SUNY series, Praxis: Theory in Action

The Visionary Philosophy of María Lugones

Pedro J. DiPietro, Jennifer McWeeny, Shireen Roshanravan, Pedro J. DiPietro, Jennifer McWeeny, Shireen Roshanravan

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781438474540
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Speaking Face to Face provides an unprecedented, in-depth look at the feminist philosophy and practice of the renowned Argentinian-born scholar-activist María Lugones. Informed by her identification as "nondiasporic Latina" and US Woman of Color, as well as her long-term commitment to grassroots organizing in Chicana/o communities, Lugones's work dovetails with, while remaining distinct from, that of other prominent transnational, decolonial, and women of color feminists. Her visionary philosophy motivates transformative modes of engaging cultural others, inviting us to create political intimacies rooted in a shared yearning for interdependence. Bringing together scholars and activists across fields, this volume charts her profound impact in and beyond the academy for the past thirty years. In so doing, it exemplifies a new method of coalitional theorizing—traversing racial, ethnic, sexual, national, gendered, political, and disciplinary borders in order to cultivate learning, embrace heterogeneity, and provide a unique framework for engaging contemporary debates about identity, oppression, and activism. Across thirteen original contributions, authors address issues of intersectionality, colonial and decolonial subjectivities, the multiplicity and the coloniality of gender, indigenous spiritualities and cosmologies, pluralist and women of color feminisms, radical multiculturalism, popular education, and resistance to multiple oppressions. The book also includes a rare interview with María Lugones and an afterword by Paula Moya, ultimately offering both new critical resources for longstanding admirers of Lugones and a welcome introduction for newcomers to her groundbreaking work.

Part I Coalitional Selves, Multiple Realities

1Trash Talks Back

Elizabeth V. Spelman

The subtitle of Lugones’s extraordinary collection Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes is Theorizing Coalition against Multiple Oppressions. Readers of Lugones’s work might wonder if she chose this subtitle only with considerable reluctance. Its telescoping conciseness perhaps assures readers who might be puzzled by the title that they will be in familiar conceptual and political territory: “theory,” “coalition,” and “oppression” are eminently keyword-worthy. But it is a measure of the forces against which Lugones has been in continuous struggle that those concepts—especially oppression—may seem all too inviting: they promise but are unlikely to deliver an opening for resistance and liberation. In what follows I briefly review some of Lugones’s reservations about the work performed by the notions of oppression and the oppressed. I then go on to suggest that concepts hinted at but not fully articulated in her work—“trash,” “waste,” “disposable,” and the like—provide a vocabulary that direct us to sources of resistance she takes the language and the structure of oppression to occlude.

“IF YOU SEE OPPRESSION, YOU TEND NOT TO SEE RESISTANCE”1

Toward the conclusion of “Tactical Strategies of the Streetwalker/Estrategias Tácticas de la Callejera,” Lugones remarks:

I end with a reflection of what pulls us into a frenzy of recognizable political activity, recognizable in dominant terms. Street-level sociality can provide a despairing, demoralizing “picture” of the complexities and depth of oppression and of the barriers to emancipatory change. There is a desire to imbue oneself with a sense of power against this demoralization. Not infrequently, the pedestrian theorist is tempted to favor a mode of comportment that speaks the languages of systems of oppression, seeking within them redress or assistance. This temptation, seduction, is understandable and ubiquitous. We feel a need to demand equality, respect, and justice within a particular dominant construal of sense, even if that sense—conceptually, materially—requires that equality, respect and justice be mechanisms congruent with fragmentation and domination. (TSC 229)

The very notion of oppression appears to open up a space in which the oppressed are both recognized and attended to: the systemic and suffocating domination, abuse and exploitation to which people are subjected is acknowledged, presumably as part of projects to end such violence. But Lugones worries that attention framed in such terms comes at a high price. Oppressive systems—including the tools they provide for reflexive examination—thrive on truncated, reductive portrayals of the oppressed that obscure their existence as “subjects, lively beings, resisters” (IP 18):

If we think of people who are oppressed as not consumed or exhausted by oppression, but also as resisting or sabotaging a system aimed at molding, reducing, violating, or erasing them, then we also see at least two realities: one of them has the logic of resistance and transformation; the other has the logic of oppression. (IP 12)

These two “logics” typically are in interplay; it is not as if a person is (or is to be understood as) simply oppressed or is (or is to be understood as) simply engaged in resistance. Nonetheless, oppressors intent on enjoying the fruits of oppression have a lot at stake in “not seeing sabotage and resistance,” even though in order to get rid of such pushback they’d have to see it (15).2 To not only take off the blinders that protect them from such awareness, but to come to understand what they then would face, they’d have to learn to “travel” to the world of the resisters, be open to seeing not just how the resister sees the oppressor and the oppressor’s world, but how the resister sees her own world.3

