The Coloniality of Gender Studies, or: What is a Not-Woman?

On searching for gender-liberation in homelands lost and imagined.

“Knowledge is Wealth”: The Importance of Education in Indian Society

Indians are all taught the story of Eklavya. In the Mahabharat, Eklavya was an ordinary boy of prodigious talent, an archer so skilled with no formal training that he shocked even the royal princes’ tutor, Dronacharya. He was impassioned, deferential, and respectful, and all he wanted was the honor of Dronacharya’s tutelage, under whom he would no doubt flourish.

This presented the legendary guru Dronacharya with a dilemma. Yes, Eklavya was an ideal pupil and had passed all of his tests, following every established tradition in his quest for mentorship. Yet Dronacharya’s duty was to his royal charges first and foremost, and more selfishly, to Arjun, the most talented of the princes and Dronacharya’s favorite student. Now duty-bound to grant Eklavya’s boon, Dronacharya resorted to a morally dubious solution that was still entirely in keeping with our culture’s values (or sanskaar): he asked Eklavya, as his loyal pupil, to grant gurudakshina—a gift to one’s teacher—and demand that Eklavya cut off and present his right thumb.

Eklavya, of course, did so without hesitation.

Though the pundits debate the sagacity of Dronacharya’s actions to this day, especially in the context of how even this small incident held untold ramification for the coming war of succession, we all understand that as students, we owe our teachers—whom we still refer to as guru—everything. They are the ones through which we access the most sacred wealth: knowledge itself, a commodity whose indispensability is no better illustrated than by noting that Saraswati and Laxmi are aspects of the same mother goddess. Some believe that our duty to our teachers transcends even that which we owe our parents.

Which has never stopped anyone from passing notes in class, of course.

After all, you can tell children whatever stories you like, but you can’t make them pay attention if they don’t want to.

We mostly call our teachers “Sir” and “Madam” nowadays, by the way. I don’t really have statistics on that, and I haven’t exactly checked, but I’m from India. You can take my word for it.

Right?

Western Feminism and the “Third World Woman”

Readers of Trans/Rad/Fem are no doubt already familiar with the Western academy’s tenuous relationship to the empirical reality of cultures and social structures outside the West. In a discursive landscape that had yet to grapple with the intersections at which multiply-marginalized women were made illegible—leave alone questions of “epistemic injustice”—the “Third World Woman” was initially fashioned as a convenient rhetorical device, tailor-made to prop up ideologies of Western superiority.

The “Third World Woman” was, of course, entirely bereft of both voice and agency, a silent fetish who could only ever be spoken for, never spoken to. Much ink was spilled on the pronounced and acute state of her abjection: her illiteracy, her jealously-guarded chastity, the total ownership that her father or husband exercised over her, usually exemplified by that most dreaded of garments, the veil. Through her, the Western feminist could exalt her own state of liberty, autonomy, and ability to think, read, organize, and agitate—especially on behalf of the Western colonial-states, of course. For did not the “Third World Woman”, by dint of her very existence, show us all why the West was, indeed, Enlightened?

What manner of society did not even allow its women to propagandize for it?

This is the climate that Chandra Talpade Mohanty sought to deconstruct in her paper, Under Western Eyes, published in 1984. Here, Mohanty strenuously argues against the prevailing orthodoxies plaguing feminist discourses of the time that flattened, homogenized, and frankly exoticized the “Third World”. She pointed out how the complexities and contradictions of Third World existence were entirely erased by these simplistic narratives, and that actual living, breathing women in the Third World did not all suffer a totalizing, uniform abjection. The Third World contained affluent and impoverished women, upper and lower caste women, women of hegemonic and marginalized faiths in theocracies—in short, women whose lives were textured by the multiplicities of their own cultures and states. They did not exist solely for Western aggrandizement, defined by a singular story of suffering that rendered them monolithic and monomythic.

