Video: Conjuring Nonbinary Futurities and Decolonizing Methodologies

Full transcript

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Conjuring nonbinary futurities and decolonizing methodologies, April 11, 2023.

CATHERINE BRECKUS: I'm Catherine Brekus. I am a Professor here at Harvard Divinity School. And I work on American religious history with a particular focus on women and religion. And the WSRP program has been one of the most wonderful parts of being a faculty member here. So I'm so glad to be here with people who are here in the room and many people online for our last session of the year, unbelievably.

It has been a wonderful year of presentations. So it's my pleasure today to introduce Dr. Xhercis Mendez, who's associate professor and vice chair of women and gender studies and queer studies at Cal State University Fullerton and one of the founding members of the Collective for Justice, Equity, and Transformation at Cal State in Fullerton.

She is currently a 2022-'23 research associate in the Women's Studies in Religion Program here at the Divinity School, where she is completing her manuscript entitled, Conjuring Nonbinary Futurities, which has been solicited by Duke University Press. We're looking forward to reading it. Dr. Mendez is a transdisciplinary scholar who, prior to Fullerton, held a position as an assistant professor of philosophy and African American and African Studies at Michigan State University.

She's also the author of several articles focused on decolonial feminist philosophy and methodology, such as "Notes toward a decolonial feminist methodology-- revisiting the race/gender matrix," also "Decolonial feminist movidas--" I'm not good at pronouncing-- "A Caribena rethinks privilege, the wages of gender, and building complex coalition," and "Not your papas winter-- women of color, contributions toward decolonial futures."

In addition to her theoretical work, Dr. Mendez is also a popular educator, organizer, decolonial feminist philosopher, and founder of the Campus Transformative Justice Project, which began in 2017 in the aftermath of the Larry Nassar case at Michigan State University. The Campus Transformative Justice Project works with universities, faculty, staff students, administrators, leadership teams, and academic units nationally to identify root causes of harm and create actionable pathways toward accountability and healing.

Bridging the gap between theory and practice, she works with community organizations and serves as a consultant, facilitator, and strategist to organizations seeking to address systemic harm, racism, and anti-Blackness. Born in New Jersey and raised in Cleveland, she is the daughter of Puerto Rican factory workers and a first generation graduate who lives to inspire the next generation of believers that a better world is possible. So please join me in welcoming.

[APPLAUSE]

XHERCIS MENDEZ: Hello, hello. Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for coming out to listen today. I know we're heading towards the end of the semester. So folks are really winding down. So props to you for coming. I feel I want to begin by just expressing how honored I am and how grateful I am for this space and this time with such brilliant colleagues and co-conspirators.

And just take a moment to thank the folks that have sacrificed things for me to be able to be here-- those ancestors past and present-- and just all the folks who have made this possible. So thank you. All right, so my book project-- my book project is titled Conjuring Nonbinary Futurities. And what it does is it takes a critical look at the ways we use gender as a cross-cultural category of analysis.

And it takes up a religiosity known in the Caribbean as Santeria-- it's also known as Lukumi or Osha-- to really ask, what are the Eurocentric binary suppositions that travel with the category? What are the suppositions that not only travel but are imposed through the practice of research? And what are the nonbinary formations, logics, and becomings that get obscured as a result.

So before we get into that, I do want to talk a little bit about who I am, and how I come to this project, and how I come to Santeria in particular. So of course, this is all right. So as Catherine mentioned, I was born in New Jersey to Puerto Rican parents. My mom is from Mayaguez. And my father is from San Sebastian.

And my mom was a factory worker. She actually was a beautician. But she was not able to take the exam in English. So she became a factory worker when she came to the mainland, as it were. And she was a factory worker when there was work. And when there wasn't, she often would take me out of school to translate for her at job interviews, and the welfare office, or social services.

And as a single mother of four kids, she didn't speak English. And she really didn't have access to things like health care. And so in the absence of access, she often turned to Santeria's practices as a way to really resolve problems, all kinds of problems, even though she would never admit that.

