First World, he reviews his early critiques of the core
myths of Eurocentism that have justied imperialism and capitalism as parts of inevitable historical progress, and racism as narural

humanity is living and thus the obraining of sustenancc that nakes

this possible. Thus, philosophy must fundamentally concern itself

Prcz:

f33

t34

SpRTNc/SUMMEn

zoro voL.rg, No.2

rheir racialized, gendered, sexed, and econo-ic opprersons

among
themselves, between themselves and women in ie Third
World,

of

color worked in coalition unde the rubic .S. Third Vorld

wom_
en in recognition of the similarities in the general phenomena

of

peoples though they are native to the United States)

also characrerizes activisrn from the r96os through the present. U.S.
women

Coalirion as ,,Third World,' (whch ihcludes Native Amencan

last two decades indicating cultural diffsence in the undestand_

ing and practice of both gender and sexuality in Native
American,
African, and other world cuhues.

gender as essentialist and falsely universal, proposing

more ccu_
rately that patriarchy does not oppress women in the same
way or
for the same reasons and that women of colo in the United
States
theefoe experienced .'doubte,",.triple,,, or,.multiple,,
oppres_
sions, in shifting or simultaneous fashion. They ,.go.d
,hri,h.r.
oppressions, differently experienced within the different negatively
racialized groups, were the livng legacies of U.S. imperiali-sm
and
slavery and nation building where Narive American, African,
and
Mexican American were incorporated into the national imginary
in diffeence to racially privileged Euro_American
-orn"rrhod.
The gay and lesbian movements also organized acoss various
differences, and to the degree that they oferated hegemonicall
wee also called on thei racism and/or class privilege.
iince at lesr
the r98os in prinr, assumprions bout the unversal"ity of
European
histoies of sexuality have also been critiqued, with research
in the

rasr majoriry of irnpoverished and marginalized populations

for
vhom stigmatizing racialization is exacebated ,rtl.,er th"n,
rn
"s
tlc fonner's cases, amelioratcd. With respect to rhe fenrinist rnovenlents that organized coalitionally cross ,,race,, and ,,class,,,
to
the degree that they reinscribed racisrn, Eurocenrric privilege,
or
disinteest in economic democrac ,,white,, feminism
elicited criticism from U.S. women of color, as well as women
in
the Third
llorld, for universalizing
rheir own hegemonic inteests within
their cririque of a simlarly sanitized an depoliticized
norion of
patriarchal oppression.
At least as early as the late r96os and rhroughout rhe r97os,
U.S.
women of color criticized dominant cultural feminism,s
notion of

{UI p^RLU

to broaden

rhe Eurocentric canon throughour the r98os and thereby helped

create multicultural Americn Studies programs and departments
cross the nation. They participated in solidarity movements
against U.S. military interventions nd wr in the Third \forld and
the Middle East, n the anti-apartheid movement, nd in the historic electoral campaigns of people of color. Finall people of color in
colition characterized the rise of an organized U.S. Third !old
Left, whose important history remains to be written, both in terms
of its material accomplishments nd its theoretical developments.
Thus, to return to Dussel, his shift in Etica rom language
preferentilly opting for the poor to that of the broader category
of "victims," as well as his critique of Lenin's theory of Leftist intellectuals as "the vanguard" of social change, concords with the
many lessons of civil rights sruggles in the United States of the last
forty years. History has shown in the United States what those suffering the most multiple oppressions, queer wonen of color, have
theorized for themselves tht "in the nal analysis," the reality of
materially and psychically surviving, negotiating, and outsmarting lived multiple oppressions exceeds the abstract privileging of
one over another, s Chela Sandoval has carefully argued in her
Methodology of the Oppressed (University of Minnesota, zooo).
The concept of "victim" allows Dussel in effect to arive at comptible theory of simultaneous oppessions to tht of U.S. women
of color, which he exemplifies in the multiple subject positionings
of Rigoberta Mench, the Guatemalan Maya Quich activist and
Nobel Prize winner, noting her oppression by gender, ethnicity,
"race," deterrirorialization, legal exclusion, social marginalization,
povert class, illiteracy [sic], Guatemalan (E, r3, 5r4),1'I will a

can, and Chicana/o studies.

