Women in Philosophy: Why the Decolonial Imaginary Matters for Women in Philosophy

by Emma Velez

This essay reflects on my recent experience visiting two liberal arts universities in Texas with the goal of recruiting undergraduate students of color to consider graduate study in philosophy. As an advanced doctoral student, I am currently attending an institution that is celebrated for its efforts to make the discipline of philosophy more diverse and inclusive, particularly for women of color. However, despite the University’s best efforts, I have experienced first-hand the toll that structural injustices embedded in the practices of doing philosophy take on graduate and undergraduate students of color. In particular, the continued emphasis on the Western canon of philosophy—which remains overly male, heterosexual, white, and European—often does not reflect the experiences of many students of color and as a result can be alienating and deter them from considering graduate study in the discipline.

As a mixed-person who identifies primarily as a Latina, my decision to pursue graduate study in philosophy was by no means a direct path. I had little explicit exposure to philosophy prior to college. I majored in philosophy as an undergraduate largely because of my aspirations to pursue a career in law and politics and, strategically, because philosophy majors consistently score highest on the LSAT. As the LSAT loomed on the horizon during my Junior year, I found myself falling in love with the kinds of questions I was being asked to consider in my political philosophy courses – What motivates struggles for recognition? How and why are some voices privileged and others marginalized in public discourse? How do our conceptions of identity and selfhood influence and contribute to the formation of our political institutions?—and growing increasingly dissatisfied with the answers that a purely social scientific lens offered. This realization combined with the passion I found for research while writing my Senior thesis culminated in the decision to apply to graduate school.

At the time that I was applying to graduate programs I had little sense of what, exactly, it was that I was getting myself in to by pursuing graduate study in philosophy. I did not know about initiatives like PIKSI, designed for students like me. My philosophy professors at my undergraduate institution were exclusively white men and though we were introduced to contemporary thought, my exposure to feminist philosophy and critical philosophy of race was limited. As an undergraduate, I did not know that there were Latinas working in the field of philosophy and I was not exposed to the work of those like Gloria Anzaldúa, María Lugones, Linda Alcoff, and Mariana Ortega whose work has since profoundly and deeply moved, inspired, and shaped my own thinking. It was not until my first semester of graduate school (in a course outside of the philosophy department) that I read the work of Latina feminist philosophers. This continues to feel like a profound injustice.

It is from this location, from these worlds of sense, that I approached planning my visit with students in Texas. My goal was to showcase a way of doing philosophy that I would not have thought possible as an undergraduate. My presentation focused on La Llorona, one of the Tres Madres [Three Mothers] from Latinx folklore, who I argue issues from what Emma Pérez has named the decolonial imaginary. Pérez’s concept of the decolonial imaginary has been largely under considered by feminist and decolonial philosophers alike. In her groundbreaking text, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (1999), Pérez advocates for the necessity of interrogating what she calls the “colonial imaginary” that has circumscribed hegemonic regimes of power. She argues that it is only through the decolonial imaginary that we find possibilities for negotiating and decolonizing identities, historiographies, and epistemologies. The decolonial imaginary is integral to Perez’s conception of decolonial feminist praxis. Pérez develops the concept of the decolonial imaginary as oppositional to the colonial imaginary that has determined what counts as historical knowledge in academic spaces, in particular claims that history is an objective science (xiv-xvi). Challenging objective and universalist conceptions of history by highlighting the partiality and fragmented of historical narratives and archives, she argues, “There is no pure, authentic, original history. There are only stories—many stories” (xv).

For Pérez, the decolonial imaginary is a critical apparatus for recovering the voices and experiences of Chicanas that indicates a transgressive space-time through which decolonizing gestures find purchase. As a “time lag” between the colonial moment and the postcolonial, Perez envisions the decolonial imaginary as a “rupturing space” that refuses the linear and progress-oriented conception of time imposed by colonialism (6). Despite having been eclipsed by coloniality, the decolonial imaginary is a resistant time-space that does not exist in a space of exteriority but rather reveals the fictive and mythological narratives upon which coloniality rests— i.e. universality, modernity, and progress. And it does this from an in-between space, that is to say, from within the very midst of oppressive systems and institutions. By recovering and bearing witness to what has remained “unspoken and unseen” by coloniality, Perez’s methodology enables us to attend to the silenced and silent voices in order to articulate resistant histories, theories, and decolonial subjectivities that hold the potential to dismantle apparatuses of coloniality (xvi).

Utilizing Pérez’s theorization of the concept of the decolonial imaginary, in my work I argue that in order to subvert the colonial imaginary that has dominated Western philosophy we must learn to inhabit the rupturing space of the decolonial imaginary. It is for this reason that I root my philosophical articulation of the interventions of decolonial feminism through figures from the Mexicanx/Chicanx imaginary: Las Tres Madres – La Virgen de Guadalupe, La Malinche, and La Llorona. I appeal to Las Tres Madres because of their omnipresence in the social imaginaries and everyday lives of many Latinxs. Departing from the conventional narratives about these three mythological women, I attempt to look beyond white colonial heteronormativity and take them up differently to show what they have to teach us about engaging in a decolonial praxis. Those of us who are already familiar with these figures know that when read traditionally they appear to be unlikely heroines of a decolonial feminist praxis. La Virgen de Guadalupe has been stripped of her sexuality and her body and is used as a religious icon that works to (re)entrench the virgen/puta (virgin/whore) dichotomy in Latinx communities; La Malinche has been characterized as the “Mexican Eve” and blamed for the colonization of the Americas because of her multilingual tongue and alleged sexual betrayal; and tales of La Llorona—the figure I focus on here—are used to reinforce heteronormative gender roles by reducing her to the “bad mother.”