But even those who acknowledge the oppressed as the oppressed and as unfairly deprived of justice, equality, and respect aren’t thereby “traveling” to the worlds of the oppressed. Even those who recognize oppression as a problem and do not boast of it as an achievement may mistakenly think that the solution to that problem is to guarantee justice, equality, and respect. But that is an answer to oppression that is offered in the “logic of oppression.” To be seen as unfairly deprived of a certain standing that others enjoy—despite being entitled to that standing in virtue of sharing with them attributes such as reason or personhood—is not the same as being seen as having traits and capacities that allow one to recognize and resist the insidious forces of oppression and the oppressors who keep those forces fueled. Recognition of people simply as deprived of that to which they are entitled doesn’t invite recognition of them as beings who are capable, for example, of seeing straight into and mocking the delusion and self-deception adoringly embraced by oppressors in order for the latter to hide their desperate need of and dependence on the very people they lord over. Portraying the oppressed as satisfied by coming at last to enjoy justice, equality, and respect is at odds with entertaining the possibility that the fondest dream of the oppressed may in fact not be that they come to be seen as enough like those who oppress them that they are guaranteed a certain shared formal set of rights. There is no reason to be thrilled if the best the oppressors have to offer is a version of something along these lines: “We’ve changed our minds. First we thought you were rather radically different from us and we wanted to mark such difference by depriving you of what we know ourselves to be entitled to. But now we’ve come to our senses: we no longer will exclude you or deny you the rights we have. After all, basically you are just like us. So come join us, won’t you?”

Lugones doesn’t wish to cease using “oppression,” “oppressors,” and “the oppressed”; they remain a means of bringing attention to the violent relationships resistance to which she is theorizing. But she does not want the conceptual armory therewith deployed to be seen as the only or the best device for undoing that violence and for understanding and giving voice to those subject to it.

ON THE CREATION OF TRASH

I hope to highlight pervasive aspects of Lugones’s work in which she employs concepts that capture the texture of oppression but that do not at the same time lend strength to the logic of oppression. Recall her worry: if to be oppressed is simply and only not to enjoy justice, equality, and respect, then to cease to be oppressed is to enjoy them; but this is very thin conceptual and procedural gruel, too much in service to the systems it promises to undo. The fact that oppression does include the denial of justice, equality, and respect doesn’t mean that satisfying the demands of justice, equality, and respect carries no seeds of treachery, that it takes care of the problem rather than leaving behind fertile ground for the sprouting and spread of myriad forms of mistreatment.

But what can open up or reveal possibilities shoved out of sight by the star status of “oppression”? I suggest looking at a more colloquial expression than “oppression” or “domination” or “exploitation,” one often used by people subject to mistreatment by others in order to capture their experiences of being the object of various forms of aggression and violence: they talk about being “treated like trash.” Indeed “trash” and close siblings such as “waste” and “disposable” occur quite commonly in descriptions of abuse. Often such terms are incorporated into titles of books or articles. Recent examples include Ha Jin, War Trash (2004); Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts (2004); Grace Chang, Disposable Domestics: Immigrant Women Workers in the Global Economy (2000); Kevin Bales, Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy (2004); and Dorothy Allison, Trash (2002).4 An Amnesty International blog entry by Fotis Philippous on October 18, 2010, sports the headline “Roma Community in Romania Still Treated Like Waste Six Years On.” A blog from July 8, 2009, on the New Zealand organization E2NZ quotes member of Parliament Jim Anderton describing migrants being “treated like waste products.”

Though the semantic home of trash seems to be in reference to things, focusing on its broader use in reference to people may illuminate important features of common forms of mistreating others—features that more formally developed concepts such as oppression only dimly reveal or in fact occlude. Even more, in light of Lugones’s efforts to bring attention to “the oppressed” as “subjects, lively beings, resisters,” a notable feature of trash comes to the fore: because of what trash is and how it is created, it can talk back. It does talk back. It resists our attempts to banish it. Perhaps, then—paradoxical as it may at first seem—the description of people as being treated like trash allows or invites us to notice avenues of resistance and refusal.

We focus first on how a thing becomes trash, leaving for the next section an exploration of how trash can talk back.5 We shall then return to the question of what it means for people to be treated like trash and the exploration of this mode of mistreatment, and resistance to it, in Lugones’s work.

