All Thinkers

María Lugones

María Lugones (1944-2020) was an Argentine-American philosopher. She was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and moved to the United States as a young woman, where she completed her doctorate in philosophy and spent her career teaching at Binghamton University in New York. She was a feminist philosopher, a Latina scholar, and a community activist who worked extensively with migrant and indigenous communities in the American Southwest. She is best known for two connected contributions to philosophy. The first is her concept of world-travelling: the practice of genuinely entering another person's world to see reality as they see it, which she proposed as the foundation of a loving and just way of relating across difference. The second is her concept of the coloniality of gender: the argument that the gender system as it now exists across most of the world was imposed through colonialism, and that many indigenous and non-Western communities had very different and often more complex and flexible understandings of gender before colonial contact. She died in 2020, widely recognised as one of the most important feminist philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Origin
Argentina / United States
Lifespan
1944-2020
Era
20th-21st century
Subjects
Feminist Philosophy Decolonial Thought Philosophy Of Gender Latina Philosophy Intersectionality
Skills
Cultural Heritage And Identity Relationships And Communication Ethical Thinking Citizenship Empathy
Why They Matter

Lugones matters because she expanded feminist philosophy in two important directions. First, she showed that much feminist philosophy had been written from the perspective of white, Western, educated women and had missed or excluded the experiences of women of colour, indigenous women, and women from the Global South. She insisted that genuine feminist philosophy had to start from the margins, from the experiences of those who faced multiple overlapping forms of oppression rather than only gender discrimination. Second, she showed that the gender categories we often treat as natural and universal, the binary division of all people into male or female with distinct roles and characteristics, were not universal human facts but were imposed through colonialism. Many indigenous communities had more than two gender categories, fluid understandings of gender, and social roles that did not map onto the European binary. Understanding this history matters both for feminist thought and for the broader question of what social arrangements are genuinely natural and what are the products of specific historical processes.

Key Ideas
1
World-travelling: entering another person's world
Lugones developed the concept of world-travelling to describe what genuine understanding across difference requires. A world, in her sense, is not a physical place: it is the way reality looks from a particular social position, shaped by a particular history, culture, and set of experiences. To travel to another person's world means to genuinely try to see reality as they see it, from their position, rather than always interpreting their experience through your own categories and assumptions. She argued that world-travelling is an act of love: it requires giving up the comfort of your own familiar perspective and risking genuine encounter with a different way of seeing.
2
Arrogant perception and loving perception
Lugones distinguished between two ways of seeing other people. Arrogant perception is seeing others through the lens of your own categories, assumptions, and interests, without noticing that you are doing this. You see what fits your framework and miss or distort what does not. Loving perception is the opposite: it tries to see the other person as they actually are, in their own terms, rather than as an instance of your categories. Loving perception requires humility: the recognition that your own perspective is not the only valid one and that genuine understanding requires work and willingness to be changed by what you encounter.
3
The coloniality of gender
One of Lugones's most important arguments is that the gender system as it now exists across most of the world was not a natural human universal: it was imposed through colonialism. Many indigenous communities in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Oceania had more than two genders, fluid understandings of gender roles, and social positions for people who did not fit into a male-female binary. Colonial powers, drawing on European Christian understandings of gender, suppressed these alternative gender systems and imposed a strict binary as part of the broader project of destroying indigenous cultures and replacing them with European ones.
Key Quotations
"I am a being in multiple worlds and I travel among them, feeling at ease in some of them, not at ease in others, successful in some, unsuccessful in others."
— Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, 2003
Lugones is describing her own experience as someone who lives between worlds: Argentine and American, Latina and academic, Spanish-speaking and English-speaking. She does not feel fully at home in any single world but belongs partially to several. She uses this personal experience as the starting point for her philosophical concept of world-travelling. Rather than seeing this in-between position as only a source of difficulty, she sees it as a philosophical vantage point: someone who has genuinely inhabited multiple worlds knows that there is more than one way to see and that none is complete.
"Travelling to someone's world enables you to see them as they see themselves, rather than as you have constructed them."
— Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes, 2003
Lugones is stating the core purpose of world-travelling. When you see another person only through your own categories and assumptions, what you see is partly your own construction: your idea of what they are like rather than who they actually are. To see them as they see themselves requires the effort of entering their world: understanding the history, the values, the experiences that shape how they interpret reality. This is not only an ethical requirement but an epistemological one: you cannot genuinely know another person if you never leave your own perspective.
Using This Thinker in the Classroom
Relationships and Communication When discussing what genuine understanding across difference requires
How to introduce
Ask: have you ever felt that someone was not really seeing you, but was seeing their idea of you? After discussion, introduce Lugones's distinction between arrogant perception and loving perception. Ask: what would it take to genuinely see another person as they see themselves rather than as you have constructed them? What would you need to give up? What might you gain? Introduce world-travelling as a practice: the deliberate effort to enter someone else's world rather than always interpreting their experience through your own categories.
Empathy When exploring what genuine empathy requires
How to introduce
Introduce Lugones's concept of world-travelling alongside the more familiar concept of empathy. Ask: what is the difference between imagining how you would feel in someone else's situation and genuinely trying to see the world as they see it from their position? Lugones argues that the first is still centred on your own perspective: you are imagining yourself in their situation. The second requires actually entering their world, with its different history and different ways of making sense of experience. Ask: is genuine world-travelling possible? What makes it hard? What makes it worth trying?
Further Reading