U.S. Third !orld campus coalitions led movements

vis--vis European and Euro-American (neo)colonialisrn. College

nd university students, facult and staff also workcd throughout
campuses in the United States in "Third Vorld" activist coaltions
to decolonize and desegregate education. They founded the Department of Ethnic Studies at San Francisco State University and
University of Califomia, Berkele in ry68 ard r969, respectively,
and more specific programs, such as African, Native, Asian Ameri-

Pez: Dusscl's Eli de la librdcin

135

rJ6

P^RL[

SPRNG/SUMMTR

20ro VOL.r8,
NO.2

of

hombe: un se humano, un sujeto tico, el rostro como epifana de

la corporalidad viviente humana; ser un tema de signicacin exclusivamente racional filosfico antropolgico" (E, r6; The Other
shall be lalel other woman/man: a human being, an ethical subject,
the face as an epiphany of a living human corporaliry; it shall be
an exclusively rtional anrhropological philosophical theme of signification; my iranslation). But it seems that what he best theoizes
and is the cornerstone of his philosophy of ethics is, in practice, rhe
condition of poverty and the alieration of laL>or "desde" or from
gretest understanding of the existence and conditions of the exploitation of poor or orherwise oppessed and excluded heterosexual men. The critiques of patriarchy and heteronormativity are not
only on par with the other major forms of domination he analyzes

sirnultaneity of oppressions makes in their thinking shortly.

The second key aspect of Dussel's Etica that I warrt to single out
is his return of economics to the critique of power and oppression.
Dusselt rereading of Marx as he begins ro rry to theorize beyond
dogmatic Leftist ideologies and the specter of aurhoritarian and
abusive communist and socialist regimes is courageous in rhe current ideological climate. His close reading of Marx and ongoing
reintegration of his thought into an ethics of libeation is likely to
benefit from reflecrion on the difference that gender nd sexuality make economically in light of the facts that the majority of the
world's poor are women, including those of First World nations,
and that women are rhe hlf of humanity from whom super-profit
continues to be exploited in rheir formal and informal labor; in
their disproportionte domesric and unpaid burdens that reinforce
and enable thei loss of social and cultural capital as well; and
across education and cmployment differentials. To what degree is
European patriarchy foundational and enabling of imperialism,
capitlism, and neocolonizing discourses?r2
Though the face of the symbolic victim that he sometimes pictures in his book is that of a poor, Native American \.voman, this
is to be undestood as only a stand-in for the more general category of all manner of present and future victims human societies
can expect to continue producing: "El Otro ser lalel otra/o mujer/

dess the difference, however, in the signicance that the concept

QUr

as a

critique against patriarchal

r ).

Dussel's response here and his trcatment of gender and sexual-

New England, r99

ontology" (285-86), a hypothesis that might well be true within

male philosophy, but that erases the work of feminist philosophers
Simone de Beauvoi and Rosario Castellanos. Finall Dussel suggests that the apparently late development of feminism in Latin
America made his theorization of the sinrultaneity of oppressions
similarly impossible at tht time (286), a proposition that is also
unpersuasive, given the importnt body of work on the history and
contribution of feminism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
in Latin America, such as that of Francesca Mller's Latin American Women and the Search for Social lustice (University Press of

r97os of the 'liberation of women'

the first philosophical movement that spoke at the beginning of the

lly*Eu rocentrism, capitalism, (neo)colonialism-but arc intrinsic to these and arguably have at least as much to revel bout
the logic of domintion duriug at least the last 6ve hundred years.
Gender and sexual identities thus emain occluded as persistent
sites of the reproduction of both otherness nd privilege.
In zooo Dussel had the occasion, in an epilogue he wrote to a
collection of essays on his work, to address previous feminist and
queer critiques of his earlier work (TUH, 284-86). His response
to the critique of his wok in the volume by the feminist theologian Elina Vuola is useful here. In his defense he notes mjor
transformtions of his thought and correction of ealier views of
women dened in terms of their sexual reproduction, and therefore of lesbianism nd bortion as denials of life. He rgues tht
it would have been "impossible" to hold other views at the time,
however, and ahisoical to expect more from him in 1972, given
that feminist criticism had not yet emerged in liberation philosophy. He points out that feminist liberation theology was possible to
begin with because of liberation theology. To thc degree that male
centrism elicits the correction of its self-interest masquerading as
universalit ths would be true. But patriarchal conceptions of libertion theology as a univesal theology cnnot bc credited with
the discourse developed by feminist thought to critique it. Dussel
also writes, "I think that liberation philosoph in any event was
c ref u