Something becomes trash only in virtue of our making it so, through our actions or our words. We toss it out, throw it away, or deign it to be tossable, throw-awayable. However much or little we valued it or used it, we now declare its worthlessness or uselessness (at least for our purposes; we may easily forget that others may find it not at all worthless or useless). We dispose of it. Rendering it no longer in the orbit of our care or concern, we separate ourselves from it, abandon it, disown it, leave it unattended or in any event to be dealt with by others. Our reasons for doing this, and our own feelings and attitudes about doing so, are many and various. Just because we throw something out doesn’t necessarily mean we are glad to do so. We might or might not have a sense of loss, or a sense of relief (or both). We might or might not have considered it as something contaminating or polluting. We may have tossed it out accidentally. Or regret having done so on purpose.6

TRASH TALKS BACK

Just because we have managed to get something to disappear from our immediate view or concern doesn’t mean it has disappeared entirely.

1.Even if we live in neighborhoods where household trash is regularly scooped up and taken away by sanitation workers, we might be aware of the fact that figuring out what to do with all that stuff is at the heart of political battles over the siting of landfills, transfer stations, incinerators, ship containers, and other destinations for our detritus.7 Indeed it would never occur to anyone to declare “Not In My Backyard”—let alone employ all the political muscle one can marshal to make sure the stuff ends up in the backyards of those with little political pull—if one really thought that for trash to disappear from one’s sight is for it to have thoroughly vanished.

2.Catching up on headlines of the gossip glossies while standing in the grocery checkout line, we might be aware of the fact that one of the favorite research tools of tattletale columnists is rifling through the trash bins outside the homes of the objects of their insistent inquiry. A.J. Weberman gained borrowed fame by appointing himself chief investigator of Bob Dylan’s garbage—all in the hope of getting the real dirt on Dylan, revealing him to be not at all the hero his fans adored.8 And in fact combing through trash is a widespread practice. What it can and cannot reveal, should and should not be allowed to reveal, are topics of considerable concern to legal professionals and social scientists. State and federal courts, up to and including the Supreme Court of the United States, have been called on to decide whether or not a person’s trash can be seized and pawed through by government agents without a warrant (California v. Greenwood). Garbology—the word was blessed for inclusion in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1989—is recognized as a subfield within archaeology. One of its foremost practitioners, whose work is cited in the OED entry, is William Rathje. For decades he and teams of his graduate students at the University of Arizona engaged in social science–sanctified snooping. Their research led Rathje to the conclusion that “… what people have owned—and thrown away—can speak more eloquently, informatively, and truthfully about the lives they lead than they themselves ever may” (Rathje and Murphy 2001, 54).9

3.Perhaps we are or have met dumpster divers, freegans, or others searching for food in household, supermarket, or restaurant waste receptacles—just a small sample of the many activities that vividly illustrate the familiar saw that one person’s trash is another person’s treasure.10 Visitors to art museums or galleries are no longer surprised to learn about the use artists make of the refuse scattered across both urban and rural landscapes or beached unceremoniously at the edge of the sea.11

In short, as confident as some of us may be that what we have consigned to the garbage heap or trash bin is safely out of sight and en route to the landfill or “wherever that stuff goes,” it perhaps has grown harder and harder to ignore the fact that though our trash is no longer here it very likely is somewhere else. (Our worries about material we think we have expunged by putting it in the computer trash bin are not irrelevant in this connection.) Trash talks back: it frustrates attempts to thoroughly dismiss it, shove it out of sight, silence it, send it as if by centrifugal force out of contact with us. On the one hand it may cause problems, especially for those left to deal with the toxic menace it may contain, or for those whose histories it reveals. On the other hand it may provide rich resources for those capable of and interested in divining the treasures within.

ON BEING TREATED LIKE TRASH

So far, then, we’ve explored some of the features of trash—in particular how something becomes trash, and ways in which trash in a sense talks back, refuses to bury once and for all activities or histories the very vanishing of which it might be thought to achieve. I’ve suggested that thinking about these features of trash might illuminate and be illuminated by Lugones’s work, especially if we focus on people being treated like trash: in...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction Like an Earthquake to the Soul: Experiencing the Visionary Philosophy of María Lugones
• Part I Coalitional Selves, Multiple Realities
• Part II Moving with and beyond Intersectionality
• Part III Gender, Coloniality, and Decolonial Embodiments
• Part IV Knowing on the Edge of Worlds and Sense
• Part V Hablando Cara a Cara
• Afterword
• Chronological List of María Lugones’s Publications
• Contributors
• Index
• Back Cover