Paula M. L. Moya
I never set out to become a Lugonesian. I have always been suspicious of academics who, by way of claiming their scholarly bona fides, announce their intellectual affiliations by identifying as a “Foucauldian” or a “Derridean”—or even by announcing that they are taking a “Freudian” approach to this or that text, this or that problem. I wondered at their theoretical monologism, and even more at how they might see themselves as intellectuals in relation to their chosen intellectual guru—particularly since those intellectuals were usually deceased and had developed their insights in other times and other places, with a disparate set of concerns. And because early in my career I developed an approach to literary texts in relation to which I claimed affiliation with a group of scholars who take a “post-positivist realist” approach to identity and experience, I was not looking for a theoretical home. For all these reasons, it took me some time to fully appreciate how deeply María Lugones’s work has shaped my thinking.
I still will not call myself a Lugonesian—both because I retain my post-positivist realist theoretical commitments and affiliations, and also because I dislike critical moves that hail any great thinker as if she had been born fully formed and armed from the belly of Coatlicue.1 Great thinkers always develop their ideas and practices in company with others; individuals might discover the most compelling way to convey a generative principle or a system of thought, but they are never the sole authors of their insights.2 But despite the fact that I will not identify myself with an eponymous adjective, I cannot deny that Lugones—or, more accurately, the intellectual presence I have construed from reading and rereading her scholarship and from hearing her give numerous presentations—walks with me everywhere I go. María Lugones’s influence on me has been profound. Certainly, my students will testify to the frequency with which I urge them to consult one or another essay from Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes so that they might incorporate one or more of her key concepts into their own scholarship. My advice in such cases has proven to be productive—my students read her work, incorporate her insights, and their work is much stronger as a result.
It gives me sincere pleasure, then, to celebrate the publication of this excellently conceived and brilliantly executed collection of original essays. In bringing together essays that engage deeply with Lugones as a thinker, teacher, and mentor, Pedro DiPietro, Jennifer McWeeny, and Shireen Roshanravan have compiled a groundbreaking volume. They have assembled an eminent group of scholars—several of whom have longstanding engagements with the strains of thinking and activism that animate Lugones’s scholarship—and have provided a scholarly apparatus that will be of enormous help to Lugones scholars, such as the chronologically organized bibliography of her writings and a helpful standardization of abbreviations. But their jointly written introduction and their individual contributions arguably make an even greater impact. In the intricately braided narrative that opens their introduction, DiPietro, McWeeny, and Roshanravan testify eloquently to the profound effect that Lugones has had on each of their lives. They describe her loving and demanding mentorship and tell how she provided them with recognition and the experience of having been faithfully witnessed. They depict her as a model of intellectual bravery and resistance whose transformative scholarship stands on the precipice of social change. They narrate the way her affirmation and encouragement call forth their best selves to forge loving and complex connections with their near others. And they speak of the relief her wisdom brings to them as they learn from her how to faithfully witness their families of origin that still, sometimes, do not fully accept them in their complexity and fullness. Understanding that María Lugones and her scholarship are for these young scholars “like an earthquake to the soul,” I genuinely appreciate the care they have taken to compile a book that could “entice others to encounter her thinking, enter into it, and be touched by it” (2).
The volume includes a wide-ranging interview with Lugones by the philosopher Mariana Ortega, herself a leader in the field of Latina feminist theory. It touches on how and why Lugones developed her astute visual attentiveness (important for reading people and perceiving resistance), and touches on Lugones’s work on the coloniality of gender. But before the interview, we encounter a diversity of scholarly essays that provide context for the development of her thinking, and that extend her insights into new domains.
