Gender and Equivocation: Notes on Decolonial Feminist Translations

Abstract

Feminism and cultural translation Latin American feminist theories, especially those articulated by subaltern/ racialized subjects, operate within an epistemological referent that is distinct from the analytic models of critique historically based on centre and periphery, tradition and modernity dichotomies. An effect of transculturation and dias-poric movements that create space and time disjunctures, the chronotrope of these feminisms is the interstice, and its practice is rooted in cultural translation in the constitution of other forms of knowledge (saberes propios) and humanity. By replacing dichotomous approaches of social-political conflicts for complex analysis of the in-between spaces-las fronteras-of the social landscape-and, therefore, by emphasizing through the practice of translation relational-ities between hegemonic forces and subaltern contestations, these feminisms are today in the forefront of discussions on how to decentre and decolo-nize Western knowledge formations. They are, in very creative ways, enabling alternative possibilities that go beyond those offered by feminist postcolonial theories. The question I want to raise in this short essay-while addressing some of the provocations that Lugones' most instigating article 'The Coloniality of Gender' engages-is: How do Latin American feminist theories, articulated by subaltern subjects, translate and subvert the coloniality of gender? In what follows, I will try to map out, in a necessarily abbreviated and perhaps inconclusive manner, possible routes out of 'the coloniality of gender' for feminist decolonial studies in the south of the Americas. To accomplish this difficult yet expedient task, I will rely on the notion of translation. I should begin by clarifying that my use of the term 'translation' is borrowed from Niranjana's (1992) deployment of the concept; that is, it does not refer exclusively to discussions about the strategies for semiotic processes in the area of translations studies, but to debates on cultural translation. The 48 W. Harcourt (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Gender and Development