1. Coloniality and Gender

If colonies are economic and military outposts, colonialism may be understood, briefly, as a historical process by which one concrete people or group of peoples establish colonies in another people’s or group of peoples’ territory (or living grounds). Such practice is characterized by many forms of violence—in the overall sense of unrepaired social damage. Hence, the Greek and Roman empires may be taken to be epitomes of ancient (pre-modern) colonialism. However, in so far as colonialism is a modern phenomenon, the epitome is clearly European colonialism, with its various stages and identities: mainly, but of course not exclusively, Iberian (Spanish and Portuguese), British, and French. It is noteworthy that, since the nineteenth century, colonial military rule gradually gave way to processes of political independence leading to the construction of new nation-states. Consequently, although of course it may be used, and is regularly used, in morally and politically overloaded contexts, we may say that “colonialism” is the name of a somewhat descriptive concept; in other words, the name for a bunch of social, historical phenomena with certain markers. (It is noteworthy that the Mesoamerican civilizations might turn out not to be examples of colonialism at all, even though they undoubtedly expanded trade in their own benefit by military means. The reason is that they did not establish outposts, and they did not need to impose their gods.)

Coloniality, on the other hand, according to Quijano, Mignolo, and others, is a system of power. Power is here understood as domination over life and death. Moreover, coloniality is diachronically and synchronically correlated with the material mode of social reproduction called capitalism, which is led by the logic of perpetual accumulation and expansion. As a system, coloniality overtakes all aspects of human and natural life, cuts up the social and natural worlds in arbitrarily hierarchical ways, and fixes what people get to know, feel, and generally experience. “Coloniality” then stands for a system of violent social relations that accompanies, but outlasts, actual, historical, colonial processes. Accordingly, it breaks the physical boundaries of individual territories and nation-states, and the absolute differences between the metropolis and the provinces (Latin terms), between the center and the periphery. In coloniality, the periphery is at the center (e.g., in the mode of forced labor and sweatshops only miles away from the wealthiest and more powerful financial corporations, i.e., in Lower Manhattan), and the center is at the periphery (e.g., in the omnipresence of corporate power beyond national borders, and in the grip of local oligarchies over labor, resources, and social institutions).

It is useful to understand coloniality as the product of two mutually reinforcing, historic-economic processes, namely, colonialism and capitalism as they have been known in the Americas, especially but not exclusively in Latin America (Abya Yala) since the sixteenth century. Add now modernity to the equation. Coloniality is a modern system of power. Aníbal Quijano points out that while modernity—understood as “a movement of social subjectivity” triggered by the mercantilism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—occurred at the same time in Europe and Latin America, here, in Latin America, it suffered a Kafkaesque transformation. Instead of triggering material processes of industrialization and development of productive forces and, correlatively, the creation of societies that valued individual freedom and merit over statutory, traditional social roles, here the effect of mercantilism was to prolong the colonial system of power—even after (nominal) independence from the colonizers. This difference is part and parcel of coloniality as a system and manifests itself in many ways. (One obvious way is the abysmal difference in wealth, income, and political representation between the elites and the working peoples of Abya Yala.) Quijano points to a difference in the experience of historical time: simultaneity and succession coexist in such a way that “what is a sequence in other countries is a simultaneity. It is also a consequence. But in the first place, it is a simultaneity” (Quijano Reference Quijano and Bereverley1995, 210–11).Footnote ⁷

Walter Mignolo, in turn, describes Coloniality as a fracture. Footnote ⁸ In the context of relativistic, ethnocentric analyses of conceptual schemes and epistemic practices, he writes:

In line with its spatial character, this fracture is also a place, an imaginary locus:

Together with its geohistorical dimensions the “fractured locus of modernity” has epistemological as well as ontological expressions from the point of view and historical experience of the subaltern (or the colonized, to use Fanon’s terms). As an epistemic device, coloniality operates as an arbitrary principle of articulation for a multiplicity of concepts (and practices) under one single whole—not unlike the Wolffian/Kantian model of “subsumption.” As a social ontology, it is a way of materially organizing hierarchy, authority, and power among a multiplicity of bodies, agencies, and personhoods such that the agency and personhood of the colonized are systematically ignored and erased, and their bodies are used as mere means for the extraction of surplus value.Footnote ⁹ Thus, the colonial difference divides up the social world into persons and subpersons; that is, into humans with full personality and rationality, and humans who are not altogether rational (women, servants, “indians,” “negroes,” non-Europeans, non-white, and nonheterosexual persons) and must consequently stand in a subordinate social position. There are, of course, degrees of subordination.Footnote ¹⁰ This fracture of modernity, Mignolo would argue, is also a fracture at the core of modern Western rationality. The recognition of a self-split between instrumental-technocratic and normative-emancipatory rationality, so typical of European critiques of Eurocentrism (from Heidegger to the Frankfurt School), comes too late and is too little of a recognition, for it continues to overlook the colonial, fractured locus of its own enunciation.Footnote ¹¹

