Coloniality at work

What is it about?

In this article I address the imbalance in the production and circulation of knowledge in the dominant Anglo-American academic circuit, aiming to make visible feminist work in a decolonial vein carried out in Latin America, to re-centre the decolonial option with regard to established postcolonial studies, and to propose a way of understanding global postfeminist female subjectivity as mediated in mass media. Benefiting from my own borderlines position as a Latin American woman trained in Anglo-American academia and based in the West (Europe), I aim at bridging the gap between decolonial feminist theory --focused on issues of praxis, overlooking questions of representation, and resolutely uninterested in mass culture and media; and feminist cultural studies --mostly informed by dominant feminist theories and postcolonial frameworks. I revise María Lugones’s influential concept of the ‘coloniality of gender’ (Lugones 2007; Lugones 2008) and link it with what I term --following closely Angela McRobbie and Rosalind Gill (McRobbie 2004; McRobbie 2008; Gill 2007)-- ‘the postfeminist regime’. I argue that both these concepts articulate and are put at work in contemporary understandings of female subjectivity as constructed in global culture through mass media. To do this I discuss two cases in point: the FEMEN –a self-defined feminist social movement that originated in Ukraine and has been at the centre of controversy and media attention in Europe since the late 2000– and what I claim is the figure of the ‘exoticised female pop icon’. I show that the FEMEN and these pop icons provide an exemplary case of coloniality at work where ‘coloniality’ is understood as the hidden face of modernity, the underlying logic of colonialism (Quijano 2000; Mignolo 2008).

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Why is it important?

The article aims to connect decolonial critique with analyses of contemporary global culture.