The essay Playfulness, World-Travelling, and Loving Perception (1987), freely available in various philosophy anthologies and online, is Lugones's most accessible and most widely read piece and is the best introduction to her concept of world-travelling. For a short overview of her work: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a freely available article on María Lugones. Her book Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes (2003, Rowman and Littlefield) collects her most important essays.

Key Ideas
1
Intersectionality and the limits of single-axis thinking
Lugones argued that much feminist philosophy and much anti-racist thinking suffered from the same problem: they focused on a single axis of oppression, either gender or race, and missed how these forms of oppression intersect and reinforce each other. A Black woman does not experience racism and then separately experience sexism: she experiences a specific form of oppression that is shaped by both simultaneously. Feminist theory that focuses only on gender and ignores race will miss the specific experience of women of colour. Anti-racist theory that focuses only on race and ignores gender will miss the specific experience of women within racially oppressed groups.
2
The light and dark sides of the colonial/modern gender system
Lugones drew on the decolonial thinker Anibal Quijano's analysis of coloniality to argue that the colonial gender system had two sides. The light side was the gender system as it applied to European and coloniser women: the Victorian ideal of the fragile, domestic, morally elevated white woman. The dark side was how the same system applied to colonised women: they were treated as not fully women at all, as closer to animals than to the European ideal of womanhood. This meant they could be used as labour, subjected to violence, and denied the protections that the ideology of womanhood extended to white women. The same system that elevated some women degraded others.
3
Decolonial feminism: starting from the margins
Lugones argued for what she called decolonial feminism: a feminist philosophy that starts from the experiences of the most marginalised women rather than from the experience of relatively privileged ones. She was critical of mainstream Western feminism for speaking in the name of all women while actually reflecting the specific concerns of educated, white, Western women. Genuine feminist solidarity requires learning to see from the positions of women who face multiple overlapping oppressions: women of colour, indigenous women, poor women, women from the Global South. This learning requires world-travelling: genuinely entering these women's worlds rather than fitting their experiences into existing feminist frameworks.
Key Quotations
"The colonial modern gender system reduced gender to biology, and through it established the inferiority of the colonised."
— Colonality and Gender, 2007
Lugones is making a historical and philosophical argument. The colonial gender system did two things simultaneously: it reduced the complex and varied understandings of gender in different cultures to a simple biological binary, and it used this biological reduction to rank people. Those who did not fit the European ideal of gender, whether because of their race, their indigenous gender identities, or their way of life, were classified as less than fully human. The same move that simplified gender also justified exploitation: if colonised people were not properly gendered by European standards, they were closer to animals and could be treated accordingly.
"It is not until we see the oppressed as complex subjects that we can begin to understand resistance."
— Various writings
Lugones is making a point about how we understand people who are oppressed. If you see oppressed people only as victims, as people defined entirely by what is done to them, you miss the full reality of their lives: their creativity, their humour, their resistance, their complex relationships and ways of making sense of the world. You also miss the actual forms that resistance takes, which are often not the dramatic confrontations that fit outsiders' expectations but the subtle, everyday ways in which people refuse to be entirely defined by the systems that oppress them.
Using This Thinker in the Classroom
Cultural Heritage and Identity When examining gender across cultures
How to introduce
Introduce the argument that many indigenous cultures had more than two genders and more fluid gender roles before colonial contact. Ask: does this surprise you? Why or why not? If the binary gender system was imposed through colonialism rather than being a universal human fact, what does this tell us about how we should think about gender today? This is not an argument for any particular conclusion: it is an invitation to examine what we take for granted about gender and to ask where those assumptions come from.
Ethical Thinking When examining feminist philosophy and its limits
How to introduce
Introduce Lugones's critique of mainstream feminism: it claimed to speak for all women but actually reflected the concerns of relatively privileged women, missing the experiences of women who faced multiple overlapping oppressions. Ask: is this a fair criticism? How should a movement that claims to represent a diverse group handle genuine differences within that group? Who gets to define the goals and priorities of a liberation movement? Connect to Biko's parallel argument about Black liberation movements.
Critical Thinking When examining how categories shape what we see
How to introduce
Connect Lugones to Kuhn's paradigms: both argue that the categories and frameworks we use to understand the world shape what we can see and what we miss. Ask: what gender categories do you use to understand the world? Where did these categories come from? Lugones argues that they came partly from a specific historical process: colonial imposition. Ask: what would it mean to question these categories? Does questioning them threaten your identity, or does it open up new ways of understanding yourself and others?
Further Reading

Coloniality and Gender (2007), published in the journal Tabula Rasa and freely available online, is the foundational text for her analysis of the colonial gender system.