In short, Mohanty was making an argument for epistemic justice—for engaging with the complexity of women’s oppression in the Third World, and acknowledging that there was no all-encompassing “Third World Womanhood” that rendered them all subject to the same oppression or aligned their interests wholly. The well-off housewife had only so much in common with her live-in maid, after all. It was effectively an argument to afford Third World women the same degree of nuance as Western feminists (sometimes) afforded women in the West, acknowledging and being cognizant of internal disputes and differing goals.

Arguably, this erasure of nuance and the particularities of multiply-marginalized women’s lives has been the central feminist failure since at least Friedan, if not before. Any feminist movement—wherever it might be located—risks overemphasizing the concerns of the hegemonic demographic, asking the most vulnerable to be the most patient and to put their specific, “lesser” concerns aside for the sake of feminist cohesion and solidarity. From Rich to Mohanty to Crenshaw to Feinberg to Serano, feminism’s history could well be succinctly summarized as, “Aren’t you forgetting someone?”

For the “Third World woman”, this concern is only heightened by the Western academy’s privileging of its own perspectives, its own histories, and most of all its own epistemologies. To make herself legible at all, the “Third World woman” has to acquiesce to the West’s framing, to use its language, its methodologies, to try to define herself in the realm of its existing ideas and conceptions and assumptions of her life and people. Imagine what it would take for her to be understood on her own terms, as a subject—a person shaped by a non-Western society with its own regimes and organization and structures of power.

Could it even be done?

According to Maria Lugones, the name most associated with ‘decolonial feminism’, we should damn well try.

“Decolonizing Gender”

In 2007, Maria Lugones published Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System. She builds on Anibal Quijano’s notion of the coloniality of power—briefly, the idea that the structuring of precolonial societies by colonizing powers continues to affect and structure those societies post-colonization—to define and discuss a concept she calls the coloniality of gender. Lugones draws on the work of Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, Paula Gunn Allen, and other scholars to illustrate that prior to colonialism, non-Western societies were not in fact organized along a hierarchy of binary gender.

“The reason to historicize gender 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.” [Emphasis mine.]

Her primary source in the paper is Oyěwùmí’s The Invention of Women, a book published in 1997 that discusses Yoruba society and gender. Oyěwùmí argues that gender was simply not an organizing principle of precolonial Yoruba society and that to view Yoruba society through this Eurocentric lens of binary and hierarchical gender is in fact to try and fit an ungendered society into a Western mold. In fact, the introduction of gender to precolonial societies is in and of itself a tool of Western domination, to subsume local epistemologies and ways of being. She says:

“The emergence of women as an identifiable category, defined by their anatomy and subordinated to men in all situations, resulted, in part, from the imposition of a patriarchal colonial state. For females, colonization was a twofold process of racial inferiorization and gender subordination. The creation of ‘women’ as a category was one of the very first accomplishments of the colonial state.” [Emphasis mine.]

Lugones and Oyěwùmí are arguing, then, that colonization was the genesis of gender in precolonial societies that had more egalitarian relations between the sexes. As such, gender and race were inseparable concepts, themselves interlinked with colonial domination and capitalism, as coterminous systems of power constructed to uphold the myth of Western superiority and secure Western-supremacy. At various points in the essay, Lugones refers to the establishment of patriarchy in precolonial societies as a betrayal, a case of collaboration between the males of a non-Western society and colonizing Western powers.

She also cites Michael J. Horswell, who discusses alternative understandings of gender and sexuality in Andean cultures and analyses his use of the term… “third gender”.

Fascinating.

While neither Lugones nor Oyěwùmí are trans scholars or strictly talking about trans people, their ideas have proved to be influential beyond their own disciplines. Many discourses in feminist, queer and trans studies draw directly from the concepts established in this paper and its interpretation of Oyěwùmí’s text to discuss the potential and possibility of queer histories and trans acceptance in precolonial times. In that sense, Lugones’ concept of the coloniality of gender unites a variety of disparate struggles and invites us to imagine worlds free of Western systems of domination that precede our own.

But is it… you know… true?