Let us now turn to Lugones’ insightful appropriation of the notion of coloniality. That the modern system of coloniality is a gendered system becomes very significant for Lugones’ project, namely, that of understanding “the organization of the social so as to make visible our collaboration with systematic racialized gender violence, so as to come to an inevitable recognition of it in our maps of reality.”Footnote ¹²

In Lugones’ own description, the work of Oyeronké Oyewumi and Paula Gunn Allen, among other (non-white) feminist thinkers (who focus on the roles of persons with female bodies in societies other than the so-called Western ones), “have helped us realize the full extent of the reach of the colonial/modern gender system into the construction of collective authority, all aspects of the relation between capital and labor, and the construction of knowledge.”Footnote ¹³ Hence, it becomes central for Lugones to notice the different ways in which gender is constructed along racial lines.Footnote ¹⁴

Lugones’ gender system has two sides: one light and one dark. The light side is gender as it is lived and experienced within the white, bourgeois world, namely, as a hegemonic, binary device that orders the lives of human beings as men and women. Its qualities? The light side comes with men’s exclusive access to women’s bodies for sex and reproduction. White bourgeois women are, in this system, pure and passive, as their role is merely to reproduce class and status without any kind of participation in collective authority; they are at most epistemic and moral minors and can have no control over the social means of production. The dark side of this same gender system, on the other hand, is the reduction of people to animality, for example, “to such deep labor exploitation that often people died working.” Quijano’s theory did help, in the eyes of Lugones, to realize there actually is a dark side of the modern system of power along racial lines. But he missed gender. In other words, he placed women’s oppression exclusively within the male struggle for power (and access to sex), and thereby ignored, in Lugones’ eyes, both the multiple subjectivities of women, and the heterosexual, male-chauvinist design of the system. It missed the fact that the reduction of persons to animal bodies included forced sex with white colonizers and other immensely cruel acts of sexual violence. The system denies gender, and thus humanity, to the female bodies of the colonized. Thus, Lugones’ accent on the gendered character of both sides of the modern system of power is designed to illuminate the full extent of social oppression, and how labor, sex, and phenotype are differently articulated within one and the same system.Footnote ¹⁵

What then is gender for Lugones? Sometimes she refers to gender as a whole system of oppression, as in “the modern gender system.” Within such a system, however, “gender” is a term that expresses the multiple but regular ways in which sexual differences and relations are socially sanctioned.

With this background in mind, let us now return to Lugones claim, in the passage from 2020: 33–34, that

Here emerges a deep, although only implicit, Kantian metaphysical insight in Lugones’ proposal, namely, the conceptual character of human experience. How people think of a difference (i.e., its social significance) fixes the way the difference is regularly grasped, which in turn configures people’s experience of the difference. Under conditions of coloniality, which are indeed conditions of power, the binarian way of grasping sexual differences fixes people’s experience of those same differences. This is true for the colonizers and the colonized, and across the system, both in its light and dark sides. Two points are important here. The first is that, within the colonial system of gender, “gender” fixes “human,” because “gender” picks up sexual difference in the binarian, male-hegemonic way that constitutes what counts as human. In other words, everything that is to be taken as human is something that is either “man” or “woman”—where being picked up as a man entails, in and of itself, a privileged moral and epistemic social status. The second point is that, although fixing what is going to count as human along the whole system, “gender” under coloniality is differentially experienced according to the status of people in the corresponding hierarchical social ontology. Given the history of Latin America—a history marked by 500 years of colonization—it is not hard to appreciate that the sexual difference counted as a human difference only from the light side of the system, namely, from the experience of colonizers. In other words, the sexual differences of the colonized were not conceptualized as human, because, for the colonizers, there was nothing in them that could be socially normalized. Reproduction of slave labor and raw sex were all there was—which is also why white colonizers disposed of the bodies of the colonized not only for labor but also for sex. This brings into full view—in act, as it were—the colonial difference: “gender” fixes “human” by fixing what is human and what is less than human (or subhuman).