Essays that provide context for Lugones’s intellectual and personal development include pieces by long-time collaborators Elizabeth Spelman, Sarah Hoagland, and Cricket Keating. Because they trace Lugones’s evolution as a thinker, these essays are a valuable resource for newcomers and long-time scholars alike. In chapter 1, “Trash Talks Back,” Elizabeth Spelman examines one of Lugones’s key terms—oppression—in relation to the trope of trash. In so doing, she gives the concept of “oppression” further depth, texture, and sensuousness. Sarah Hoagland’s friendship with Lugones dating back to the 1980s when they were both involved in the Society for Women in Philosophy (SWIP) informs “Walking Illegitimately: A Cachapera/Tortillera and a Dyke” (chapter 12). By reflecting on how Lugones’s philosophical moves affected her own, and by filling in details of the environments from which essays familiar to Lugones’s long-time readers emerged, Hoagland pulls back the curtain and makes visible the conditions of possibility for Lugones’s system of thought. Explaining that her notion of “agency under oppression” was modified by Lugones into “active subjectivity,” Hoagland demonstrates how intellectual engagement can resemble a pas de deux, a salsa, a two-step, or (even better) a tango of two thinkers who care deeply about the words and the images they choose to convey the depth, intricacy, and complexity of their embodied ideas. Cricket Keating’s contribution, “Deep Coalition and Popular Education Praxis” (chapter 11), operates similarly to contextualize the building up and shaping of Lugones’s multilayered intellectual praxis. As a participant in the Escuela Popular Norteña (EPN), Keating is admirably positioned to illuminate the notion of deep coalition—the type of activist connection that goes “beyond short-term interest-based alliances” and that challenges us “to align our own self-understandings, interests, and goals with other oppressed groups” (239). Through a description of the different workshops conducted by the EPN over time—workshops inspired by the radical pedagogy of Paulo Freire and the organizing strategies of Myles Horton—Keating gives specificity to Lugones’s pedagogical practices.
The other type of essay in the volume carries Lugones’s insights into new terrains, effectively testing their viability and range. A good example is Jennifer McWeeny’s “Motion Sickness and the Slipperiness of Irish Racialization” (chapter 7). McWeeny provides an historically informed account of a psychological affliction tied to colonization and its aftermath across multiple generations. She movingly describes the “postcolonial stress disorder” that can arise among those whose racialization is easily hidden, and elucidates why people who inherit a sense of racialized shame and inferiority (but whose visage enables them to “pass”) might seek out that escape. As long as negative racial associations live on in the world—either in an individual’s psyche or in the ideas that others have about that individual’s racial group membership—the shame will never simply disappear. By extending Lugones’s work into a consideration of Irish racialization, McWeeny provides a superb illustration of Audre Lorde’s lesson that the only way out is through. In “Witnessing Faithfully and the Intimate Politics of Queer South Asian Praxis” (chapter 5), Shireen Roshanravan explores her own struggles with her mother’s dismay at her queerness to explicate key elements of Lugones’s notion of deep coalition. Roshanravan explains that most South Asian worldviews are shaped by a collective ethos such that “individuals are understood as interdependent in the collectivist mission of familial and communal wellbeing” (115), but reminds us that differently positioned people have differential access to diverse worlds of resistant sense-making. Roshanravan then notes that the angst experienced variously by the gay child and the disappointed parent often stems from a shared fear—the very real fear of losing the self-in-community. Emphasizing the importance of “being there” for one another, Roshanravan argues convincingly for the efficacy of approaching resistant family members with the goal of “witnessing faithfully” rather than “seeking acceptance.” By exemplifying the activity of “learning to read resistance across worlds of sense,” Roshanravan sheds light on the subtlety, complexity, and lovingness of Lugones’s commitment to building deep coalitions.
In chapter 9, “Beyond Benevolent Violence: Trans* of Color, Ornamental Multiculturalism, and the Decolonization of Affect,” Pedro DiPietro discusses the damages that accrue to people from nondominant cultures when they encounter the well-meaning but ignorant empathy offered to them by dominant-culture people who do not recognize the existence of ontological plurality. Building on work by Joshua Price and Lugones on structural monoculturalism and ornamental multiculturalism, DiPietro narrates two case studies—one involving Indian hijras and the other a Muslim trans man. In a sensitively wrought analysis that attends to the synecdochal relations that always structure interactions between people who do not know each other well, DiPietro shows how structural monoculturalism often leads to a “benevolent violence.” Other similarly perceptive chapters also push the boundaries of Lugones’s theoretical reach. Madina Tlostanova’s chapter regarding the second-order colonialism of the Asiatic part of Russia confirms that even when we talk about a lighter and a darker side of modernity, configurations of coloniality never break down into uncomplicated binaries (chapter 6). Finally, Manuel Chávez, Jr.’s chapter on decolonial ethics examines Lugones’s contributions to rethinking what it means to transform dominant masculinities among straight-identified Chicano men (chapter 8). Chávez builds on Lugones’s core elements in the coloniality of gender, underscoring that nonrelational understandings of the colonial condition within Chicana/o communities tend to erase the multiplicities of worlds and plural selves where what might look like resistant masculinities might be in allegiance with colonial patterns of violence against Chicanas.
