Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System

Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System

Heterosexualism and the Colonial / Modern Gender System

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The coloniality of power is understood by Anibal Quijano as at the constituting crux

of the global capitalist system of power. What is characteristic of global, Eurocen-

tered, capitalist power is that it is organized around two axes that Quijano terms “the coloniality of power” and “modernity.” The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social classification of the population of the planet in terms

of the idea of race, a replacing of relations of superiority and inferiority established

through domination with naturalized understandings of inferiority and superiority.

In this essay, Lugones introduces a systemic understanding of gender constituted by

colonial/modernity in terms of multiple relations of power. This gender system has a

light and a dark side that depict relations, and beings in relation as deeply different and

thus as calling for very different patterns of violent abuse. Lugones argues that gender

itself is a colonial introduction, a violent introduction consistently and contemporarily

used to destroy peoples, cosmologies, and communities as the building ground of the “civilized” West.

In a theoretico-praxical vein, I am offering a framework to begin thinking about

heterosexism as a key part of how gender fuses with race in the operations of colonial power. Colonialism did not impose precolonial, European gender arrangements on the colonized. It imposed a new gender system that created very different arrangements for colonized males and females than for white bourgeois colonizers. Thus, it introduced many genders and gender itself as a colonial concept and mode of organization of relations of production, property relations, of cosmologies and ways of knowing. But we cannot understand this gender system without understanding what Anibal Quijano calls “the coloni- ality of power” (2000a, 2000b, 2001-2002). The reason to historicize gender

Hypatia vol. 22, no. 1 (Winter 2007) ? by Maria Lugones

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formation is that without this history, we keep on centering our analysis on the

patriarchy; that is, on a binary, hierarchical, oppressive gender formation that rests on male supremacy without any clear understanding of the mechanisms by which heterosexuality, capitalism, and racial classification are impossible to understand apart from each other. The heterosexualist patriarchy has been an ahistorical framework of analysis. To understand the relation of the birth of the colonial/modern gender system to the birth of global colonial capitalism-with the centrality of the coloniality of power to that system of global power-is to understand our present organization of life anew. This attempt at historicizing gender and heterosexualism is thus an attempt

to move, dislodge, complicate what has faced me and others engaged in libera- tory/decolonial projects as hard barriers that are both conceptual and politi- cal. These are barriers to the conceptualization and enactment of liberatory possibilities as de-colonial possibilities. Liberatory possibilities that emphasize the light side of the colonial/modern gender system affirm rather than reject an oppressive organization of life. There has been a persistent absence of a deep imbrication of race into the analysis that takes gender and sexuality as central in much white feminist theory and practice, particularly feminist phi- losophy. I am cautious when I call it “white” feminist theory and practice. One can suspect a redundancy involved in the claim: it is white because it seems unavoidably enmeshed in a sense of gender and of gendered sexuality that issues from what I call the light side of the modern/colonial gender system. But that is, of course, a conclusion from within an understanding of gender that sees it as a colonial concept. Yet, I arrive at this conclusion by walking a political/ praxical/theoretical path that has yet to become central in gender work: the path marked by taking seriously the coloniality of power. As I make clear later in this essay, it is also politically important that many who have taken the coloniality of power seriously have tended to naturalize gender. That position is also one that entrenches oppressive colonial gender arrangements, oppressive organizations of life.

So, on the one hand, I am interested in investigating the intersection of race,

class, gender, and sexuality in a way that enables me to understand the indiffer- ence that persists in much feminist analysis. Women of color and Third World feminisms have consistently shown the way to a critique of this indifference to this deep imbrication of race, gender, class, and sexuality. The framework I introduce is wholly grounded in the feminisms of women of color and women of the Third World and arises from within them. This framework enables us to

ask harsh but hopefully inspiring questions. The questions attempt to inspire resistance to oppression understood in this degree of complexity. Two crucial questions that we can ask about heterosexualism from within it are: How do we

understand heterosexuality not merely as normative but as consistently perverse when violently exercised across the colonial modern gender system so as to

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construct a worldwide system of power? How do we come to understand the very meaning of heterosexualism as tied to a persistently violent domination that marks the flesh multiply by accessing the bodies of the unfree in differential

patterns devised to constitute them as the tortured materiality of power? In the

work I begin here, I offer the first ingredients to begin to answer these questions.