This is the framework within which Lugones’ critique of the universalism of gender is best understood. It is significant that Lugones’s philosophical-critical move is intimately tied with the (political) aim of building coalitions of resistance among the colonized. Hence, the claim itself that gender is not a category involves a diagnosis of the systemic status quo within which the term “gender” designates the socially necessary regulation of sex, as well as a prognosis of the meaningful alternatives to it. Importantly, these alternatives, for Lugones, lie not in other social regulations of sexual differences, that is, in alternative gender categories within one system, but point rather to supersede the need for the social regulation of sex characteristic of the system of coloniality itself. It is therefore no surprise that, although Lugones sees that an alternative thinking about gender has arisen along the critique of binarism by intersexual, transgender, transsexual, and queer practices, and political statements, such critique has not abandoned, in her view, the universality of gender. In other words, nonbinary conceptions and experiences of sexual differences—by themselves—are still compatible with gender, understood as a (hierarchical and oppressive) socialization of sex.Footnote ¹⁶

As concerns feminist resistance to the gender system so far (she has mostly in mind those localized in the United States), Lugones finds that, “(1) it does not address the conditions of subordination and oppression of non-white women, and (2) it fails to offer another humanity, another sense of being a woman, if such a being should continue to exist under that name” (Lugones Reference Lugones2020, 28–29). The former point comes as no surprise, given Lugones’ distinction between the light and dark sides of the gender system; we will briefly take up the latter—Fanonian—point below (#7).Footnote ¹⁷

Call gender under coloniality “the category of gender.” To say in this framework that gender is not a category does two things for Lugones: first, it points out that “gender” is a conceptual problem, for to say that a given concept is not a category is not to say that it picks up reality incorrectly or wrongly, for example, that its usual meaning is at stake, but that its very role and place in the economy of peoples’ beliefs and actions is flawed and fatally mistaken. It is to incur a conceptual error, not the error of getting the facts wrong, for example, the facts of sex, reproduction, etc. (if indeed there are such). Differently put, the problem is not that gender is not a concept, “a universal,” but that its significance is not that of a rule articulating a diversity of social kinds under one unified set of social practices. Lugones’ argument may thus be seen as a disanalogy:

If the category of causality is seen, broadly speaking, as a rule of synthesis (for a sensible manifold) that determines what is going to count as a causal relation among successions of events, the disanalogy says that gender is not a rule of synthesis that determines what is going to count as a sexual difference—what is going to count as being, for example, a woman and not a man, a man and not a woman, and so on. There may be several reasons why this disanalogy holds. Let us focus on the parenthetical phrase “for a sensible manifold.” Indeed, the category of causality has a nonempirical content emanating from the pure understanding, but it only acquires Sinn und Bedeutung in judgments (e.g., claims that things are thus and so) when a sensible manifold is given to the understanding. This does not and cannot happen with the concept of gender: it does not have any content which could in any way be considered as independent from experience (e.g., the experience of sexual differences as experience of human sexual differences); moreover, gender cannot present the analogue of the sensible manifold for causality. Unlike the sensible multiplicity displayed in a temporal succession of events, in gender nothing is given; no-thing is just given as a sexual difference of some sort. This situates Lugones in line with the view that gender is a violent social construction from top to bottom; in other words, there is no raw, pre-conceptualized experience of sexual difference which would even come close to play the role of a given sensible manifold, and which would then justify the claim that gender fixes sexual differences. Gender, according to Lugones, is a bogus category.Footnote ¹⁸ The reasons why it is presented as if it were a category (when it is not) have everything to do with the modern European colonial system of power, and nothing to do with facts about the social world and our (human) capacities to grasp it.

The second thing that the slogan “gender is not a category” does for Lugones, in turn, is to call into question the necessity of gender: if it is not a category, then, despite the appearance to the contrary in the experience of the colonized and the colonizers, it is optional. Consequently, other social arrangements are possible and (from the point of view and experience of the colonized) certainly desirable, outside the system of gender. Lugones thinks that such a possibility is not only a theoretical one—a Gendankenexperiment, as it were—but one that has been partially realized by the practices of resistance (linguistic, aesthetic, and cosmological) of some of the original peoples of the Americas.

