Quijano Colonial Power Summary

Lugones tries to develop a systemic understanding of gender in consideration of Quijano’s conception of coloniality of power. Quijano conteptualized the coloniality of power as the constituting crux of the global capitalist system of power which classifies the population around the idea of race. Lugones criticizes the absence of race in conceptualizing gender from a white/colonial perspective. According to her, gender is a violent, destroying colonial concept that is constituted and imposed by colonial/modernity in terms of multiple relations of power. Gender fuses with race in the operations of colonial power; colonialism imposed a new gender system and different arragenments for colonized people than for colonizers. Intention of her in this writing is to show the instrumentality of the colonial/modern gender system in subjecting the people of color in all domains of existence. (pg. 189) Coloniality of power expands all aspects of social existence in constituting that race-based social classification and initiates new social and geocultural identities. Further, in Quijano’s understanding, coloniality, permeates all control of sexual access, collective authority, labor, subjectivity/intersubjectivity and the production of knowledge from these intersubjective relations.(pg. 191) Especially, the production of a way of knowing

Coloniality of power is constitutive of gender system and the gender system is constitutive of coloniality of power, there is a mutual constitution between them but, gender system cannot exist without the coloniality of power in regard to necessity of category of race in classification of the population. Different representations of gender and sexuality figure strongly in the articulation of racism. (pg. 205) Gender norms attiribute different roles and forms to white middle-class women, Asian men, non-white slave women