I do not believe any solidarity or homoerotic loving is possible among females who affirm the colonial/modern gender system and the coloniality of power. I also think that transnational intellectual and practical work that ignores the imbrication of the coloniality of power and the colonial/modern gender system also affirms this global system of power. But I have seen over and over, often in disbelief, how politically minded white theorists have simplified gender in terms of the patriarchy. I am thus attempting to move the discussion of heterosexualism, by changing its very terms. I am also interested in investigating the intersection of race, class, gender

and sexuality in a way that enables me to understand the indifference that men,

but, more important to our struggles, men who have been racialized as inferior,

exhibit to the systematic violences inflicted upon women of color.’ I want to understand the construction of this indifference so as to make it unavoidably

recognizable by those claiming to be involved in liberatory struggles. This indifference is insidious since it places tremendous barriers in the path of the struggles of women of color for our own freedom, integrity, and well-being and

in the path of the correlative struggles toward communal integrity. The latter is crucial for communal struggles toward liberation, since it is their backbone. The indifference is found both at the level of everyday living and at the level of theorizing of both oppression and liberation. The indifference seems to me not just one of not seeing the violence because of the categorial’ separation of race, gender, class, and sexuality. That is, it does not seem to be only a question of epistemological blinding through categorial separation. Feminists of color have made clear what is revealed in terms of violent

domination and exploitation once the epistemological perspective focuses on the intersection of these categories.3 But that has not seemed sufficient to arouse in those men who have themselves been targets of violent domination and exploitation any recognition of their complicity or collaboration with the violent domination of women of color. In particular, theorizing global domina- tion continues to proceed as if no betrayals or collaborations of this sort need to be acknowledged and resisted. Here, I pursue this investigation by placing together two frameworks of

analysis that I have not seen sufficiently jointly explored. I am referring, on the one hand, to the important work on gender, race and colonization done, not exclusively, but significantly by Third World and women of color feminists, including critical race theorists. This work has emphasized the concept of intersectionality and has exposed the historical and the theoretico-practical

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exclusion of nonwhite women from liberatory struggles in the name of women.4

The other framework is the one Quijano introduced and which is at the center

of his work, that of the coloniality of power (2000a, 2000b, 2001-2002).5 Placing both of these strands of analysis together permits me to arrive at what I am tentatively calling “the modern/colonial gender system.” I think this understanding of gender is implied in both frameworks in large terms, but it is not explicitly articulated, or not articulated in the direction I think necessary to unveil the reach and consequences of complicity with this gender system. I think that articulating this colonial/modern gender system, both in large strokes, and in all its detailed and lived concreteness will enable us to see what

was imposed on us. It will also enable us to see its fundamental destructiveness in both a long and wide sense. The intent of this writing is to make visible the instrumentality of the colonial/modern gender system in subjecting us-both women and men of color-in all domains of existence. But it is also the project’s

intent to make visible the crucial disruption of bonds of practical solidarity. My intent is to provide a way of understanding, of reading, of perceiving our allegiance to this gender system. We need to place ourselves in a position to call each other to reject this gender system as we perform a transformation of communal relations.6 In this initial essay, I present Quijano’s model that I will complicate, but one that gives us-in the logic of structural axes-a good ground from within which to understand the processes of intertwining the production of race and gender.

THE COLONIALITY OF POWER

Quijano thinks the intersection of race and gender in large structural terms. So, to understand that intersection in his terms, it is necessary to understand

his model of global, Eurocentered capitalist power. Both race7 and gender find their meanings in this model (patr6n).8 Quijano understands that all power is structured in relations of domination, exploitation, and conflict as social actors fight over control of “the four basic areas of human existence: sex, labor, collec-

tive authority and subjectivity/intersubjectivity, their resources and products” (2001-2002, 1). Global, Eurocentered, capitalist power is organized character- istically around two axes: the coloniality of power and modernity (2000b, 342). The axes order the disputes over control of each area of existence in such a way that the coloniality of power and modernity thoroughly infuse the meaning and forms of domination in each area. So, for Quijano, the disputes/struggles over control of “sexual access, its resources and products” define the domain of sex/gender and the disputes, in turn, can be understood as organized around the axes of coloniality and modernity.