Prez: Dr,ssel's Etica de la libctacin

\37

ity

QU

r1

p^ltLE

spRtNG/SUMM[R

20lo vot..g,
NO.2

Etica is frankly disappointing from a feminist

and <ueercentered poirt of vicw, positions hs philosophy
wishes to represent
as "victims" and to be in solidarity with.
Because of his iimited
engagement with the diffeence in inteests
and desires with respecr
to normative patriarchy and heteronoflnativit he unwirtingly
translates out the difference into the Same that
he wishes to avoid
in any situation of power differential. His counter_citicism
of fem_
inist citicism of his work above not only fails
to convince but fails
to sufcicntly elrgage the invitatitn to e*a_;n. the
charge of his
unwitting yet embedded patriarchal and heteronomariv.
iiuil"g..
He ends his response ro Vuola by announcing
th"t r"thinkng oi
masculinity by him is ,,a rask already underraken "
but will be de_
veloped further in the future.,, Without wishing
to be unkina, lt
is nonetheless worth reflecting upon the fact
tht ,,second wave,,
feminist and queer movcments and discourses
h"v" been.iculrt_
ing throughout the world for forty years, rrrd
th"t.,fir.t *uu",,
feminist thought dates to the nineteenth century.
To continre with a relared ancl thid point
of importance that
also requires further reflection, in his Etica,l*r.t
p.oui., a"_
fense of the need fo a constant critic
"
co,.rsciougrers that is
at_
tentive, precisely, to rhe inevirable imperfcctions
*.i"f
""j-,"1
exclusions and blank spots of // systems, suggesting
thr ;irh a
gcnuiirely democratic sensitivity lies precisely-i"n
this"capacity for
constant self-citicism with regard to one,s own
of.r"*
"*aluriona
others.
Thus, Dussel points us to one of the most
basic questions of
all: rVhat is an ethics of coexisrence and coalirion
amii diff.rerr"",
whereby the empowermenr of some is no longer
i.uJ it.ougi,
".t
social, economic, cultural, psychological, and physical
violence to_
ward orhers n ininimizing and negating themi
I will add, howcan
the more.fully empowered, precisely by virtue
oI thei, o*n im_
brrcated stmultaneity of racialized, gender, sexual,
and economic
privileging, be made ro understand that th.
unurtli oppr.rr.J"nd
the unjustly overpowered ae both dehurnani^a
ii,f*'...""g.
Women of color in the United States have largely
*.in"n f.o_-t ._
low, as it were, because our conrmuniries h;";
hisr;ric;ll;"been
systematically stripped of power. Regardless
of educational and

r38

to experience
racialized

ltacit

for ourselves, our communities, and in coalitionary recognition of

what we shae with each other and what is nonetheless specic
and different in our experiences of oppression in the United States.
Dussel's El is supportive in addressing the inappropriateness,
as history has shown, and the contradictions of elitist conceprions
of a vanguard leading and directing the masses and speaking for
them rather than struggling to empowe them to speak on their
own behalf.
Fourth, Dussel's Etlca assulnes that violence is, at tilnes, neces_
sary to eliminate the violence of the dominating unjust (e.g., E,
533). The success, precisely on the basis of their ethical coherence
in limit situations, of Maharm (Mohandas K.) Gandhi, Martin
Luther King Jr., and Chicano farm worker leader Csar Chvez
and of the achievement of the various civil rights as a whole invite
a_serious reckoning with the power of nonviolent activisn, argu_ /
ably as the most socially and long-lasring transformative o, ,,r"di_
cal" means of personal and social change. hat radical thought
must further explore, and redene, are the cultural assumpti;ns
that naturalize violence as n essenrially dominant u, n"""rr"ry
part of human nature and in many situations, and not
ust limit
situations, a legitimate form of behavior, as the new field of peace
studies is showing us.rr And more broadl what other forms of
violence, such as discursive violence, sustain the thought and prac_
tice of both (neo)colonialism(s) and capitalism? Love, in maierial
pfctices of care, of the materially poor or politically disenfran_
chised is the basis of Dussel's erhics. Bur how does this Christian
philosopher reckon with the radical idea of loving the enem of
refusing to dehumanize the dehumanizer and thus resisting our
own dehumanization-an idea that is colnrnon to culturally varied

fuse to essentialize such diffeences as incomprehensible? We speak

others o on rheir behlf, as I have already said. But how might we

begin sharing power with the variously disempowered to speak for
themselves without our mediation or rranslation, au"r, u, *".._

gender and cultural oppression, economic cxploitation, and social

disenfranchisemerlt, but as a whole, our intellectuals and artists
theorize as part of the oppressed. le ae not the spokespeople of

professional achievement, we continue

Prcz; I)ussel's Etia dc la

rt

ir.:;:i

li

20ro vo- r8' No

2

"rl

:u:h

sti

ethn-ic studies, it has been largely pie.",r.,."l

ir;;;;;*,"

'a

..