For the intersectionality context

Kimberlé Crenshaw's essay Demarginalising the Intersection of Race and Sex (1989), freely available online, develops parallel arguments in the legal context and provides useful comparison.

For the decolonial theory context

Aníbal Quijano's work on coloniality of power, on which Lugones builds, is available in the journal Nepantla.

Key Ideas
1
Resistant subjectivity and coalition
Lugones was interested in how people who face multiple forms of oppression develop a sense of self that resists being fully defined by those oppressions. She described people who live on the borderlands between different worlds, who belong fully to none of them, as developing a complex and resistant subjectivity: a way of being that draws on multiple traditions and refuses the reduction to any single identity. She saw this complexity as a source of creative political possibility rather than only as a burden. Coalition across different groups and different forms of oppression required this kind of complex, multi-world subjectivity.
2
Playfulness and world-travelling
Lugones connected world-travelling to a quality she called playfulness: the ability to engage with unfamiliar ways of doing and being without needing to control the situation or reduce it to familiar categories. A playful person can enter an unfamiliar world with curiosity and openness, making mistakes, learning, and allowing themselves to be changed by the experience. The opposite of playfulness is rigidity: insisting that things must work the way you are used to, that your categories must apply, that unfamiliarity is a problem to be solved rather than an invitation to learn. Playfulness in this sense is not frivolity: it is an essential quality for genuine encounter across difference.
3
The streetwalker theorist: philosophy from the ground
Lugones used the term streetwalker theorist to describe her approach to philosophy: thinking from the ground up, from the everyday lived experience of people at the margins, rather than from the abstract height of academic philosophy. She was critical of philosophy that developed its concepts in isolation from the messy reality of people's lives and then applied them top-down to understand that reality. She argued that genuine philosophical insight about oppression, liberation, and what it means to live well across difference had to be developed in genuine engagement with the people who lived these questions every day. This connects to Gramsci's organic intellectual and to Freire's insistence on starting from people's lived experience.
Key Quotations
"Decolonial feminism requires that we learn to see gender as having been colonial from its inception in the Americas."
— Colonality and Gender, 2007
Lugones is making a strong historical claim: the gender system as it now operates in the Americas was not pre-existing and then shaped by colonialism. It was imposed by colonialism, arriving with the colonisers and replacing the gender systems that existed before contact. This matters because it means that the gender binary and the specific roles and meanings associated with male and female are not natural or universal but historically produced through a specific and violent process. Questioning these arrangements is not going against nature: it is understanding their origins and recognising that different arrangements are possible.
"The logic of coloniality reaches into every nook of the self and of social life."
— Various writings
Lugones is arguing that colonial power did not only operate at the level of laws, governments, and economies. It reached into the most intimate dimensions of human life: how people understood their bodies and their genders, what families were supposed to look like, what desires were natural or perverse, who had spiritual authority, what knowledge counted as real. Decolonisation is not only a political and economic project: it requires questioning all of these intimate dimensions of social life that colonialism shaped. This is a more radical and more personal project than simply changing governments.
Using This Thinker in the Classroom
Citizenship When examining coalition-building across different forms of oppression
How to introduce
Introduce Lugones's argument about coalition: that genuine solidarity across different groups facing different forms of oppression requires world-travelling, genuinely entering each other's worlds rather than assuming that the most visible shared identity is sufficient. Ask: what makes coalition difficult? When do coalitions break down? Apply to examples from political history or current events: movements that have successfully built broad coalitions and ones that have fractured over differences within the coalition. What did the successful ones do that the unsuccessful ones did not?
Global Studies When examining how colonial legacies shape gender today
How to introduce
Apply Lugones's coloniality of gender argument to the contemporary world. Ask: in what ways does the current global gender system reflect colonial history? Which countries criminalise or suppress indigenous gender identities? How have international organisations, sometimes claiming to promote gender equality, imposed Western gender frameworks on communities with different traditions? Ask: what would it mean to approach global gender justice in a way that genuinely respected the diversity of human gender traditions rather than imposing a single standard?
Common Misconceptions
Common misconception

Lugones argues that all gender differences are simply imposed by colonialism and do not exist naturally.