This is too narrow an understanding of the oppressive modern/colonial constructions of the scope of gender. Quijano also assumes patriarchal and

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heterosexual understandings of the disputes over control of sex, its resources, and products. Quijano accepts the global, Eurocentered, capitalist under- standing of what gender is about. These features of the framework serve to veil the ways in which nonwhite colonized women have been subjected and disempowered. The heterosexual and patriarchal character of the arrangements can themselves be appreciated as oppressive by unveiling the presuppositions of the framework. Gender does not need to organize social arrangements, including social sexual arrangements. But gender arrangements need not be either heterosexual or patriarchal. They need not be, that is, as a matter of history. Understanding these features of the organization of gender in the modern/colonial gender system-the biological dimorphism, the patriarchal and heterosexual organizations of relations-is crucial to an understanding of the differential gender arrangements along “racial” lines. Biological dimor- phism, heterosexualism, and patriarchy are all characteristic of what I call the light side of the colonial/modern organization of gender. Hegemonically, these are written large over the meaning of gender. Quijano seems unaware of his accepting this hegemonic meaning of gender. In making these claims I aim to expand and complicate Quijano’s approach, while preserving his understand- ing of the coloniality of power, which is at the center of what I am calling the modern/colonial gender system. The coloniality of power introduces the basic and universal social clas-

sification of the population of the planet in terms of the idea of ‘race’ (Qui- jano 2001-2002, 1). The invention of race is a pivotal turn as it replaces the relations of superiority and inferiority established through domination. It reconceives humanity and human relations fictionally, in biological terms. It is important that what Quijano provides is a historical theory of social clas- sification to replace what he terms the “Eurocentric theories of social classes” (2000b, 367). This move makes conceptual room for the coloniality of power. It makes conceptual room for the centrality of the classification of the world’s population in terms of races in the understanding of global capitalism. It also makes conceptual room for understanding historical disputes over control of labor, sex, collective authority, and intersubjectivity as developing in processes of long duration, rather than understanding each of the elements as predating the relations of power. The elements that constitute the global, Eurocentered, capitalist model of power do not stand separately from each other and none is prior to the processes that constitute the patterns. Indeed, the mythical pre- sentation of these elements as metaphysically prior is an important aspect of the cognitive model of Eurocentered, global capitalism. In constituting this social classification, coloniality permeates all aspects of

social existence and gives rise to new social and geocultural identities (Qui- jano 2000b, 342). “America” and “Europe” are among the new geocultural identities. “European,” “Indian,” “African” are among the “racial” identities.

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This classification is “the deepest and most enduring expression of colonial domination” (2001-2002, 1). With expansion of European colonialism, the classification was imposed on the population of the planet. Since then, it has permeated every area of social existence, constituting the most effective form of material and intersubjective social domination. Thus, coloniality does not just refer to racial classification. It is an encompassing phenomenon, since it is one of the axes of the system of power and as such it permeates all control of sexual access, collective authority, labor, subjectivity/intersubjectivity and the production of knowledge from within these intersubjective relations. Or, alternatively, all control over sex, subjectivity, authority, and labor are articu- lated around it. As I understand the logic of “structural axis” in Quijano’s usage, the element that serves as an axis becomes constitutive of and constituted by

all the forms that relations of power take with respect to control over that particular domain of human existence. Finally, Quijano also makes clear that, though coloniality is related to colonialism, these are distinct as the latter does not necessarily include racist relations of power. Coloniality’s birth and its prolonged and deep extension throughout the planet is tightly related to colonianism (2000b, 381). In Quijano’s model of global, Eurocentered, capitalist power, capitalism

refers to “the structural articulation of all historically known forms of control of labor or exploitation, slavery, servitude, small independent mercantile pro- duction, wage labor, and reciprocity under the hegemony of the capital-wage labor relation” (2000b, 349). In this sense, the structuring of the disputes over control of labor is discontinuous: not all labor relations under global, Euro- centered capitalism fall under the capital/wage relation model, though this is the hegemonic model. It is important in beginning to see the reach of the coloniality of power that wage labor has been reserved almost exclusively for white Europeans. The division of labor is thoroughly racialized as well as geo- graphically differentiated. Here, we see the coloniality of labor as a thorough meshing of labor and race. Quijano understands modernity, the other axis of global, Eurocentered

capitalism, as “the fusing of the experiences of colonialism and coloniality with the necessities of capitalism, creating a specific universe of intersubjec- tive relations of domination under a Eurocentered hegemony” (2000b, 343). In characterizing modernity, Quijano focuses on the production of a way of knowing, labeled rational, arising from within this subjective universe since the seventeenth century in the main hegemonic centers of this world system of power (Holland and England). This way of knowing is Eurocentered. By Eurocentrism Quijano understands the cognitive perspective not of Europeans only, but of the Eurocentered world, of those educated under the hegemony of world capitalism. “Eurocentrism naturalizes the experience of people within this model of power” (2000b, 343).

