In this article I caution that María Lugones's critiques of Kimberlé Crenshaw's intersectional theory posit a dangerous form of epistemic erasure, which underlies Lugones's decolonial methodology. This essay serves as a critical engagement with Lugones's essay “Radical Multiculturalism and Women of Color Feminisms” in order to uncover the decolonial lens within Crenshaw's theory of intersectionality. In her assertion that intersectionality is a “white bourgeois feminism colluding with the oppression of Women of Color,” Lugones precludes any possibility of intersectionality operating as a decolonial method. Although Lugones states that her “decolonial feminism” is for all women of color, it ultimately excludes Black women, particularly with her misconstruing of Crenshaw's articulation of intersectionality that is rooted within the Black American feminist tradition. I explore Lugones's claims by juxtaposing her rendering of intersectionality with Crenshaw's and conclude that Lugones's decolonial theory risks erasing Black women from her framework.

Structural gaslighting arises when conceptual work functions to obscure the nonaccidental connections between structures of oppression and the patterns of harm they produce and license. This article examines the role that structural gaslighting plays in white feminist methodology and epistemology using Miranda Fricker's discussion of hermeneutical injustice as an illustration (Fricker 2007). Fricker's work produces structural gaslighting through several methods: i) the outright denial of the role that structural oppression plays in producing interpretive harm, ii) the use of single-axis conceptual resources to understand intersectional oppression, and iii) the failure to recognize the legacy of women of color's epistemic resistance work surrounding the issue of sexual harassment in the workplace. I argue that Fricker's whitewashed discussion of epistemic resistance to sexual harassment in the United States is a form of structural gaslighting that fails to treat women of color as knowers and exemplifies the strategic forgetting that is a central methodological tactic of white feminism.

In 2016, when #NODAPL first appeared in the mainstream media, many nonnative people approached me about how to support the water protectors. This question can be answered in a couple of ways: first, I might address the specific issue (actions that directly support those at Standing Rock), or second, I might respond more generally about how to be an ally to native people. The two responses highlight a current issue in Indian Country: should nonnatives serve as active bystanders—or should they be allies to native peoples? Being an ally has come under scrutiny, especially given its propensity for epistemic injustice. Some philosophers—such as Rachel McKinnon—argue for dismissing the concept altogether, requiring that individuals serve as active bystanders. Although this may be necessary to support individuals in the transgender community, it lacks the resources to fully address the needs of colonized peoples. In this article, I argue for the operationalization of “ally” in Indian Country insofar as it is subject to decolonizing treatment. Although there is a need for both bystanders and allies in Indian Country, the Indigenous people must define the concepts that are intended to serve them.

Lands and bodies are often conceptualized as exhaustible objects and property within settler-colonial and neoliberal ideologies. These conceptualizations lead to underdevelopment of understandings of lands and bodies that fall outside of these ascriptions, and also attempt to actively obscure the pervasive ways in which settler colonialism violently reinscribes itself on the North American landscape through the murder and disappearance of Black and Brown women's bodies. In this article, I will argue that the continual murder and disappearance of Black and Brown women in North America facilitate the successful functioning of ongoing settler-colonial systems and projects. This violence creates and reinforces the functionality of Black/Brown bodies as the territory upon which settler identity and futurity gains traction, indeed, requires.

This article traces the centrality of capitalism in the work of three decolonial feminists: María Lugones, Sylvia Wynter, and Sayek Valencia. Elaborating on the role of capitalism in each of their work separately, I argue that each of these thinkers conceptualizes capitalism in a novel and urgent way, charting new directions for both theory and social movement practice. I thus argue that the decolonial feminist tradition holds crucial philosophical and historical resources for understanding the emergence of capitalism and its endurance.

It's early evening, a Friday night in October, and I have hauled myself off the couch to make dinner for my son and me. It's just us; the more active cooks in our family are away and the house is quiet. I've spent all afternoon immersed in scholarly literature about the history of home economics, and I chuckle at the irony as I pour premade marinara sauce over the noodles. I call up my son from the basement, where he's been immersed in his own studies, and find myself musing about our beginnings together—that spring when he arrived twenty-three years ago just as the trees were beginning to bud. I mutter about how perplexing cooking and mothering have been for me, and realize that these glimpses of me as a young mother and ponderings of how to take up increasing responsibilities as a middle-aged Indigenous “academic auntie” bookend my seasons of Indigenous feminist growth.

Since the early twentieth century, various strands of “anticolonial” scholarship have been and are concerned with how colonial encounters and practices constitute differences. In recent years, this scholarship maps the uneven implications of “coloniality” for subjects and bodies marked as different, for example, “feminine,” “raced,” “queer,” or trans. Along with feminism, anticolonial scholarship's analytical goals—to link the body with body politics—are closely tied to its political ones: to correct the wrongs of colonial encounters and practices. The current avatars of anticolonial scholarship include postcolonial, decolonial, and settler-colonial variants.

The first version of this piece was written for the opening panel of the 2017 Conference of the Association for Feminist Ethics and Social Theory (FEAST) in Florida. The panel, “Decolonial Feminism: Theories and Praxis,” offered the opportunity for Black and Latinx feminist philosophers and decolonial scholars to consider their arrival to decolonial feminisms, their various points of emergence, and the utility of decolonial politics for liberation movements and organizing. I was prepared to discuss some genealogies of US Latina decolonial feminisms with a focus on the relationship of decolonial feminisms to other feminist articulations—for example, a consideration of the relation and divergence between decolonial and postcolonial feminism. I was particularly interested in examining some of the “decolonizing constellations of resistance and love” created by Black, Indigenous, Latinx feminisms (Simpson 2014b). I wanted to track the intergenerational labor of relationality as a part of women of color politics and to discuss how these politics unseat coloniality in its variant iterations.