Let’s consider this paper more generally before focusing on the specifics. Non-Western society is a breathtakingly broad category. Singular non-Western countries that exist today are themselves constructions that haphazardly aggregate masses of cultures, hierarchies, peoples, languages, institutions, systems, religions, and histories into a supposedly shared national identity. To make a statement that is both this broad and this definitive about every non-Western society would require a very high threshold of evidence, one that these selfsame scholars insist the assertion that “patriarchy is a transcultural phenomenon” does not meet! So to claim that the very opposite is true about Argentina and also India and also China and also Nigeria and also Ukraine, and so on, is both bold and more than a little homogenizing.

Is it not in and of itself an act of colonial Western epistemology to make this statement about all non-Western societies? It is arguable whether Lugones and Oyěwùmí make such a strong claim, but the circulation of their ideas and especially their reproduction in queer and feminist discourses regularly do.

There is furthermore the issue of colonialism being treated as a singular process or system, without accounting for how different societies experienced colonial violence differently. The indigenous genocide that is the foundation for the United States’ settler-colonial order involved near-total levels of epistemicide and erasure in the process of usurpation, but by contrast the colonial relationship between India and England was not settler-colonial. It was a much more extractive relationship, with India being treated as a site of wealth to loot (and today, as a site of cheap labor to exploit), but there was nowhere near as holistic an attempt to supplant and replace India’s societies on India’s lands. Transform and disrupt them to reorient them towards the purposes of extractivist colonialism and the hollowing out of both land and people? Almost certainly. But while Indian history will likely always be filtered through a degree of Anglophonic and colonial translation and interpretation… there’s still a lot of Indian history, and Chinese history, and other histories that are far less (allegedly) unknowable and ambiguous than the histories destroyed by Native genocide.

Despite these clear material differences, Western discourses on the violence of colonialism—ironically—even discount and homogenize non-Western perspectives on colonial violence.

Once more, this principally occurs in queer and feminist discourses that do not much care to differentiate between colonialism as a process of usurpation and replacement, or colonialism as a process of displacement and enslavement, or colonialism as a process of wealth extraction and pillaging. While these processes may look broadly similar and no doubt have large degrees of overlap, the distinction is important to make, especially when describing non-Western people’s relationship to their own precolonial understandings.

So on a very basic, almost tautological level, this is not a true claim in the way it is usually deployed—broad, totalizing, and homogenizing. If the claim that patriarchy is both transhistorically and transculturally extant does not meet evidentiary standards, then these claims about non-patriarchal precolonial societies fall much, much further short.

But also… are the claims even true about Yoruba society specifically?

Constructing a Non-Gendered Society

There’s an interesting paper I came across during the process of research, published in 2024 in the journal of feminist philosophy Hypatia. The following is a snippet from the abstract of Sexual Difference and Decolonization: Oyĕwumı and Irigaray in Dialogue about Western Culture:

“In this article we aim to show the potential of cross-continental dialogues for a decolonizing feminism. We relate the work of one of the major critics of the Western metaphysical patriarchal order, Luce Irigaray, to the critique of the colonial/modern gender system by the Nigerian feminist scholar Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí. Oyěwùmí’s work is often rejected based on the argument that it is empirically wrong. …” [Emphasis mine.]

Oh, dear.

Oyěwùmí’s argument in The Invention of Women about gender not being a relevant organizational factor in precolonial Yoruba society rests on three prongs. The first is a linguistic argument, centering on the notion that Yoruba language is less gendered than—let’s say English, even though Oyěwùmí talks about ‘Western’ and ‘Eurocentric’ linguistic understandings as though they’re all reducible to the English understanding. The second is the assertion that Yoruba society is organized by seniority, not gender. The third is that statistics are fake and Western. On page 77:

“Odds are the supreme language of statistics speaks to the Western obsession with measurement and the preoccupation with ‘evidence that we can see.’” [Emphasis mine.]