Lugones points out that the Aymara voice warmi cannot be univocally translated as “mujer” or “woman,” and not only for reasons having to do with the structure of languages (the Aymara, and then Spanish and English). A whole cosmology—with a whole, complicated way of living together—is at work here. In particular, “chacha and warmi are opposites but they cannot be hierarchical opposites, one inferior to the other” (2020, 43). Like night and day, dry and hot, they belong to a conjunctive order of porous processes, not to the disjunctive, hierarchical order of western modernity. No gendered notions or ideas about human beings are normative here in the sense that being human is being a man and not a woman, or a woman but not a man; and not being a man nor a woman is not being human. Social roles need not be tied to the type of body that one has. If, on a female body, one dreams of a weapon, then one can go to combat at war. In Surinam and Haiti—like in many places in Abya Yala, “women” from the African diaspora—who were bestialized by European colonizers and traders—are at the center of the social world in which they and their communities live and resist, and they have created new social arrangements (including new linguistic and religious practices), despite the coloniality of power.

Lugones’ slogan may be understood, consequently, as a methodological call to resist all easy and unidirectional translations. Those translations seem to be forced upon theorists who try to understand “the other” without getting rid of their colonial, gendered lenses. By eliminating the necessity of gendered social arrangements, however, the slogan opens the conceptual (and political) space, from the point of view of the colonized, for an alternative social ontology, a different epistemology, and a non-accumulative (or seminal) means of social reproduction. We—the peoples of Abya Yala and our allies in the so-called Global South, including those resisting in North Atlantic societies—can only escape coloniality if we learn to supersede (in our moral, political, and epistemic practices) gender and the difference between the human, the subhuman, and the nonhuman it entails. Here, the Fanonian call for a new humanity, therefore, must take up the lessons of resistance, insurrection, and creation from the “women” of Abya Yala, including those of the African diaspora.

2. Gender and Categorial Thinking

Let us now turn to explore Lugones’ view of the categories and categorial thinking in her argument against the universality of gender. As I hinted at above (#4), the disanalogy between causality and gender is at the heart of that argument. Hence, at least prima facie, it can be safe to say that Lugones is working with the view of categorial thinking that arises from Kant’s theoretical philosophy, especially in the Analytic of Concepts of the Critique of Pure Reason. As a part of a large metaphysical inquiry concerning the conceptual nature of human experience, Kant divides the conceptual resources of ordinary humans into two well-differentiated classes, namely, the categories, or pure concepts of the understanding, and empirical concepts. They are distinguished by origin and by function, at least. By origin, the categories spring from pure understanding alone (through processes of epigenesis “as it were,” KrV B 167), whereas empirical concepts arise from our (human) cognitive touch with particulars (given) in space and time.Footnote ¹⁹ Broadly speaking, the categories contain specific rules of synthesis for given sensible manifolds; the function of empirical concepts, in contrast, is to grasp and follow the trajectory of determinate particulars (a tree, a chair, and a dog) in space and time. Although a fine-grained description of this difference would inevitably enter controversial terrains, it is safe to say that the categories rule over empirical concepts (with the contribution of the schematism of pure concepts). For our purposes at present, this means that any use of concepts to sort out and follow the trajectory of particulars in space and time—call this objective thinking—presupposes the enforcement of the nonempirical rules of thinking provided by the categories. The thesis that human experience is conceptual thus amounts to the thesis that human experience has a categorial structure—it is not just a pile of assorted, arbitrarily-correlated (empirical) concepts, but an articulated whole. Hence, if we distinguish thoughts—as, for example, representational states of a subject that may turn into claims that things (e.g., in the natural world) are thus and so—from the activity of thinking (a complex, holistic process involving many other thoughts and types of thoughts as well as inferences), we may say that all thoughts (including all cognitions) are made possible by categorial thinking.Footnote ²⁰ Call this the Kantian view of the categories.

