Gender as decolonial category of analysis

Abstract

What is the role and the usage of gender? What is the meaning of the use of this term not only for feminist movements, but for the production of knowledge? Why use gender as a category of analysis to think the “human”? I try to think, about 30 years after Joan Scott's canonical publication, what it means to use gender as a category of analysis when perspectives such as decoloniality have shown us that gender can be a form of coloniality and can produce discourses that hide the multiplicity of the experience of relations outside the world-system of colonial modernity. I here argue that gender is a category of analysis capable of destabilizing what it is to be a man or to be a woman only when perceived not as a primary category, having race as secondary, but as a category with which it is produced.