And on page 110:

“My discussion of statistical categoricalism in the previous chapter dealt with the issue of whether a legitimate argument can be made about the statistical prevalence of anafemales in a particular trade. Suffice it to say here that the question of gender and numbers does not arise from the [Oyo] frame of reference; it, of course, fits in very well with the Western bio-logic framework.” [Emphasis mine.]

The crux of Oyěwùmí’s argument here is that statistical analyses of, for example, the number of women and men in particular trades to gauge how gendered the trade is and whether women are under-represented, is not a relevant lens through which to view Yoruba society, and in fact such statistical analyses effectively create the gendered reality they wish to observe. By, well, observing how many men or women are present in particular arenas or domains. Allegedly, statisticians must first prove that “man” and “woman” are meaningful categories in Yoruba society before trying to measure how gendered specific aspects of Yoruba society are.

This is less an argument and more a circular reasoning for why Oyěwùmí’s claims about gender not being a meaningful social organizing category ought to be treated as unfalsifiable. If Yoruba society is not preoccupied with gender, but empirical observations do not show that men and women are roughly evenly distributed across a cross-section of professions or classes, then perhaps gender is a determining factor in some way. That is implied by the observation.

There is one more thing Oyěwùmí says about statistics. She alleges that by observing, say, a disproportionate number of men in a field or trade, those doing the analysis downplay and dismiss the exceptions, the women who are also present but outnumbered. Keep that in mind for later.

Let’s return to the linguistic argument. Oyěwùmí holds that the Yoruba categories obinrin and okunrin are translated by Western researchers, who “always find gender when they look for it”, as ‘female/woman’ and ‘male/man’ respectively. According to Oyěwùmí, this is a mistranslation: “These categories are neither binarily opposed nor hierarchical.” Instead, the terms obinrin and okunrin merely indicate “anatomic distinction” and she insists that they are better translated as “anatomical female” and “anatomical male”, or “anafemale” and “anamale” for short.

…So that’s… interesting…

Perhaps a transfeminine perspective here might be invaluable. Leaving aside the sleight of hand in including the word ‘female’ alongside ‘woman’ when asserting that obinrin is a mistranslation, as though ‘female’ does not have principally anatomic connotations, the idea that the word ‘woman’ is first and foremost regarded by most Westerners—even most Western researchers and scholars—as a social and not anatomical or biologically-essentialist category is giving the West far, far too much credit! You need only look at the X feed of a certain wizard kidlit author and their disciples to disabuse yourself of the notion that Western linguistic understandings of gender encode and communicate a primarily social hierarchy—that assumes feminist discourses to be far, far more widespread than they actually are!

But also… is the idea that Yoruba language encodes and communicates anatomical differences without gendered connotations actually, you know… true?

Bibi Bakare-Yusuf’s Yorubas Don’t Do Gender: A Critical Review (2000)

Bibi Bakare-Yusuf is a Nigerian academic and writer who has studied communication, anthropology and gender studies abroad. Her work is not as well known as Oyěwùmí’s for reasons that will become clear later, and in 2000 she published a critical review of The Invention of Women.

“Recently, some African scholars have begun to question the explanatory power of gender in African societies. This challenge came out of the desire to produce concepts grounded in African thought and everyday lived realities. These scholars hope that by focusing on an African episteme they will avoid any dependency on European theoretical paradigms and therefore eschew what Babalola Olabiyi Yai (1999) has called ‘dubious universals’ and ‘intransitive discourses’.”

Bakare-Yusuf describes Oyěwùmí’s methodology as problematic and her understanding of both language and the Yoruba system of seniority as simplistic and naive. She reminds us that language is also an evolving, living thing, that the same word can carry different meanings and connotations even between different places during the same era, and that by purporting to uncover a “pure essence” of Yoruba language free of gendered implications, Oyěwùmí effectively situates it out of history, time, and the forces of change. Yet it is the question of ‘seniority not gender’ that proves to be most illustrative of Oyěwùmí’s approach and priors:

“The essential pitfall of her account of power, whether that of seniority in Yorubaland or gender distinction in the west, is that a particular variable of power is the same everywhere in isolation from any other form of enablement or constraint. One can readily concede that Oyewumi is right to argue that seniority is the dominant language of power in Yoruba culture. However, she is wrong to conclude that seniority is the only form of power relationship and that it operates outside of or in relation to other forms of hierarchy.”