Eurocentric self-criticisms.

And while.the critique of philosophi.rl Erro."ntrlrn

lonrarrsmJ through its recent yet

prehensive critique of the contradictions

pr_
.r"".."i.ir'.""_
ropean philosophy and his account of "r
its discursive .on*u.,ion
,, the dawn of its global rise through i_p..i"li;;;;;

of colo in the Un"ited Si";;;;;""rr_

l.t:l:^.rl"i1'"".:*ainst
where, perhaps Dussel greatest contribution
ro U.S. ethnic minor_
ity studies as it is to the worid is his Herculean,
hi"r;;i;;ll;

people

Fifth, more than anything else, and alongside

his soliclarity

othefs?

spirirual philosophies that sce all of creation as essentially one?

!har gearcr odeness can we experience than that which we feel
for those we perceive as enemies, as deserving of thei own destuc_
rion? $7hat is the connectiol hetween this rype of tlrinking
and
the. otherization of Europe and then of
tu..r_I..ri.ui o*n .,.r.r_
white othes? Of hcteronorrnative patriarchy,s
quee.
."r"1.fl

QUI lt^RLE sPllNG/suMMEt

f."rifr"

Euocentris'm."r."rri,.f
She shows,

to them in crucial formulations, aird its

rhnrr.o_ing,
the tautological effects of its unwitting

r9<los through rhe r98os, Sandoval inrerrogares

o-grirriu.';orr_
strucruralisr thought, showing its commona jiries'*jl
.ul ,iehrs
ano post- r 96os Third World thought
and practice, its indebtediess

activisr writings

Queer theorist Chela Sandoval,s Methodology of the

Oppressed
is in essence a proie* similar ro Dussel,s
in nica'e lo ti"roir.
Fully centered, however, in the study of
U.S. feminist
oo.".
women_of color's literary and political
"rrd

o, inir.lr,'""jrrff *_
centlyr Irgely frorn outside the discipline
.f pfrif.r"pfrv pr"o"" H,
has also.begun the dialogue of western
phil;r;ph;"";;;"; t"r,
ern."philosoph', in Etica, in which the jon.r
iff.r.n, ."r,"rn.
of thought that have long meditated ,lr.
."" "..
.f._."i"f'"Jrr,.",
of human nature and the meani'g of existence
and ,h;, .;r;;;y ,.
Enlightenment-produced Eurocenrric
myth are neither ";;;;;;*"
nor pre-philosophical. He has also contributed
,o orr r.n*'W..a
ern philosophy as one culturally specific
reflecrion ,;;;;.n;"o
neither exempt from rhe inreests oi th.
po*"rful
;;;i;;;.the necessarily collective pursuit of justic
"r; -"' "
and ,.lf_U.irg.

I4o
libcrauot

can, Chicana, and Native American women. In their "creative"

and ostensibly untheoretic works, they chronicle, analyze, and theoize their own lives and those of their ethnicall gender, sexuallS
economicall and culturally oppressed communities, knowing, as
Audre Lorde observed in r979, that "[t]he masters tools will never
dismantle the mste's house" (SO, rrz). And it cannot be any
orher way under rhe legacy of cultural imperialisnr and neocolonizing patriarchal, heteronormative, and classist Eurocentrism. Logic
by whch to argue and think, to imagine and act, must be found
beyond the ways of thinking that maintain injustice in the present world. Yet this outsideness, this living in the "borderlands,"
of women, of the queer, of artists, of the spiritual, as Anzalda
p\1t it, i\ Bordcrlands ft987), is wht enables the critical intellectual distance, the empathy for those who also suffe injustice, and
the commitment to greater democracy precisely because we cannot
deny that injustice exists and that it can and musr be eliminated.
There is wisdom in the writings and other rt forms in which U.S.
women of colo render themselves and ther lives objects of reflection. Through these cretive but ideologically critical practices,
they enter a rccord of the mechanisrns of transfornation. But tbe