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The cognitive needs of capitalism and the naturalizing of the identities and relations of coloniality and of the geocultural distribution of world capital- ist power have guided the production of this way of knowing. The cognitive needs of capitalism include “measurement, quantification, externalization (or objectification) of what is knowable with respect to the knower so as to control the relations among people and nature and among them with respect to it, in particular the property in means of production” (Quijano 2000b, 343). This way of knowing was imposed on the whole of the capitalist world as the only valid rationality and as emblematic of modernity. Europe was mythologically understood to predate this pattern of power as a

world capitalist center that colonized the rest of the world and, as such, the most advanced moment in the linear, unidirectional, continuous path of the species. A conception of humanity was consolidated according to which the world’s population was differentiated in two groups: superior and inferior, rational and irrational, primitive and civilized, traditional and modern. Primitive referred to

a prior time in the history of the species, in terms of evolutionary time. Europe came to be mythically conceived as preexisting colonial, global, capitalism and as having achieved a very advanced level in the continuous, linear, uni- directional path. Thus, from within this mythical starting point, other human inhabitants of the planet came to be mythically conceived not as dominated through conquest, nor as inferior in terms of wealth or political power, but as an anterior stage in the history of the species, in this unidirectional path. That

is the meaning of the qualification “primitive” (Quijano 2000b, 343-44). We can see then the structural fit of the elements constituting global, Euro-

centered capitalism in Quijano’s model (pattern). Modernity and coloniality afford a complex understanding of the organization of labor. They enable us to see the fit between the thorough racialization of the division of labor and the pro-

duction of knowledge. The pattern allows for heterogeneity and discontinuity. Quijano argues that the structure is not a closed totality (2000b, 355). We are now in a position to approach the question of the intersectionality of

race and gender9 in Quijano’s terms. I think the logic of “structural axes” does more and less than intersectionality. Intersectionality reveals what is not seen when categories such as gender and race are conceptualized as separate from each other. The move to intersect the categories has been motivated by the difficulties in making visible those who are dominated and victimized in terms of both categories. Though everyone in capitalist Eurocentered modernity is both raced and gendered, not everyone is dominated or victimized in terms of their race or gender. Kimberlk Crenshaw and other women of color feminists have argued that the categories have been understood as homogenous and as picking out the dominant in the group as the norm; thus women picks out white bourgeois women, men picks out white bourgeois men, black picks out

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black heterosexual men, and so on. It becomes logically clear then that the logic of categorial separation distorts what exists at the intersection, such as violence against women of color. Given the construction of the categories, the intersection misconstrues women of color. So, once intersectionality shows us what is missing, we have ahead of us the task of reconceptualizing the logic of the intersection so as to avoid separability.’o It is only when we perceive gender and race as intermeshed or fused that we actually see women of color. The logic of structural axes shows gender as constituted by and constituting

the coloniality of power. In that sense, there is no gender/race separability in Quijano’s model. I think he has the logic of it right. But the axis of coloniality is

not sufficient to pick out all aspects of gender. What aspects of gender are shown

depends on how gender is actually conceptualized in the model. In Quijano’s model (pattern) gender seems to be contained within the organization of that “basic area of existence” that Quijano calls “sex, its resources, and products” (2000b, 378). That is, there is an account of gender within the framework that is not itself placed under scrutiny and that is too narrow and overly biologized as it presupposes sexual dimorphism, heterosexuality, patriarchal distribution of power, and so on.

Though I have not found a characterization of gender in what I have read of his work, Quijano seems to me to imply that gender difference is constituted in the disputes over control of sex, its resources, and products. Differences are shaped through the manner in which this control is organized. Quijano under- stands sex as biological attributes” that become elaborated as social categories. He contrasts the biological quality of sex with phenotype, which does not include differential biological attributes. On the one hand, “the color of one’s skin, the shape of one’s eyes and hair do not have any relation to the biologi- cal structure” (2000b, 373). Sex, on the other hand, seems unproblematically

biological to Quijano. He characterizes the “coloniality of gender relations,””‘ that is, the ordering of gender relations around the axis of the coloniality of power, as follows:

1. In the whole of the colonial world, the norms and formal- ideal patterns of sexual behavior of the genders and conse- quently the patterns of familial organization of “Europeans” were directly founded on the “racial” classification: the sexual

freedom of males and the fidelity of women were, in the whole

of the Eurocentered world, the counterpart of the free-that is, not paid as in prostitution-access of white men to “black” women and “indians” in America, “black” women in Africa,

and other “colors” in the rest of the subjected world. 2. In Europe, instead, it was the prostitution of women that was the counterpart of the bourgeois family pattern.

