Maria Lugones

María Lugones (Argentina, 1944 – New York, 2020) was an Argentine philosopher, feminist, researcher and activist, regarded as one of the central voices of decolonial feminism. Her work, which spans social and political philosophy, the theory of resistance and intersectional feminism, questions the hierarchies imposed through the conquest and colonization of the Americas.

Born in the province of Buenos Aires, she studied philosophy in the United States, earning her degree at the University of California and her doctorate at the University of Wisconsin in 1978. She taught at Carleton College and, from 1993, at Binghamton University in New York, where she was a professor of Comparative Literature and Women's Studies. Her popular education work also mattered: in 1990 she co-founded La Escuela Popular Norteña in New Mexico.

In Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes (2003), a collection of essays, she developed the idea of multiple selves: a person can move from one identity to another, and each shift opens a different world. She also introduced curdling, a practice of resistance that challenges the logic of purity through acts such as code-switching or gender transgression. In later work, such as Toward a Decolonial Feminism (2010), she drew on Aníbal Quijano's theory of the coloniality of power to argue that gender is a colonial imposition, a classification system that ranks people by class, ethnicity and other factors.

Her influence extends across decolonial studies, Latin American philosophy and intersectional feminist debates, where her concept of the coloniality of gender remains a key reference.