It is important to note that the archive of Sandoval, a queer

Chicana, for her coalitionary theory of social change rooted in a
politics of love as a social care for the other is primarily the creative and intellectual writings of African American, Asian Ameri-

for example, Roland Barthes's indebtedness to Fanon and argues

that Fredric Jarncson's political ennui before the enormity of global
capital's capacity to appropriate resisrance and critique is neither
universal nor speci6c to lte capiralism, but rather the condition of
his own newly destabilized subject positoning as an increasingly
disempowered member of male Euro-American culture, even if a
deeply dissenting one. Because women of color, since the European
colonial invasions of the Americas, have long confronted psychological, social, and economic disempowerment and alienation, indeed violence, and responded in myriad ways in order to survive
physically and culturally, she suggests, they have much to teach
about liberation struggles, and late-capital's newest victims offe
new possihiliries for coalitionary opposition.

Prcz: Dusscl's Ltica J la

r42

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SPRNG/SUMMER

20rO VOt.l8:
NO.2

those less so. The question of gender and sexual difference, like the
economic and racialized oppression of the ,,other," returns us not
only to an ethics of responsibility for the other but also t o receptiulry to alterity that ultimtely opens us up to the repressed alterity
within ourselves. Thus, the problem of gender is hardly a woman's
problem alone, for notions of masculinity change by feminist and

Systematic and prolonged marginalization, such as that of women,

the queer, and the ethnically or culturally different, has creared a
multiple consciousness-a cultural multilinguality with respect to
different versions of ruth and reality, those of the empowered and

ical formulations with respect to political organization, reconcep_

sualization of communit and the struggle for justice have come
from the pens of women of color, and some of the most important
of these have been queer feminists. It is telling that many have cho_
sen to write "queer" mixtures of diary, poetry, revisionist history
and mytholog and political essay from outside of academic disci_
plinarit among rhese the pioneerng Audre Lorde; the late Gloria
Anzalda, June Jordan, and paula Gunn Allen; Cherre Moraga
and Ana Castillo.
U.S. ethnic studies, like feminism ancl queer studies, is therefore
not merely an argument for inclusion into a canon whose disciplin_
ary principles are derived from, and remain within, an elitist, Eu_
rocentric, sexist, and homophobic colonial politics of domination.
As part of a decolonial project, these studies contribute as well to
the transfomation of ou understanding of what gets to count as
knowledge and the appreciation of its value to humanity outside
the prejudices of the Eurocentrism of cultural Darwinism that as_
sumes that the products of German France, England, Renaissance
Ital and Euro-America, parricularly those of its gender-privileged
ruling classes, are most worrhy of srudy.

clearly and powerfully speak truth to power. Some of the most rad_

Historically marginalized fom the intelligentsia, our crerive

vriting and arts in general have thus been and continue to be an
archive of resistance and the place where women of colo most

lrocess of knowing one's self when one is tlultiply oppressed is, by

ecessity, a dccolonizing one, as ir is for the multiply privileged.

QUI

the present essay was presented November zr,

zoo4. In June zooT I revised the essay. I revised it again in Octole

r. A shorter version of

Notcs

spiritual interconnectedness.

heartbeat. I believe I push Dussel fruitfully in my engagement with

his work in this essay and in observing, by way of conclusion, my
belief that coalition and solidarity toward Iasting social justice and
hurnan well-being necessitte, as inevitable, pofound personal as
well as social transformation in a cycle of receptivity and deepening knowledge in which we open ourselves to the other as borh
other dnd self, as different yet same in our human, ntural, and

Gender and sexualit like poverty and racialization, are not

problems specinc to the negatively mrked bodies that bear rhei
burden. If it is a step forward philosophicall as Dussel has so
compelling argued throughour Etica, to listen to the other as other
and not as the sme-s-oneself, then it is perhaps also another, further liberatory step to allow the other's seeming alterity ro dialogue
within us, to make rs its sameness, thus tfnsgfessing our own internlized and socialized identity dualisms, if only for a hisrorical

transgcnder transformations of gender. Nor is sexuality the intellectual and politicl burden of the queer, for hetcroscxual identifications change in light of bisexual, ga lesbian, and transgendered sexualities. To not engage dominant constructions of gender
and sexuality in depth as fundamental conditions for exploitation
across ideological regimes, including those of otherwise dernocratic liberation struggles, reproduces neocolonizing economic, social,
and cultural domination with which they are imbricated and impoverishes our own humanit and that of others.
As the huge corpus of feminist and gayllesbian/bisexuaUqueer
scholrship has shown, dominant notions of gender and sexuality
we received as natural are negations of the human panorama of
possibilities.u Patriarchy dehumanizes human beings, as does heteronormativity in its insistence that we must all be "straight," and
that we must be so in particular ways. For myself, I wonde if these
ancient, though not universal, divisions, are not as grave spiritully
and materially as that of mteril poverty.

