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5Revolt and the Lettered SelfIn Sarah K. Hansen (ed.), New forms of revolt: essays on Kristeva's intimate politics, Suny Press. pp. 67-83. 2017.
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32Structural ViolenceOxford University Press. 2024.Enduring social inequalities in settler colonial societies are not an accident. They are produced and maintained by the self-repairing structural features and dynastic character of systemic racism and its intersecting oppressions. Using methods from diverse anticolonial liberation movements and systems theory, Structural Violence theorizes the existence of adaptive and self-replicating historical formations that underwrite cultures of violence in settler colonial societies. Corresponding epistem…Read more
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262Critical Race Structuralism and Non-Ideal TheoryIn Hilkje Hänel & Johanna Müller (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Non-Ideal Theory, Routledge. forthcoming.Ideal theory in social and political philosophy generally works to hide philosophical theories’ complicity in sustaining the structural violence and maintenance of white supremacy that are foundational to settler colonial societies. While non-ideal theory can provide a corrective to some of ideal theory’s intended omissions, it can also work to conceal the same systems of violence that ideal theory does, especially when framed primarily as a response to ideal theory. This article takes a decolo…Read more
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380Reproductive Violence and Settler StatecraftIn Sanaullah Khan & Elliott Schwebach (eds.), Global Histories of Trauma: Globalization, Displacement and Psychiatry, Routledge. pp. 150-173. 2023.Gender-based forms of administrative violence, such as reproductive violence, are the result of systems designed to enact population-level harms through the production and forcible imposition of colonial systems of gender. Settler statecraft has long relied on the strategic promotion of sexual and reproductive violence. Patterns of reproductive violence adapt and change to align with the enduring goals and evolving needs of settler colonial occupation, dispossession, and containment. The U.S. Su…Read more
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1433Epistemic Oppression, Resistance, and ResurgenceContemporary Political Theory 21 (2): 283-314. 2022.Epistemologies have power. They have the power not only to transform worlds, but to create them. And the worlds that they create can be better or worse. For many people, the worlds they create are predictably and reliably deadly. Epistemologies can turn sacred land into ‘resources’ to be bought, sold, exploited, and exhausted. They can turn people into ‘labor’ in much the same way. They can not only disappear acts of violence but render them unnamable and unrecognizable within their conceptual a…Read more
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696Structural TraumaMeridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 20 (2). forthcoming.This paper addresses the phenomenological experience of precarity and vulnerability in racialized gender-based violence from a structural perspective. Informed by Indigenous social theory and anti-colonial approaches to intergenerational trauma that link settler colonial violence to the modalities of stress-inducing social, institutional, and cultural violences in marginalized women’s lives, I argue that philosophical failures to understand trauma as a functional, organizational tool of settler …Read more
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782Gender-Based Administrative Violence as Colonial StrategyPhilosophical Topics 46 (2): 209-227. 2018.There is a growing trend across North America of women being criminalized for their pregnancy outcomes. Rather than being a series of aberrations resulting from institutional failures, we argue that this trend is part of a colonial strategy of administrative violence aimed at women of color and Native women across Turtle Island. We consider a range of medical and legal practices constituting gender-based administrative violence, and we argue that they are the result of non-accidental and systema…Read more
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646A credible fear test is an in-depth interview process given to undocumented people of any age arriving at a U.S. port of entry to determine qualification for asylum-seeking. Credible fear tests as a typical immigration procedure demonstrate not only what structural epistemic violence looks like but also how this violence lives in and through the design of asylum policy. Key terms of credible fear tests such as “significant possibility,” “evidence,” “consistency,” and “credibility” can never be n…Read more
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380Theorizing Multiple Oppressions Through Colonial History: Cultural Alterity and Latin American FeminismsAPA Newsletter on Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy 2 (11): 5-9. 2011.The hermeneutic resources necessary for understanding Indigenous women’s lives in Latin America have been obscured by the tools of Western feminist philosophical practices and their travel in North-South contexts. Not only have ongoing practices of European colonization disrupted pre-colonial ways of knowing, but colonial lineages create contemporary public policies, institutions, and political structures that reify and solidify colonial epistemologies as the only legitimate forms of knowledge. …Read more
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1027The Secret Life of ViolenceIn Dustin J. Byrd & Seyed Javad Miri (eds.), Frantz Fanon and Emancipatory Social Theory, Brill. 2019.This chapter proceeds in two ways. First, I argue that Fanon’s structural witnessing of racism yields important insights about the nature of violence that challenges the settler colonial concept of violence as the extra-legal use of force. Second, I argue that his analysis of violence is insufficient for combating colonial racism and violence because, using the terms of his own analysis, it leaves intact logics and mechanisms that allow racism to structurally renew itself in perpetuity: violence…Read more
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4Mestiza ConsciousnessIn Gail Weiss, Ann V. Murphy & Gayle Salamon (eds.), Fifty Concepts for a Critical Phenomenology, Nothwestern University Press. 2019.