Granting that Lugones uses the Kantian view of the categories to formulate her argument against the universality of gender, does that mean she endorses it? Not at all, and this is a source of potential trouble in her proposal. There is—I submit—a tension in her treatment of categorial thinking, namely, one between her denial of the universality of gender, on the one hand, and the conceivability of the alternatives to it, on the other. Indeed, to even formulate the denial of gender-universality, categorial thinking must be given (some) endorsement; however, to find the terms for an alternative to the coloniality of gender, categorial thinking must be outright rejected (or so it seems). Moreover, when read as stating differential conditions for the social and the natural worlds, there are various possibilities and directions in the logical space for her argument from disanalogy to proceed. She may be read as having three different claims, and the tension becomes alleviated or increased as we transit the corresponding interpretive alternatives:

1. i) Gender is not a category for the social world as causality is for the natural world, but there are other categories for the social world.

2. ii) Gender is not a category for the social world as causality is for the natural world, because there (really) are no categories for the social world.

3. iii) Gender is not a category, as causality is (taken to be) for the natural world, because categorial thinking is optional.

Let us briefly examine these possibilities without forgetting that there may be others. These readings correspond to degrees of radicality or at least of separation from the Kantian view. The first one is—we would claim—quite compatible with the Kantian view that categorial thinking rules systematically across the whole board of human epistemic practices. To say that gender is not a category is to say then, in this context, that there are or there may well be other categories for the social world, but gender is not one of them. In a Kantian vein, one may even say that such normative concepts as dignity and being an end-in-itself (in the framework of the individual agent’s moral deliberation guided by the categorical imperative, and to the extent that morality is a social affair) are at least the analogues of categorial thinking in practical thought, namely, rules for judgments concerning the social (moral) world. In other words, if this—gender—is not an analogue, there are surely other analogues of the categories for the social world.Footnote ²¹ Broadly speaking, this reading is amenable to liberal-minded professional philosophers, including followers of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas. The alternative to gender and racial violence and oppression, in this framework, is inclusion and equality within the modern legal, political, and economic order: to widen the scope of the social contract, to include the excluded in the “unfinished project of modernity.”

The second interpretive option is more restrictive. It grants categorial rule only over the natural world. In this case, the problem of mistaking gender for a category is a different, graver one. The problem concerns not only the arrangement of this or that node of our concepts (about social reality), but to mistake the nature of a whole range and perhaps the psychologically more basic human relations, namely, the social ones. The view then is only partially, but still Kantian, for it can readily admit that substance, causality, and the like are necessary for human cognitive experience of the natural world. It is the social world that resists categorization. There are no analogues to categorial thinking in thinking about the social world, and this is the reason why gender does not work for the social as causality works for the natural world. The view is furthermore compatible with a power-centered view of social relations according to which social rules are nothing but the crystallization of asymmetrical power relations. There only seem to be social categories—concepts without which we cannot figure out and generally experience social relations as human social relations—but there are only power relations (e.g., maintained by ideological and nonideological means). This view is consistent with a Marxist and Engelsian view, broadly in line with Western “left” intellectuals, as well as with certain trends of so-called post-structuralist thought.

The third option marks an even wider distance from the Kantian view. It says that there are really no necessary features of human experience that would call for the structural work that the categories do in the Kantian view. Not even for the natural world. Walking along this option requires a different lens and poses a different range of questions. It requires questioning the received distinction between the natural and the social worlds, such that the natural is not social and the social does not appear to be natural.

Lugones’ position vis-a-vis categorial thought is best represented in the third option. For the sake of the argument, let us bracket for a moment the issue of the difference between the natural and the social worlds. Notice that option iii represents the conclusion (that gender does not necessarily fix social relations) not as a consequence of mistaking the role the concept of gender plays in the economy of our beliefs and practices, but as a consequence of a different ground, namely, that there are no categories. If there are no categories, however, then the idea that gender is not a category does not point to a problem with gender but with the categorial. This is not a conclusion that, we suspect, Lugones would be comfortable with.

With a view on the articulation of epistemologies and ontologies that are alternative in significant ways to the modern gender system of power, we will see in #6 that both gender and the categorial are problematic for Lugones, and that some significant remains of the Kantian view will persist after the revolution (if we want to speak like that), even if gender ceases to be used as a rule that necessitates an oppressive experience of sexual differences—even if categories of human experience cease to be bounded (by gender, race, and class).

It is important that, for Lugones, the alternatives to gender are not other gender arrangements fixing sexual differences but living and experiencing sexual differences without gender arrangements at all.Footnote ²² In a decolonized world, sexual differences conform a multiplicity, and no gender is needed. There is, in principle, no need to regulate that multiplicity, and if there is regulation it is always, primarily, self-regulation. Now, multiplicity is to be sharply removed from fragmentation.Footnote ²³ A decolonized world is a world of many differences, but it is not a fragmented, atomized world.