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3. Familial unity and integration, imposed as the axes of the model of the bourgeois family in the Eurocentered world, were the counterpart of the continued disintegration of the parent-children units in the “nonwhite” “races,” which could be held and distributed as property not just as merchandise but as “animals.” This was particularly the case among “black” slaves, since this form of domination over them was more

explicit, immediate, and prolonged. 4. The hypocrisy characteristically underlying the norms and formal-ideal values of the bourgeois family are not, since then, alien to the coloniality of power. (Quijano 2000b, 378, my translation.)

As we see in this complex and important quote, Quijano’s framework restricts gender to the organization of sex, its resources, and products and he seems to make a presupposition as to who controls access and who become constituted as resources. Quijano appears to take for granted that the dispute over con- trol of sex is a dispute among men, about men’s control of resources which are thought to be female. Men do not seem understood as the resources in sexual encounters. Women are not thought to be disputing for control over sexual access. The differences are thought of in terms of how society reads reproductive biology.

INTERSEXUALITY

In “Definitional Dilemmas,” Julie Greenberg tells us that legal institutions have the power to assign individuals to a particular racial or sexual category:13 “Sex is still presumed to be binary and easily determinable by an analysis of biological factors. Despite anthropological and medical studies to the contrary, society presumes an unambiguous binary sex paradigm in which all individuals can be classified neatly as male or female (2002, 112). Greenberg argues that throughout U.S. history the law has failed to recognize intersexuals, in spite of the fact that 1 to 4 percent of the world’s population is intersexed. That is, they do not fit neatly into unambiguous sex categories; “they have some biologi- cal indicators that are traditionally associated with males and some biological indicators that are traditionally associated with females. The manner in which the law defines the terms male, female, and sex will have a profound impact on these individuals” (112, emphases added). The assignations reveal that what is understood to be biological sex is socially

constructed. From the late nineteenth century until World War I, reproductive function was considered a woman’s essential characteristic. The presence or absence of ovaries was the ultimate criterion of sex (Greenberg 2002, 113). But

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there are a large number of factors that can enter into “establishing someone’s ‘official’ sex”: chromosomes, gonads, external morphology, internal morphology,

hormonal patterns, phenotype, assigned sex, and self-identified sex (Greenberg 2002, 112). At present, chromosomes and genitalia enter into the assign- ment, but in a manner that reveals biology is thoroughly interpreted and itself surgically constructed.

XY infants with “inadequate” penises must be turned into girls because society believes the essence of manhood is the ability to penetrate a vagina and urinate while standing. XX infants with “adequate” penises, however, are assigned the female sex because society and many in the medical community believe that the essence of womanhood is the ability to bear chil- dren rather than the ability to engage in satisfactory sexual intercourse. (Greenberg 2002, 114)

Intersexed individuals are frequently surgically and hormonally turned into males or females. These factors are taken into account in legal cases involv- ing the right to change the sex designation on official documents, the ability to state a claim for employment discrimination based upon sex, the right to marry (Greenberg 2002, 115). Greenberg reports the complexities and variety of decisions on sexual assignation in each case. The law does not recognize intersexual status. Though the law permits self-identification of one’s sex in certain documents, “for the most part, legal institutions continue to base sex assignment on the traditional assumptions that sex is binary and can be easily determined by analyzing biological factors” (Greenberg 2002, 119). Greenberg’s work enables me to point out an important assumption in the

model that Quijano offers us. This is important because sexual dimorphism has been an important characteristic of what I call “the light side” of the colonial/ modern gender system. Those in the “dark side” were not necessarily understood

dimorphically. Sexual fears of colonizers led them to imagine the indigenous people of the Americas as hermaphrodites or intersexed, with large penises and breasts with flowing milk.14 But as Paula Gunn Allen (1986/1992) and others have made clear, intersexed individuals were recognized in many tribal societies prior to colonization without assimilation to the sexual binary. It is important to consider the changes that colonization brought to understand the scope of the organization of sex and gender under colonialism and in Eurocentered global capitalism. If the latter did only recognize sexual dimorphism for white bourgeois males and females, it certainly does not follow that the sexual divi- sion is based on biology. The cosmetic and substantive corrections to biology make very clear that “gender” is antecedent to the “biological” traits and gives them meaning. The naturalizing of sexual differences is another product of the modern use of science that Quijano points out in the case of “race.” Not all

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different traditions correct and normalize intersexed people. So, as with other assumptions, it is important to ask how sexual dimorphism served and continues

to serve global, Eurocentered, capitalist domination/exploitation.