So my childhood was really surrounded by the deities within Santeria known as Orishas. They were everywhere. And I'm just going to give you some examples of how they showed up. When my mom had problems, she often would light "velitas," candles, to the seven African powers or the siete potencias. The weekends were filled with cantos of the Orishas, drumming and singing in the background as she was cleaning to bring in good energy into the space.

The Orishas were also in the salsa music we listened to. I mean, famous singers that we would listen to all the time, people would listen to at the club, yes, but folks like Hector Lavoe, and La Lupe, and-- they were singing about these Orishas-- [SPEAKING SPANISH]. They would show up in the music, in the popular music.

And it also showed up in the ways that my mom would describe the women in my family as having [SPEAKING SPANISH], powers, to communicate with ancestors or to bring messages from folks that were not here tangibly. It also showed up in moments where one of us needed to be healed. So in a moment where prayers, Catholic prayers were not going to do-- were not going to do it, right? So here we go. She would take me to the Santera.

And I remember, at a really young age, being taken to the Santera, at the age of four actually, which is one of those moments where it's like you should be young enough to not remember. But I remember because it was a moment of having someone with-- there was oils, and prayer, and song. And it was just a vivid memory.

And I remember asking my mom, did you take me to a Santera? And she was like, how do you remember that? You were too young. But yeah, she did. And so what I'm interested in is all of these ways in which folks turn to extra-Catholic activities, as it were-- and I really thank Conicho for that language-- to solve all kinds of problems, to resolve and to heal in the other. In the absence of other types of resources.

So in my upbringing, the Orishas were everywhere. But they were actually formally nowhere because we were Catholic. And we weren't supposed to talk about those things. But it's a really interesting moment to think about how Santeria is not containable within just ritual. It permeates and bucks up against even that sacred secular binary, right?

So I am not a practitioner. But I have positively been impacted by the practices and meaning-making. And it was these types of experiences growing up that made me feel really not American, even though I was born and raised in the US, on the mainland. It made me feel really not Western.

But it also gave me a sense of empowerment that was not really legible to those who operated outside of these systems. So it's here that I'm interested, right? As a scholar of gender, as a decolonial thinker, and as an activist, I'm really interested in those practices that are not immediately legible to those outside of it. So the not salient, the opaque aspects of Santeria Lucumi that have been empowering to those who are structurally marginalized in a variety of ways.

So fast forward-- I go to grad school, right? And I want to talk a little bit about this because it's important to think about how you come to ideas. So here I am. When I went to grad school, I went to Binghamton University. And Binghamton University happened to be a hub of decolonial scholars, folks who were talking about the coloniality of power, language, gender. They were all there. So Anibal Quijano was there. He had a residency there. Sylvia Wynter had come through there. And Maria Lugones, who's someone I worked very closely with while I was there.

And one of the things that the folks at the decolonial school were talking about was this concept of the coloniality that was really different from how folks were talking about colonization in Latin America at the time, sort of thinking about it as this moment in the past. The coloniality was a shift, in that it was really thinking about the intergenerational consequences of colonialism.

It was thinking about how the power dynamics that were established under colonization continue to vibrantly exist in the law, in education, in the way we talk about bodies, in science. So we were really thinking about these intergenerational ripple effects. Where were they? How are we tracking them? And for me, this is important. We'll talk about how this pertains to gender in a minute.

But the other thing that they were doing, which is interesting, because it was a philosophy department, was they were talking about turning towards non-Western cosmologies explicitly, like turning away from this Western arrangement of the social, and really thinking with the non-Western and what that looked like.

So it was a way to disrupt what Boaventura de Sousa Santos was referring to at the time as a, quote, "waste of human experience." So he had this argument that the majority of what the world knows we don't think is worthy of knowing, or studying, or even looking for ingredients for something else. It was also a way to perform what Mignolo was calling epistemic disobedience.