Categorial thought, thus, becomes problematic, for Lugones, when understood as endorsing a world of “bounded categories” and atomized objects with properties, or as projecting some form of social domination or control over people’s experiences. What, then, is the alternative? A decolonial world is one where blunt differentiations do not need to arise in the lives of people. It is therefore a world where there is no blunt difference between concepts such as the categories, which are purportedly immune to experience, and empirical concepts, which are always sensible to experience. In other words, people may deny the claim that some of our concepts are never exposed to experience and some others are bound to change with experience—deny the purity of the categories—without thereby denying that there is a difference between those concepts that are closer to experience (like that of chair or of dog) and those that are far removed from it and articulate the web of our beliefs. And we could accordingly give full credit to the claim that gender is not a category without throwing away categorial thought altogether.

Perhaps surprisingly, then, the idea that experience is conceptually articulated may remain in Lugones’ alternative picture. There is still an important (Kantian) sense in which experience is a conceptually structured whole, and not a mere aggregate of atomic units. This is why it remains wholly significant to say that gender is not a category: although sexual differences are experienced as gendered under coloniality—where being a human being is being either a man or a woman, and being a man means having a high social status—they do not need to be. Gender is therefore not a necessary feature of the experience of humans, and it may even disappear while the multiplicity of sexual differences remains. A decolonial world issues non-individualistic or communal ontologies and epistemologies where differences are the mark of multiplicity, not of fragmentation; people there do not have fragmented experiences of their lives and relations but experience them as part of an interconnected whole.

Let us now turn our attention back to the distinction between the natural and social worlds. Rather than reinforcing a rigid separation, it is crucial to acknowledge that the boundaries between these realms are not absolute; the differentiation is often gradual, porous, and fluid, resisting mechanical or dichotomous definitions. This perspective invites us to consider ontologies in which human beings, persons, animals, artifacts, and inorganic material things exist along a continuum, where differences are marked by degrees rather than fixed categories. In this sense, the distinction is not a matter of some sharply bounded concepts that are immune to experience, but rather part of a dynamic web of beliefs and practices that are always open to transformation. Such an approach aligns with a view in which entrenched social practices—like the regulation of sexual differences under coloniality—are understood as mutable forms of conceptualization that can be superseded by new ways of giving testimony, evidence, and sharing communal experience. Ultimately, in a decolonized world, this movement away from categorical rigidity paves the way for alternative ontologies and epistemologies, where multiplicity replaces fragmentation, and interconnectedness supplants atomization, so that experiences and existence remain flexible and responsive to the lived realities of individuals and communities.

3. An Epilogue: Resistance and Radicality

Two extremely brief lessons. One, about alternatives to the gender-oppressive status quo under coloniality. The other, about radicality, philosophical and political.

Our worry concerning Lugones’ idea of what resistance to coloniality may look like is that her view of categorial thinking might obscure some possibilities for expanding resistance in coalition with the people (la gente) of large cities all along Abya Yala. In recent years, la gente of large Latin American cities, such as Santiago de Chile, Bogotá, and many others, has had a taste of their potential to question the status quo (with gender up front) and, together with the statues of the conquistadores, to bring down “structural oppression.” These and other cases (such as the civil insurrection following the brutal murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police) show that coalition of resistances is not only possible but desirable to question and fight structural (intersectional) violence. However, it is perhaps too much to ask from the diversity of peoples and struggles to share a type of cosmology. Some will believe, for example, in the Christian god, others in other gods, or in none. From a philosophical point of view, such a coalition of beliefs, religious or nonreligious, is a coalition of many worlds (“there are worlds within worlds” as the Mayan rebels of EZLN would say), and they belong to resistance so long as they express nonviolent, communal practices.

