Michelle Khuong
Professor Bayles
GSW 050
5 February 2023
The Coloniality of Gender and Its Impacts on Society The binary gender system has been around for as long as many of us can remember, but it wasn’t always as black and white as it may seem. In actuality, our current idea of gender was implemented by colonists as a way to control indigenous populations. To understand the coloniality of gender, one must first understand Quijano’s coloniality of power, as these two concepts go hand-in-hand. In Maria Lugones’s article “The Coloniality of Gender'', she explains that Quijano concluded that colonists invented the construct of race to give more power to the colonists to get control over “the four basic areas of human existence: sex, labor, collective authority, and subjectivity/intersubjectivity, their resources and products” from the native population (Lugones 2).
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One of these communities of people is the Navajo community in New Mexico. In this specific culture, there are four basic gender identities (masculine-masculine, masculine-feminine, feminine-feminine, and feminine-masculine) and people who identified as being “two-spirited” were actually following their ancient cultural traditions (“How colonialism killed my culture’s gender fluidity”). Interestingly enough, even in Delhi, the capital of India, “gender has been more than just male and female for centuries. And in 2014, India’s Supreme court even recognized a ‘third gender’ ”(“How colonialism killed my culture’s gender fluidity”). Evidently, gender fluidity has existed long before the introduction of the binary system in society; and, these ‘third genders’ were typically found to be sacred and valued rather than shunned like today. This further disrupts the idea that only male or female genders