So here we are talking about this. And in 2007, Maria Lugones put out this article called "Heterosexualism and the modern colonial gender system," where she makes this claim that gender is a colonial imposition, that what we think of as gender is a colonial imposition. Now, there was some really awesome things about that movement. And I'll talk a little bit about that arrangement in a second. But there was also some not so good things about that movement.

And one of the things that happened-- and I totally understand why we arrived here-- was that in this move to say, this is a colonial-- gender is colonial, then folks started looking for all this stuff that was pre-colonial. Like, what is precolonial? What is precolonial? Now, for me, that immediately posed a methodological problem because I'm in the Caribbean.

And one thing is, where is the pre-colonial archive? That's the first question. Is it here? Is it there? Where is it? Because part of colonization in the Caribbean was exactly destroying, making sure, eradicating that there is no such thing as a precolonial archive.

But if there was an egalitarian utopia, and it was great, and colonization ruined it for us, there was another turn that happened with that discussion, which is that there was these arguments that were emerging that because precolonially we were more, quote unquote, "egalitarian," that women of color who were critiquing hierarchical arrangements in relation to their own racialized counterparts, male counterparts, had been duped by a liberal feminist politic.

OK? So you see the tension there between wanting to talk about a colonial arrangement that damaged our relationships, while also saying, oh, because-- and now, all that turns to what is precolonial or non-Western is almost so sacred that it can't be addressed. And if you are trying to address some of the problems within those practices, somehow you are-- you've been duped by a liberal Western politic.

So the question for us became, well, what are some of the necessary methodological shifts that scholars who are invested in decolonizing the category and disrupting settler colonial and neocolonial arrangements of power-- what are the shifts that we have to make in terms of our theoretical practices?

So yeah, this move, obviously, left women of color between a rock and a hard place. I like this little comic because here we have Hillary Clinton saying, I facilitate the imperialist domination of your country, so we can super-exploit you. But we're both women. So-- so this ahistorical conception of gender, which had men versus women. So we want to think a little bit about how that shows up.

And then on the flip side, we had this clear critique, men of color who had a clear critique of the violence of colonialism and the processes of racialization, but seem to have a much harder time, a literal indifference identifying the effects and impacts of that on our interpersonal relationships and the ways in which they were being asked to be complicit in the subjugation of their racialized female counterparts. And we're not even talking about other gender variants at this point, right? But it does include that.

So we needed to do something else. So I want to go a little bit to Maria Lugones's claim to talk a little bit about how I view it, what I think is useful about it, and where I'm making a methodological shift. So what she describes-- for me, more interesting than the claim that gender is a colonial imposition is what she describes as this relational system that I want us to sort of tune into.

So this relational system of gender that is taking shape within the context of colonization. So I am not talking about gender like prior to colonization. There may be moments that the way we deploy gender as a category of analysis makes sense in those contexts. But in the context of colonization, something else is happening with gender.

So the first thing that happens is that she makes this argument that the only people with gender are those folks on the light side. She describes it as light and dark. And we can talk about what that means. But for her, within the context of colonization, woman really refers to white, Bourgeois, heterosexual females, not one or the other. It's not about an anatomy of sexual difference. It is about all four of those things together-- white, Bourgeois, heterosexual females and white, Bourgeois, heterosexual, males, OK? So what she is describing is this binary regime that is hierarchical and oppositional. Whatever she is, he cannot be and vice versa.

Now, there are really good reasons in the context of a colony to start to police people's behavior. So it's important to know that is also what's happening because there is this constitutive outside that is there in large numbers threatening this arrangement of power between these two people.

So when she describes the binary regime, she talks a lot about the characteristics that are tied to these categories, man and woman. So with woman, if he is mind, she is body. You guys know this, right? You've seen this over and over. If he is of the public, she is of the private. This is basically the cult of domesticity played out.