Take nahualism and tonalism, old spiritual practices that are very much alive among the peoples of Mexico and Guatemala. Nahualli in Nahuatl means “disguise,” “hidden,” “obscure”; tonalli means “sun,” “energy,” “daylight”. Nahualism is the belief that some individuals are invested with particular powers that allow them to transform themselves into animals (or, sometimes, natural phenomena such as thunder, wind, fire, and rain) and perform certain tasks with that disguise. Tonalism is the belief that each human individual has a correlate in some animal (and sometimes in plants, stones, mountains, volcanoes, and so on) or animal-like creature.Footnote ²⁴ The question is not whether those beliefs are true, just as such, but whether they collide with what people who practice nahualism and tonalism believe about the natural and social worlds and how they interact. The answer must be negative: it is not as if believers in nahualism and tonalism deny the materiality of the natural world and what modern philosophy and science say about energy and interactions in the material, natural world. People just do not morph into animals or natural events, and the actual existence of animal-like correlates of persons is not supported by evidence. Christian theology, modern philosophy, and science align here in dismissing or condemning such beliefs as pagan, mere superstitions—which is a clear expression of epistemic coloniality. The point here is rather that it is highly problematic to claim that the cosmology corresponding to nahualism and tonalism does not distinguish between the natural and the social worlds, and therefore, that their practitioners just do not think categorially; that they, for example, do not structure their beliefs about ordinary objects of experience in causally efficient terms. Moreover, it is problematic to suggest, as Lugones sometimes seems to do, that resistance to coloniality takes abandoning categorial thought altogether. A coalition of resistances would in that case be impossible for people of different cosmologies. However, if nahualism and tonalism do not compete with natural causality, if their practitioners are also categorial thinkers, then coalition of resistances seems quite plausible between people living different but porous cosmologies.

Sometimes, for example, in proposals such as the reengineering of concepts and debunking projects, the question arises about their radicality, both philosophically and politically. We do not think, as Lugones seems to do at certain junctures of her work, that we need a radically different metaphysics in order to have a radically different way of living social relations. Take “humanity” and “gender” in Lugones’ context. The Fanonian shift, from colonial consciousness to a new humanity, is an inversion: whereas gender under coloniality fixes social relations, and humanity is a wide-open concept that underlaps with subhumanity and nonhumanity; under noncolonial conditions (after the revolution), “humanity” will permeate social relations, and gender will become an extinct concept while sexual differences will have multiple possibilities of realization. This inversion suggests that the task is not to abolish all categories, as if that were possible, but to reimagine the frameworks within which solidarity and social meaning can be constructed. Instead of aiming at a singular, decolonial order in which all remnants of colonial categorization are erased, the impulse toward a new humanity would recognize the complex interplay of histories and the porous cosmologies that inform collective existence. The real challenge, then, seems to lie in enabling solidarities to emerge across differences, fostering a plurality of worlds that are not constrained by rigid hierarchies and blunt differentiations. In this horizon, the work of decolonial transformation would become a matter of creating and sustaining relational practices (in the model of the women of Abya Yala) that honor the multiplicity of lived realities, while remaining vigilant against the resurgence of oppressive structures under new guises. Thus, the emphasis shifts from the promise of total rupture to an ongoing, situated labor of building communities where concepts are neither imposed nor abolished in the abstract, but are continuously negotiated in actual practices of resistance.

With the maxim “there are worlds within worlds,” I have meant to ask here whether the Fanonian inversion requires a radically alternative metaphysics. Insofar as it requires the destruction of the world in which, for example, blackness is meaningfully connected with modern slavery, and for example, womanhood is meaningfully connected with reproduction and sexual violence, the Fanonian inversion is certainly about destroying worlds. However, by embracing this inversion, decolonial critique may just not need to reject metaphysics altogether in order to resist and fight the oppressive social status quo. Differently put, moderate metaphysical change (e.g., a world where there are nahuales) is compatible with radical change in social relations (a nonviolent world, where “woman” and “black” cease to be meaningful). It follows, then, that the challenge is to foster solidarities and forge connections across the multiplicity of cosmologies and lived experiences that constitute resistance to colonial structures, without the anxiety of finding one radically different conceptual scheme. Instead, the emphasis might shift toward alliances and the cultivation of shared practices that, though anchored in distinct ontologies and epistemologies, converge in their opposition to oppression and their affirmation of communal, nonviolent social arrangements. This approach does not diminish the importance of conceptual critique (and reimagining concepts) but rather situates it within the plurality of worlds inhabited by those resisting. Thus, a decolonized world might be sustained not by the rise of an entirely new metaphysical order, but by the ongoing creation of alternative, nonviolent communal relations underneath, despite and against the Colonial/Modern Gender System.