Prez: Dussel's lltia de la lberdin

L44

2or

voL rSJ NO-2

queer theologian.

nial feminisrn to eui parlc.

On a second, relared panel, rhe lace Marcella
Althaus-Reid presenred
a sirnilar cririque, grounded in her work
as a Lari Anrerican femnisr

Noit fhi)krrg_

r96or;;;;;;"r,

,,

if*_

ijjf lli,L;
*"i rl

7. Mara Lugones, ,.Hereosexualisrn and rhe Colonial/Moderrr

Gende
System," Hypatit| zz, no. t (zoo7):,A_"o9.
f,"p,Zr."r.f

*.i,i,l?llj,i,j"illii

T"

Andr"

SO.

rican A,nerica r._,i*

Reader, edited by Joy James and T. Denean
sr,"rpr.y_1rn*
ford, UK: Blackwell zooo).

L-orde (.Betkeley,: Crossing press, r9g4);

hereafter cit"d
Combahee River Collective,s

attd Sp"n"h",

including rhose efered to here, can be found

in Alma Cor""'""_
thology Chicana Feminist l.hought: The Basic
Urror_i rrs,
(New York: Routled ge, 1997), Some
of Audre Lod"t *.i,irg, oi *.
rgTos can le found in Ss O utsider: Essays

lare

Dussel, Etrc de la libercn en lo edad

de la globalizacin,t de la
erclusio (Barcelona: EdirorirlTrotta.
srd ed., .oo, iir. ,*fr*
cited as E.
5 Mara Lugores, p irgrinagcs/p*cgriuajes: Thcorizittg coaririon agai,tsr
M ltiple Oppressions (Lanharn, MD: Rownran iiml"na,
r;).
6. Some key early Chicara feninist wriings of rhe

Oh"r,i-D*ique

of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and B;bara

Hrsh;vi;;;don;
Continuum Inrernational, zoo6), rrz, rr3.
Also see Dr.."l;;i."u.sion of Levinas's Totalit et lufinit: Essai *,
t,e*truri tlgeal
on "the inconprehensibility of the presence of
the

Eatre

ceiving socialiry as independenr of the ,lort,

uniry.,, n, l"ft i, i,""",f,"
excellence of the mulriple, which evidently
L. thorght;i-* th"
degradation of the one.', Ernmanuel Levinas,
"un

;;

3. From Rosario Castellanos,s (ry25-r971 poem ,,Mediracin

en el
mblal,', Medtdcit en el qmbral: Antologa potic
tlr"><i.. Cry,
Fondo de Cultua Econrnica r985).
4. See, for example, Emmanuel Lvinas: ,.[n rhis whole prioriry
of the
relationship to the orher, rhere is a break
wirh a great t."irl.ir" ia*
ofthe excellence of unity. The relarion worfa ,tay
fr. rl"pr""ri""
of this unity. That is the plotinian rradirion. My
id; ..;;;;,

r.

SPRING/SIJMMER

.ooog ar, Februaty 2oro. My rhanks to Randy P. Conrre Norma

Alarcn, Jorge Aquino, Pedro Di Pierro, Daphne 'Iylor_Garcia, and
Lere Lr.a fol attcntivc reading of tlre rnaDuscript, to Saa Rnltrez

^R-E

fo research assistance and cornpilation of my notes, and to

Marcelle
Maese_Cohen fo he inviratior to sutrmit an essay
relating to decolo_

QUI

Dr.scl's Etica

j.

z,

B. Freedma n, No Turing Back: The History of Feninism

Futtqe o{ \(/onen (New York: Ballaoine Books, zooz), chs.

zoor ),

See,

for example, Michael N. Nagler's Is T'here No Other Wy? The

Search for a Nonuiole Futute (Berkele CA: Berkeley Hills Books,

6 and 7.

.1nd tbe

See Estelle

Arnricas).

