Maria Lugones

Lugones is the author of Pilgrimage/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions (2003)[6]  a seminal, highly-praised collection of essays,[7] many of which were originally published in Hypatia, Signs and other journals. Among the essays included are “Playfulness, ‘World’‐Travelling, and Loving Perception,”[8] which addresses the experience of navigating hyphenated identities from a phenomenological perspective.[9]  Lugones posits “a plurality of selves” that literally shift from being one person to being a different person, with each shift producing a corresponding new world.[10] In another essay, “Purity, Impurity, and Separation,”[11] Lugones introduces the concept of curdling as an intersectional practice of resistance that works against an oppressive logic of purity.[12] Examples of curdling include: code-switching, drag, gender transgression and multilingual experimentation.

In her later work, “Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System” (2007)[13] and “Toward a Decolonial Feminism” (2010),[14] Lugones turns her attention to coloniality: its impact on gender formation, as well as various strategies of resistance which could contribute toward its eventual dismantling. Combining Anibal Quijano’s theory of the coloniality of power with a feminist, intersectionalist framework, Lugones concludes that gender is a colonial imposition.[15] Drawing on historical examples of pre-colonial, gynecratic Native American tribes, Lugones situates gender as a colonial classification system that divides and subjugates people differently depending on multiple intersectional factors including class and ethnicity.

Some of Lugones's published work includes:

• Heterosexualism in the Colonial/modern Gender system - Hypatia vol 22 no 1 (winter 2007)
• Problems of translation in Postcolonial Thinking - Anthropology News. April 2003. With Joshua Price.
• The Inseparability of race, class, and gender - Latino Studies Journal. Vol. I #1, Fall 2003. With Joshua Price.
• Strategies of the Chicana Lesbian - edited by Ma. Louise Keating (forthcoming).
• Peregrinajes/Pilgrimages: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions - New York: Rowman & Littlefield Press, 2003.
• Impure Communities - in Diversity and Community: An Interdisciplinary Reader, edited by Philip Anderson. 2002. Oxford: Blackwell.
• On Maria Pia Lara's Moral Structures - Hypatia, Fall 2000.
• Wicked Caló: A Matter of the Authority of Improper Words - In Feminist Interpretations of Mary Daly. Edited by Marilyn Frye and Sarah Lucia Hoagland. Penn State University Press, 2000.
• Tenuous Connections in Impure Communities - Journal of Environmental Ethics, 1999.
• The Discontinuous Passing of the Cachapera/Tortillera from the barrio to the bar to the Movement - In Daring To Be Good: Feminist Essays in Ethico-Politics. Edited by Ami Bar-On and Aim Ferguson. New York: Routledge, 1998.
• Motion, Stasis, and Resistance to Interlocked Oppressions - In Making Worlds: Gender, Metaphor, Materiality. Edited by Susan Hardy Aiken, et al. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press. 1998.
• Enticements and Dangers of Community for a Radical Politics - In Blackwell Companion to Feminist Philosophy. Edited by Iris Young and Alison Jaggar. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998.
• Hard to Handle Anger - In Overcoming Racism and Sexism. Rowman & Littlefield, 1996.
• Colonialidad y género - Tabula Rasa. Bogotá - Colombia, No.9: 73-101, julio-diciembre 2008

Speaking Face to Face: The Visionary Philosophy of María Lugones (SUNY Series, Praxis: Theory in Action), ed. by Pedro J. DiPietro , Jennifer McWeeny, Shireen Roshanravan, State University of New York Press, 2019.