Decoloniality, gender and resistance: animality as a meeting point

Abstract

Coloniality was not only a violent and aggravating process of oppressions in the globalized world, but also the founding origin of new frontiers between bodies and existences. Modernity-coloniality placed at the center of "what is" the normative ideal of the human (the cisgender, white, heterosexual, bourgeois male), resulting in the domination and subordination of diverse bodies that, within some indigenous and native worldviews, were marked as different or marginalized: racialized people, queer existences and other non-normative subjectivities. Based on the human/non-human dichotomy, these "new" bodies and existences have been organized into ontological-political hierarchies - determining which ones matter and which do not - through different codes of domination such as race, ability, geopolitical location, gender, sexual orientation, species, among others. Within the framework of such a humanist power matrix, queer bodies and people have been animalized and, at the same time, codified as unnatural and deviant; and at the same time, these existences have been stigmatized for disobeying the order of the supposedly "natural" heterosexuality. Based on the above, we aim to point to decoloniality as an experience and a practice that vindicates and emancipates non-normative bodies, people and existences.