Contra these traditional tellings and inspired by Chicanas who have re-appropriated and re-written these myths towards decolonial feminist ends, I argue that we must probe the gaps and fissures produced by the moral ambiguities of La Llorona in order to generate new philosophical readings of this mythological woman. In particular, I argue that La Llorona can help us to identify ethical imperatives that face us in our contemporary moment such as, femicide and human trafficking; violence directed at migrant communities; growing wealth disparities amongst the global rich and poor; and, the near constant violence perpetrated against women, particularly women of color. These challenges require a new way of thinking and demand a new ethics, what Luce Irigaray has aptly called an ethics of our time. Taking up the work of Chicana feminists who have engaged in practices of revisionist mythmaking, I offer a reading of La Llorona as one possible alternative from which to sketch out an ethics of estos tiempos, of our time.

I gave this talk to a room of predominantly undergraduate non-majors, most of whom are Latinx. By showcasing work from my dissertation, I hoped to be an example who demonstrated that it is possible to do philosophy rooted in histories from your own communities. Indeed, I know intimately what it is like to be Latina and to not see yourself reflected in the majority of the philosophy that you read. The response from the students was overwhelmingly positive. Many of them had never had the opportunity to think through La Llorona in a feminist or philosophical way. Unlike the predominately white academic audiences in the North Eastern United States where I typically present my work, nearly all of the attendees not only knew of this legend but had grown up hearing stories about the wailing woman who killed her own children. Excited to discuss the legend in an academic space, many students offered their reflections on accounts of the legend passed on to them during the question and answer period of the talk. One student recalled that her mother had told a much more sympathetic version of the La Llorona story that was sensitive to intersectional issues such as class while another worked through complex issues of violence and culpability that arise from longstanding histories of colonial, racist, and sexist oppression. I can say with utter sincerity that the questions these students asked were more insightful and philosophically reflective than the majority that I have received from trained philosophers.

For several young Latina students who came up to me after the talk, seeing someone do philosophy in this way opened up new possibilities for them and allowed them to make sense of their experiences navigating the white and colonial space of the academy. They asked tough questions and through our conversations were better able to articulate feelings of exclusion and gained skills for thinking critically about why they did not feel scholarly when writing from their own lived experiences. While this may be an old or stale insight for those of us who are familiar with the writings of feminist epistemologists, these Latina students were having an experience that philosophy could be about them for the first time.

I want to suggest that this is the power and the importance of philosophizing from decolonial feminist imaginaries. As Ana M. Lara writes of her experience as an Afra-Latina in the academy in The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States,

We come without mirrors, for in the eyes of a world in which we do not yet exist, we have not yet been born. As we walk, we must at every turn choose our own birthing, we must choose that first breath. To birth ourselves. Again. And again. And again. And to find joy in that birthing. To come together as water does on a smooth surface, and in doing so become mirrors for each other.

In addition to our sheer presence as women of color in these space, philosophizing from decolonial imaginaries opens up further possibilities for students of color to catch a glimpse of themselves in mirrors that have more often worked to distort their images. Because our imaginaries and the images that surround us shape our concepts and desires, they play a constitutive role in forming not only our social realities but also our Selves.

Many mainstream feminist philosophers emphasize the importance of the philosophical imaginary for the possibility of liberatory thinking outside of patriarchal structures that have systematically and constitutively excluded women from the production of History, knowledge, and the symbolic order. Despite the myriad critical feminist appropriations and retellings of Hipparchia, Hypatia, and Antigone, I do not see myself reflected in these figures in the same way that I do with those from the Latinx imaginary, such as Las Tres Madres. It is by rooting my philosophical work in these figures that intersectional concerns that reflect my multiplicitous self—such as race, class, sexuality, and coloniality—come into focus.

If it is true that as feminist philosophers we seek to do the work of making philosophy more diverse and inclusive—dare I say that if we are interested in decolonizing the discipline of philosophy (if such a task is even possible)—then it is imperative that we begin to philosophize from decolonial imaginaries. For, as Gloria Anzaldúa argues in Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), it is “[b]y creating a new mythos— that is, a change in the way we perceive reality, the way we see ourselves, the ways we behave— [that we can create] a new consciousness” (80).

Emma Velez is an advanced doctoral candidate (ABD) in Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Penn State. Her research areas are social and political philosophy, feminist philosophy (esp. Latina feminisms),  and decolonial philosophy. Utilizing the work of U.S. Latina thinkers, her research aims to show the contributions that decolonial feminisms make to re-thinking questions of identity, cross-cultural communication, and ethicopolitical strategies for decolonization. For additional information please see her website, emmadvelez.wixsite.com/mysite.