It’s almost like distinct forms of power can co-exist… and impact the same person simultaneously… in a sort of overlap, or say, intersection…

Bakare-Yusuf further stresses that Oyěwùmí’s reductive reading of power relations in Yoruba culture preclude her from understanding that seniority is oftentimes invoked as a cover for other forms of inequality or power imbalance:

“The vocabulary of seniority often becomes the very form in which sexual abuse, familial (especially for the aya/wife in a lineage) and symbolic violence is couched. Her refusal to complicate or interrogate the workings of power is even more alarming giving the virulent abuse of power in the teacher-student relationship in the Nigerian education system that often goes unchallenged by the victim because they are loathe to challenge the abuser in the name of ‘disrespecting their senior’ . …. Seniority in the Yoruba context is therefore often a ruse for other forms of power. However, because Oyěwùmí wants seniority to stand alone as the dominant mode of power in the Yoruba social system, she simply cannot recognise blurred reality for what it is. She therefore must avoid all work done by feminists and social theorists that stresses the complex interdependency of one form of power upon another and the ways in which one explicitly manifested (and respected!) power often conceals other more insidious ones.” [Emphasis mine.]

Speaking from the Indian context, I want to point out that the idea of seniority as a form of social power relations, especially within joint and extended families, is hardly exclusive to Yoruba culture—nor is it exactly decoupled from gender relations! Because the source of an elder’s authority within a family structure is as much about their role as a progenitor to whom their children and children’s families owe deference, which is very much a form of reproductive logic!

There’s also the fact that Oyěwùmí notes in the book that it is customary for Yoruba women to relocate to their husbands’ households after marriage, which instantly removes them from their old hierarchical position and places them on the bottom of a new one as the most recent entrant, on the same level as newborn infants. She then does not interrogate this observation at all.

Finally, on the subject of gender-neutrality predicated on non-gendered language, Bakare-Yusuf observes:

“For Oyěwùmí, there are no barriers to obinrin’s activities in relation to okunrin. That is, the biological fact of being female does not interrupt or determine in any way (beyond the obvious fact of reproduction) the social perceptions of bodies. It is this alleged gender neutrality that affords ana-females in the Yoruba context the level of freedom and capacity that they enjoy. However, just because gender difference is not inscribed within discourse or marked within language doesn’t mean that it is entirely absent in social reality. There is often a gap between what happens in law and social reality. It is precisely by not making a distinction between language and reality that Oyěwùmí is able to elide this possibility and assume that Yoruba women have the same power as men in their lineage.” [Emphasis mine.]

It’s a shame that statistics are too Western to give us any insight into the gendered reality of Yoruba society.

Given the way that Oyěwùmí recoils from empiricism, in addition to the licenses she takes in interpreting the West as distinct from Yoruba society in ways it likely isn’t, it is perhaps fair to conclude that her reasoning is motivated by her conclusion rather than the other way around. Oyěwùmí wants to make these assertions about Yoruba society, despite the fact that, per Bakare-Yusuf, the wives of the household typically have food-preparation and child-rearing responsibilities in a way that “male wives” (men who relocate to their wives’ household instead of the inverse) simply do not. Oyěwùmí is attached to the idea that exceptions to the rule mean that one cannot make gendered assertions about Yoruba culture, and relies on those exceptions heavily in her reasoning, but as Bakare-Yusuf says:

“While one can sympathise with the therapeutic value motivating Oyewumi’s desire to uncover a pre-colonial, harmonious, ungendered history, the evidence she uses to support her argument simply does not stand up to scrutiny. We cannot simply use the experience of princesses and privileged women to evaluate the position and experience of most women in society.”