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What to teach instead

Lugones argues that the specific gender binary as it operates in modern colonial and postcolonial societies was imposed through colonialism rather than being a universal natural fact. She does not argue that there are no natural differences between people or that gender is entirely artificial. Her point is that the specific forms, meanings, and social roles associated with gender in different contexts are shaped by historical and cultural processes, including colonialism, and are not simply expressions of biological nature. Different communities have understood and organised gender in different ways.

Common misconception

World-travelling means agreeing with everyone or having no standards of your own.

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What to teach instead

Lugones distinguishes world-travelling from relativism. Entering another person's world to see it as they see it does not mean abandoning your own values or agreeing with everything you find there. It means genuinely trying to understand before judging, seeing with their eyes before evaluating with your own. After genuine world-travelling, you may still disagree with practices or values you encounter. But the disagreement will be informed by genuine understanding rather than by the arrogant projection of your own categories onto an experience you have not genuinely entered.

Common misconception

Lugones's work is only relevant to Latina women and their specific experiences.

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What to teach instead

While Lugones drew on her own experience as an Argentine Latina woman in the United States, her concepts of world-travelling, arrogant and loving perception, and the coloniality of gender address universal philosophical questions about how we understand each other across difference, and historical questions about how colonial power shaped gender systems worldwide. Her framework has been applied by scholars working on African gender systems, Asian feminist thought, indigenous gender traditions in many contexts, and the experiences of multiple overlapping oppressions in very different settings.

Common misconception

Lugones argued that Western feminism is simply wrong and should be abandoned.

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What to teach instead

Lugones was a feminist throughout her life and engaged seriously with Western feminist philosophy. Her critique was not that Western feminism was worthless but that it was incomplete: it had developed concepts and frameworks that were genuinely useful but that reflected specific experiences and missed others. She wanted to expand feminist philosophy to start from the experiences of the most marginalised rather than only from the experiences of relatively privileged women. This is a project of enrichment and completion rather than rejection.

Intellectual Connections
Extends
Simone de Beauvoir
De Beauvoir's argument that one is not born but becomes a woman established that gender is socially constructed rather than naturally given. Lugones extends this insight in two directions: she shows that the gender construction de Beauvoir analysed was specific to Western modernity and colonialism, not universal, and she insists that feminist philosophy must start from the most marginalised women's experiences rather than from those of relatively privileged Western women. Lugones is both building on and critically extending de Beauvoir's foundational insight.
In Dialogue With
bell hooks
Both Lugones and hooks argued that mainstream Western feminism spoke in the name of all women while actually reflecting the concerns of white, educated, relatively privileged women. Both insisted that genuine feminist solidarity required engaging seriously with the experiences of women of colour and women facing multiple overlapping oppressions. Both developed feminist frameworks that insisted on the intersection of gender with race and class. Lugones added the colonial dimension and the analysis of gender as a colonial imposition.
In Dialogue With
Frantz Fanon
Fanon's analysis of colonial psychology provided a framework for Lugones's analysis of the coloniality of gender. Both argue that colonialism did not only change political and economic structures: it changed the most intimate dimensions of how people understood themselves, their bodies, and their relationships. Lugones extends Fanon's analysis specifically to gender, showing how colonial power reorganised gender systems as part of its broader project of cultural destruction and replacement.
Complements
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Both Lugones and Kimmerer draw on indigenous perspectives to challenge what Western culture treats as natural and universal. Kimmerer shows that the Western understanding of plants as objects rather than beings is not universal but culturally specific. Lugones shows that the Western binary gender system is not universal but was imposed through colonialism. Both argue that indigenous traditions contain genuine alternatives to Western categories that have been suppressed rather than simply absent.
In Dialogue With
Aimé Césaire
Césaire argued that colonialism destroyed the cultures it encountered, replacing them with European ones and falsely claiming this was civilisation. Lugones applies this argument specifically to gender: one of the things colonialism destroyed was the diverse gender systems of colonised peoples, replacing them with the European binary. Both Césaire and Lugones insist that genuine decolonisation requires recovering what colonialism destroyed, not only challenging its political and economic legacies.
In Dialogue With
Kwame Gyekye
Both Lugones and Gyekye work on the question of how to engage with cultural traditions critically: preserving what is genuinely valuable while challenging what is harmful. Gyekye argues for critical engagement with African communal traditions rather than either uncritical acceptance or wholesale rejection. Lugones argues for recovering indigenous gender traditions that colonialism suppressed while also applying feminist critique to practices within those traditions that cause harm. Both reject the choice between romanticising tradition and dismissing it.
Further Reading

For rigorous philosophical engagement with Lugones

The collection Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, edited by M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty (1997, Routledge), provides the intellectual context.

For applications of her framework

The journal Hypatia and the journal Feminist Philosophy Quarterly publish the best current academic work developing and debating her ideas.

For the broader decolonial feminist tradition

Chandra Mohanty's Feminism Without Borders (2003, Duke University Press) is the most comprehensive account of the field Lugones helped create.