Maria Lugones

Lugones was diagnosed with her third occurrence of lung cancer in late 2019 and hospitalized with pneumonia-like symptoms after undergoing radiation treatment in 2020. On 14 July 2020, at 76 years of age, Lugones died at a hospital in Syracuse, New York. The cause was cardiac arrest.

Editors’ Introduction: Tango Dancing with María Lugones: Toward Decolonial Feminisms of the Special Issue: Toward Decolonial Feminisms, Critical Philosophy of Race,Vol. 8, No. 1-2, 2020.

Speaking Face to Face: The Visionary Philosophy of María Lugones (SUNY Series, Praxis: Theory in Action), ed. by Pedro J. DiPietro, Jennifer McWeeny, Shireen Roshanravan, State University of New York Press, 2019.

In 2016, she was named Distinguished Woman Philosopher by the Society for Women in Philosophy. In 2020, she was awarded the Frantz Fanon Lifetime Achievement Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association in recognition of her contribution to decolonial philosophy/theory, feminist philosophy/theory, Indigenous philosophy/theory, critical gender, race and sexuality studies, Latin American philosophy and world systems theory.

In her later work, "Heterosexualism and the Colonial/Modern Gender System" (2007) and "Toward a Decolonial Feminism" (2010), Lugones turns her attention to coloniality: its impact on gender formation, as well as various strategies of resistance which could contribute toward its eventual dismantling. Combining Anibal Quijano's theory of the coloniality of power with a feminist, intersectionalist framework, Lugones concludes that gender is a colonial imposition. Drawing on historical examples of pre-colonial, gynecratic Native American tribes, Lugones situates gender as a colonial classification system that divides and subjugates people differently depending on multiple intersectional factors including class and ethnicity.

Lugones is the author of Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions (2003)  a seminal, highly praised collection of essays, many of which were originally published in Hypatia, Signs, and other journals. Among the essays included are "Playfulness, ‘World’‐Travelling, and Loving Perception," which addresses the experience of navigating hyphenated identities from a phenomenological perspective.  Lugones posits "a plurality of selves" that literally shift from being one person to being a different person, with each shift producing a corresponding new world. In another essay, "Purity, Impurity, and Separation," Lugones introduces the concept of curdling as an intersectional practice of resistance that works against an oppressive logic of purity. Examples of curdling include: code-switching, drag, gender transgression and multilingual experimentation.

Outside of the academy, Lugones also worked as a popular educator. Inspired by the Highlander Folk School, in 1990 she co-founded La Escuela Popular Norteña in Valdez, New Mexico.

Lugones earned her BA from the University of California in 1969. She also received a master's degree in 1973 and a PhD in philosophy in 1978 from the University of Wisconsin. She taught Philosophy at Carleton College from 1972 to 1993, beginning as an instructor and leaving as a full professor. She joined Binghamton University in 1993, where she was Professor of Comparative Literature and Women's Studies. During her time there, she taught in the Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture program, the Latin American and Caribbean Area Studies Program, the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, and the Department of Comparative Literature. She also held visiting appointments at ACM Chicago, Instituto Tilcara de la Universidad de Buenos Aires, Universidad Andina Simón Bolivar, and elsewhere. Her scholarship ranged across disciplines, extending from social and political philosophy to decolonial feminism, Andean philosophy, Latino politics and theories of resistance.

María Cristina Lugones (January 26, 1944 – July 14, 2020) was an Argentine feminist philosopher, activist, and Professor of Comparative Literature and of women's studies at Carleton College in Northfield, MN and at Binghamton University in New York State. She identified as a U.S-based woman of color and theorized this category as a political identity forged through feminist coalitional work.