Here, I must apologize to my readers for withholding crucial context that would enable them to read this declaration from Bakare-Yusuf with the appropriate tone. You see, in the very Preface of The Invention of Women, Oyěwùmí explains that she was born into a large family, and in 1973 her father ascended the throne to become the Soun of Ogbomoso.

She also says that she is indebted to her siblings, parents, and “the many mothers and fathers in the palace” for their contributions to her many years of research.

Now, far be it for me to question whether the perspective of a royal family can be drawn upon to accurately portray what life is like for everyday men and women, which would imply that Oyěwùmí’s assertions about gender cannot even be applied to all of Yoruba society. Let’s entertain the idea that the existence of influential and affluent women necessarily implies that those women’s cultures cannot be held to be patriarchal. Applying this logic would lead one to necessarily conclude that England under Queen Victoria was a non-gendered, non-patriarchal society.

You know, the Victorian England that was a colonial power. The one that is charged by scholars of various disciplines as having introduced the ‘colonial’ and hierarchical gender binary to non-Western societies. I suppose that England is exonerated of these charges and we have to look elsewhere for the True Source of Evil from which patriarchy emerged. Perhaps Middle-Earth.

Of course, there is also the matter of Oyěwùmí’s other opinions on gender, including her views on the ‘Western’ practice of homosexuality. In 2004, Oyěwùmí edited an anthology entitled African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood. The second chapter, written by her, contains the following:

“The insistence on the part of Western women to label what African women call female circumcision ‘mutilation’ was the first visible sign of deep divisions between them and many of their African counterparts … A number of other African institutions that Westerners view as barbaric include arranged marriages, levirate, and child betrothal. These practices are misrepresented as misogynistic and not placed in their cultural and social contexts that would allow Westerners to discern their meaning from the perspective of African societies.”

Okay. We really need to talk about this trick.

Recall, if you will, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Under Western Eyes. Mohanty cautions against the flattening and homogenization of complex systems and societies outside the West—just as Oyěwùmí did here, referring to a notion of “African societies” that uniformly accept practices like FGM and child betrothal more neutrally than the also-homogenized specter of hysterical “Western women” do. As if there are no African women or African movements or African feminisms opposing these practices. As if the perspectives of the most conservative, visible, affluent and well-connected elements of a non-Western society must be granted epistemic authority enough for all society, including the elements of society they do not meaningfully share many interests with!

Oyěwùmí here is not concerned with the unvarnished truth, the complexities of non-Western systems of oppression, and certainly not with feminism of any kind. The clue is in the word barbaric, which belies a preoccupation with how her society and people are perceived by the West. Her statements about gender and seniority and misogyny must all be considered with the context that she occupies a certain place in her society that makes her more preoccupied with its image than whether its people truly accept all its traditions and customs. Her work represents the apotheosis of academic discourse between the racism of the West and the classism of the upper-crust of non-Westerners.

It is this fixation on image that compels Oyěwùmí to engage in a strange dialogue with the works of Alice Walker, within this same anthology. Oyěwùmí takes issue with Walker’s idea that West African societies had “culturally sanctioned and institutionalized forms of lesbianism”, accusing Black feminists of speaking over African perspectives and applying contemporary Western discourses of sexuality onto indigenous African contexts.

So, you know, the scholar whose work has most trickled down into queer scholarship that claims a pre-patriarchal and queer-inclusive precolonial paradigm is one whose idea of “non-gendered” society cannot even countenance the prevalence or acceptance of lesbianism.

Cool!

Westerners Seem To Be Really Fucking Gullible

Did you believe the things I said about Indian society in the very first section of this essay? You really shouldn’t have. I can spin a pretty story about Hindu values and the deference we owe our teachers, but India is not a purely Hindu country, nor does its Hindu population necessarily live lives guided by the teachings of an ancient epic it would take aeons to read.

Also, the story of Eklavya is more about caste than anything else, because Eklavya was a lower-caste boy who tried to reach above his station, and was dealt with accordingly.