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365Women of Color Structural FeminismsIn Shirley-Anne Tate (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook on Critical Race And Gender. 2022.One way to track the many critical impacts of women of color feminisms is through the powerful structural analyses of gendered and racialized oppression they offer. This article discusses diverse lineages of women of color feminisms in the global South that tackle systemic structures of power and domination from their situated perspectives. It offers an introduction to structuralist theories in the humanities and differentiates them from women of color feminist theorizing, which begins analyses…Read more
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4868Cultural GaslightingHypatia 35 (4): 687-713. 2020.This essay frames systemic patterns of mental abuse against women of color and Indigenous women on Turtle Island (North America) in terms of larger design-of-distribution strategies in settler colonial societies, as these societies use various forms of social power to distribute, reproduce, and automate social inequalities (including public health precarities and mortality disadvantages) that skew socio-economic gain continuously toward white settler populations and their descendants. It departs…Read more
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3The Structure of Dispossession in Settler MéxicoJournal of World Philosophies 1 (4): 121-155. 2019.
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1The Hermeneutics of Mexican-American Political PhilosophyInter-American Journal of Philosophy 9 (2): 45-57. 2018.Este artículo aborda la prominencia de las actitudes colonialistas en tradiciones anti-coloniales, observando la capacidad del racismo sexista para adaptarse en la filosofía política Mexicano-Estadounidense. Señalo un paralelo entre el uso de universales culturales en el pensamiento hermenéutico y la continuación de mecanismos interpretativos colonialies en los debates centrales de la filosofía política Mexicano-Estadounidense. Basándome en pensamiento comparativo indígena de resistencia anticol…Read more
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393Feminist Border TheoryIn Gerard Delanty & Stephen P. Turner (eds.), The Routledge International Handbook of Contemporary Social and Political Theory, Oxford University Press. pp. 350-361. 2011.
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2244Postcolonial and Decolonial FeminismsIn Ásta . & Kim Q. Hall (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Philosophy. 2021.In recent years postcolonial and decolonial feminisms have become increasingly salient in philosophy, yet they are often deployed as conceptual stand-ins for generalized feminist critiques of eurocentrism (without reference to the material contexts anti-colonial feminisms emanate from), or as a platform to re-center internal debates between dominant European theories/ists under the guise of being conceptually ‘decolonized’. By contrast, this article focuses on the specific contexts, issues and …Read more
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52Linguistic Alterity and the Multiplicitous Self: Critical Phenomenologies in Latina Feminist ThoughtHypatia 31 (2): 421-436. 2016.Latina feminists like Gloria Anzaldúa and Mariana Ortega have developed anti-essentialist accounts of selfhood that are responsive to the problem of alterity and hermeneutic alienation experienced by multiplicitous subjects, understood as those who must navigate between multiple cultural norms and often conflicting interpretive traditions. These accounts can be fortified by examining the sense of inarticulacy that arises from having to name conditions of existence undergirded by social and histo…Read more
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1638Framing IntersectionalityIn Linda Alcoff, Luvell Anderson & Paul Taylor (eds.), The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Race, Routledge. pp. 335-348. 2017.Intersectionality is a term that arose within the black feminist intellectual tradition for the purposes of identifying interlocking systems of oppression. As a descriptive term, it refers to the ways human identity is shaped by multiple social vectors and overlapping identity categories (such as sex, race, class) that may not be readily visible in single-axis formulations of identity, but which are taken to be integral to robustly capture the multifaceted nature of human experience. As a diagno…Read more
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144On the Politics of CoalitionFeminist Philosophy Quarterly 3 (2): 1-16. 2017.In the wake of continued structural asymmetries between women of color and white feminisms, this essay revisits intersectional tensions in Catharine MacKinnon’s Toward a Feminist Theory of the State while exploring productive spaces of coalition. To explore such spaces, we reframe Toward a Feminist Theory of the State in terms of its epistemological project and highlight possible synchronicities with liberational features in women-of-color feminisms. This is done, in part, through an analysis of…Read more
East Lansing, Michigan, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
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Violence |
Colonialism and Postcolonialism |
Latin American Feminism |
Indigenous Feminism |
Critical Race Feminism |
US Latina Feminism |