Dussel's critique of posrmodern philosophers

includes the lack of cricical reflection in them wrh respecr ro the origins of difference in European global hegenrony and rheir inability to

r4, Note, for example, that

befoe the European invasions, Chngfug Ones: Third and Fourtlt

Genders in Notiue No:,th Ameic.t (Basigsroke, Hampshire, UK: palgrve Macmillan, zooo). For the latter phenonenon in presenc-day
Burkina Faso, see the works of Malidoma Patrice Som and Sobonfu
Elizabeth Som and the "gatekeeper', function of the qr.ree in the Dagaa tribe in, for example, Sobonfu Som , The Sirit of lfltfllacy: Ancient A{ricn Teachings iu the Ways of Reldtionships (Berkele CA;
Belkeley Hills Books, r997). See also Randy P Sparks, David Sparks,
and Mariah Sparks, Cssel/'rr Encyclopedia of eueer Mytb, Symbol,
and Spirit: Gay, Lesbion, Bisexual and Transgendet Lore (Londor:
Cassell, r998),
8. Notable exceprions are the writings oI performancc atist Guillermo
Gmez-Pea and erhnic studies-trained Mexican scholar Marisa Belausreguigoiria, and anothe long-time rcsident of the United Srates,
Walte D. Mignolo, whosc infuential work on border gnoseology
is heavily indebted to Chicana queer wrirer Gloria Anzalda's Borde ands/La Frontea: The New Mestza (San Francisco: Aunr Lure,
r987).
See
the essays ofJames L, Marsh and Eduardo Mendiera in Thinking
9.
from the Underside of History: Enrique Dussel,s Philosophy of Liberction, ed. Linda Martin Alcoff and Eduardo Mendieta (Lanham,
MD: Rowman & Linlefield, zooo). Hereafte r cited as TUH.
o. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guaftari, Anti-Oedipus: Caitalsr1 .tnd
Schizophrenia lMinneapolis: University of Minnesora press, r985 ).
rr. Rigoberra Mencht life story widely circulared in various languages
after its r98j publicaton, Elizabeth Burgos-Debray, Me llano Rigoberta Metcbu, y si me naciott la cotcietcia (lJavana: Casa de las

wor.k '

l la liban 145

journa ls/hypa ria/vozzlz z, r Iugones. html. See, for example, the

of Will Roscoc on rhc "berdache" or third-gender idca thar was cor*
mon ald, in rnany cases, honored among thc peoples of the nrcics

fircz:

r46

r5.

sPRING/SUMMER

2oro VOL.r8,
NO.

On our reproduction of gendered and sexualhierachies through our

performances of nornrative conceptions of these, see Marjorie Garber,
Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cuhurcl,4rrlty (New york:
Routledge, r997) and Judith Butler, particularly Bodies That Mattar:
On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (New York: RoutledEe, r9%).

rnct to rhe overlhrow of ',capiralism. . , liberalism , . . Eurocentrism

, . . machismo,.. rcisrr, erc." (8,62-64). All translations of Dussel,s
work from the Spanish nro English are my own.

poffer lrerntives to Eurocentric power. Instead, tlereforc, Dussel

spcaks of the transmodernity of the Ethic of Liberation, as a comrnir-

qtt r'^Rt-n

BACCIIETTA: Thank you, Marcelle. I was born in New York

into a heterosexual family that was mixed nationall culturall
and in terms of its racialization and morphologies. My grandparents converged out of Ital Venezuela, and farther back Turke
nd even farther bck northeastern .A.frica. I've lived most of
my life in Paris, in India, and in Ital before settling in the U.S.
again in adulthood. These spaces, various languages, the forms of
hybridity of which I am comprised and in which I'm immersed,
my specific morphology and how it is perceived in the contexts
in which I live, the sometimes conflicting and sometimes overlpping grids of intelligibility in which I'vc been formed, through
which I have been framed, but also through which and in relation
to which I inevitably make sense of the world, my specific type of
accumultion of knowledge, my sense of critique, the way theory

the agency of the speker nd for the possibility of coalition wok.

M^EsE-coHtrN: Can we start from the beginning? Vhere re

you from? And I ask that in the most respectful and intersubjective
way possible, not in the mgra or border patrol way-"where were
you born?"-but s way of situating knowledge, the way that
Anzalda speks of the importance of naming yourself, both for

PAO LA BACC H ETA

An lnterview by Marcelle l\laese-Cohen

Enabling lntranational and Queer Coalition Building

Decolonial Praxis