This is going to be the least rigorous part of this piece, because I’m kind of just fed up. Judith Butler in Who’s Afraid of Gender? talks about how authoritarians in the West live in a ‘phantasm’, a reality of their own making that they have retreated into because actual reality challenges and complicates their understandings of power, hierarchy, and how the world ‘should’ be. Butler was wrong.

Because I’m pretty sure it’s not just authoritarians.

The West’s relationship to the Third World remains a deeply orientalist one. Even amongst those who are more aware of social ills—perhaps especially amongst such people—the idea that an entire unfamiliar world exists past colonized borders is incredibly enticing. What can these strange and faraway people and places that I know very little about and refuse to look at objectively teach me about a better, less rigid, less Western way of life? Maybe I should listen to this charlatan who is trying to push a very particular narrative? It would be racist of me not to, right?

Well, folks, swallowing whatever bullshit someone with a particular outlook and interests sells you isn’t exactly egalitarian and decolonial.

This is where I’d caution folks to be critical about my work too, but I don’t seem to need to bother. People who are very attached to the fictions and fabrications I have zero patience for somehow managed to find the ability to be nuanced about my life and point of view, and constantly invent novel ways to call me ‘white’ or ‘Western’, ascribing to me a level of privilege and subjecting me to a level of scrutiny that actual princesses escape. People are plenty skeptical about what I write, don’t you worry, because the bedtime stories are more important than coming to terms with just how fucking complicated life is everywhere and just how much conservative, reactionary, and nationalist logic pervades thinking all over the world.

The only purpose I can ascribe to this level of attachment to trumped-up and difficult to substantiate visions of precolonial life is a desire for a far simpler world than the one that actually exists, where solidarity is not impossible but requires a hell of a lot of work across movements, cultures and interests. What if we could get everyone on board with slaying The One Dragon Responsible For All Evil? What if we could cast the One Ring of Whiteness into the fires of Mount Decolonize? What if we could crawl back into the prelapsarian womb that I was untimely ripped from and to which I can definitely, definitely return? Wouldn’t that be nice?

It would, but it’s not a particularly useful or productive or predictive model of the world, so fucking deal.

Worst of all, I genuinely cannot envision how it would matter even if this idealist precolonial utopia was real. Let’s just believe everything for a moment. Let’s allow that in the past—the very recent past, even!—all societies outside the West were paradises where trans people were revered and queer people were accepted and men actually loved the women they fucked. Then 200-400 years ago, The White Nation attacked and plunged us into this centuries-long dystopia.

So fucking what?

Can we roll the world back to an earlier version on git? Can we go up to the manager of Patriarchy and Imperialism and say, “Excuse me sir, we used to exist in harmony and peace. Doesn’t exploiting us now make you feel bad?”

Even Lugones admits that this model of history and colonial relations condemns non-Western men as traitors and turncoats, as scum who overthrew the harmony of their peaceful society in exchange for property rights over women! If it were all true, we would still have to deal with that, to contend that systems of domination and power and gender hold a certain appeal to those who are granted certain benefits. We would still have to analyze these systems as having incentives, as having an appeal for those who aren’t on the absolute bottom rung. Keep looking into and interpreting our past, and believe in the fairy tale if you like, but that doesn’t actually change what must be done today and now.

And frankly, I don’t even think the story is that inspiring. I think the fact that despite the lack of historical precedence women and trans people and queer people have still fought for and secured rights, that we are sitting here envisioning and fighting for better worlds, is a hell of a lot more inspiring than the idea that I must seek out a lost paradise. It is, frankly, tantamount to spitting on the memories of those who come before us and everything they fought for.

Because I am proud of my foremothers, and I don’t understand why more of us aren’t.

I may be many things, but I am most certainly a woman. Neither my transness nor my brownness nor my lesbianism nor anything else about me makes me less of one. I am regarded as reproductive offal and a valid target of sexual violence under patriarchy. I fight to change that.

Do you?

Thank you for supporting my work. This essay marks another entry of my upcoming book, Brown/Trans/Les, which is out on Monday! If you enjoy my work, please consider supporting me by pre-ordering!