I first met María Lugones in October 1995 at a conference at Cornell University that I co-organized with the writer Helena María Viramontes. I was a fifth-year graduate student in the Department of English, and Lugones was one of the keynote speakers.3 She made a strong impression on me then, and I have followed her peregrinations ever since—through her writings and occasionally in company with her through friends or at conferences. I have absorbed her teachings, occasionally debated her observations, and my thinking advanced exponentially after I reviewed her book Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes.4 Along the way, I have watched brilliant young scholars build on her work as they develop a corpus of decolonial scholarship.5 The essays in this book prove that Lugones’s influence spreads wide; the book itself will ensure that she is recognized for the major thinker and teacher that she is. And so, if I were inclined to identify myself with an eponymous adjective, I might well call myself a Lugonesian.
1.The reference is to the myth of the birth of the Aztec god of war, Huitzilopochtli. The events related in the story inaugurated Aztec warrior society and affirmed an ideology of male dominance in Tenochtitlán even prior to the arrival of the Spaniards. The story begins with Coatlicue doing penance at Coatepec. As she sweeps the temple, a ball of feathers appears and falls on or touches her. Coatlicue tucks it into her bosom for safekeeping and goes on with her task. When she is finished, she looks for the ball of feathers. But it has disappeared, and she is pregnant. When Coatlicue’s daughter, Coyolxauhqui, and her sons, the Centzonuitznaua, find out about this unexpected and shameful pregnancy, they become infuriated and decide to kill their mother. The infant in her womb, who is Huitzilopochtli, hears the commotion, and calls out to his mother that he will protect her. At this point, everyone stops and girds for battle. Then, at the decisive moment, Huitzilopochtli is born and appears fully armed with the fire serpent Xiuhcoatl, with which he strikes his sister: “Then he pierced Coyolxauhqui, and then quickly struck off her head. It stopped there at the edge of Coatepetl. And her body came falling below; it fell breaking to pieces; in various places her arms, her legs, her body each fell” (de Sahagún 4). After Coyolxauhqui’s defeat and dismemberment, Huitzilopochtli pursues the Centzonuitznaua until they flee into the southern sky and he remains victorious.
2.Even the great naturalist Charles Darwin rushed to publish his world-shaking book On the Origin of Species before Alfred Russel Wallace, with whom Darwin was in communication, could lay claim to what turned out to be a similar theory of evolution.
3.The conference was “El Frente: U.S. Latinas Under Attack and Fighting Back.” Lugones was one of six invited keynote speakers alongside philosopher Linda Martín Alcoff, filmmaker Ana María García, playwright and essayist Cherríe Moraga, Yvonne Yarbro Bejarano, and performance artist Ela Troyano.
4.Editors’ note: Dr. Moya refers to her review of Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes (2006).
5.I have been privileged to teach several of these. In his most recent work, Ernesto Martínez witnesses faithfully his childhood traumas to explore the (de)formation of his sexual subjectivity; Alisa Bierria builds on the concept of active subjectivity to propose a theoretical framework that can account for the problem of racial conflation in the ascribing of “phantom intentions” to Black women’s strategic actions; and (although her dissertation is still in progress) Modern Thought and Literature PhD student Luz Jimenez Ruvalcaba is developing herself as a faithful witness to the problem of domestic violence as an outcome of structural violence as represented in the work of 20th- and 21st-century Latinx writers.
Bierria, Alisa. 2018. Missing in Action: Agency, Race, & Recognition. PhD diss., Stanford University.
———. 2014. “Missing in Action: Violence, Power, and Discerning Agency.” Hypatia 29(1): 129–145.
de Sahagún, Bernardino, Arthur J. Anderson, and Charles E. Dibble. 1982. Florentine Codex, A General History of the Things of New Spain. Book 3—The Origin of the Gods. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Martínez, Ernesto J. 2014. “¿Con Quién, Dónde, y Por Qué Te Dejas?” Aztlán: A Journal of Chicano Studies 39(1): 237–46.
———. 2013. On Making Sense: Queer Race Narratives of Intelligibility. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Moya, Paula M. L. 2006. “Review of Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions.” Hypatia 21(3): 198–202.