But the other thing that's part of this thing that we don't talk about as much is that beyond the sex-gender binary between these women and these men, there is a whole bunch of other binaries that help support this arrangement. So we want to talk about the constitutive outside that has Black enslaved folks. And we have Indigenous folks on the outside of this arrangement, right? So the other binaries that are being played out in this gender system include the White-Black binary, the European-other binary, the human-non-human binary, the subject-object binary. All of these are part of this system that need to be policed.

And so here on the dark side are the bodies of those who are legally produced as chattel and as non-human. It's not that they're non-human. It's that they're legally produced that way. And their sexed bodies matter to the extent to which they serve capitalist accumulation. So we're not talking about these folks as gendered as men and women.

So that's what she wants us to tune into. So when we go back, when we talk about the gender analysis, we're often wondering about the oppositional relationship of women versus men, of queer versus straight. So we're looking at those oppositional arrangements. And while it is true that this woman is disempowered in relation to this man, she is not disempowered in relation to all of these males and females beneath her. So this is why the gender analysis has to include a conversation about colonization and how it plays out.

All right. So for me, if we're going to use gender differently, if we're going to start to question this reduction, this move to reduce gender to the series of oppositions that doesn't take up this colonial history, we need to start asking other kinds of questions. So some of the questions we can begin to ask methodologically is when I'm doing this analysis, to what extent does gender center a descriptive biology? Are we talking about the sexual difference only?

That's one way to start to begin to enter this conversation. Is it presupposing the relationship of power between light side men and women? And by extension, is it presupposing the characteristics ascribed to those bodies? And again, I am talking about within the context of colonial and post-colonial. I mean, obviously, coloniality trumps up-- bumps up against the idea of anything being post-colonial.

But the other question is, is the analysis obscuring the colonial history that attached gender to those who would be recognized as human and enjoyed a systemically supported freedom? So we are looking at the structure itself and seeing whose freedom is being structurally supported. And you can think about how that would play out contemporarily because we see there are certain people and bodies who are consistently targeted for demise. So this keys us into that. And gender doesn't become a conversation about identities. It becomes a conversation about troubling the structure that targets those bodies for demise.

In which context does it make sense to deploy gender or sexual difference? We need to start having that conversation more explicitly. And what coeval logics does it obscure? And here, I want to tune in a little bit into the nonbinary. All right, so I'm going to give you an example. This is low-hanging fruit. This is not the most-- this just gives us an insight into to the way we might be able to operationalize this.

So I want to talk a little bit about the Orisha Saint correspondences within Santeria, Lukumi, and what those correspondences tell us about gender. So as Santeria emerged, there came to be a point where correspondences were established between the Orishas and the Catholic Saints.

In other words, the Catholic Saints come to represent Orishas in the Santeria pantheon. So for example, here we have Santa Barbara. Now, Santa Barbara is coincided with Chango. So I'm going to show an image of Chango in a minute. But I want you to take a moment and take a look at this image.

What does her image convey to you about gender and gender expectations, if anything? I don't even know if that's the. right question. But I just want to take a moment to just-- because we know this is how we're trained in academia. What does this image tell you? OK. So here, we have this image of a young, pale skin, rosy cheeked Santa Barbara donning a crown. She's wearing a red tunic with a golden-- with a long blue cape.

She's holding a sword that's pointed down in her left hand. And in her right hand, she holds up a golden chalice that features a prominent host. Her head is surrounded by a golden halo of light, as is the chalice. And behind her is the image of a prison tower with a jaggedly sharp lightning bolt descending from an ominously dark sky. She seems to be standing in a battlefield. There's cannons and cannonballs just opposite the prison tower.

Now, we know that iconography often conveys stories. So the iconography is telling us a story about Santa Barbara. How many of you who know anything about Santa Barbara's life? All right, cool. So she was the daughter of a pagan king who had locked her in a tower, on the one hand, to protect her virginity from suitors.

But at some point, she becomes a Christian. And he becomes furious. And he has her killed. And when he has her killed, a lightning bolt descends from the sky. And whammo, he's gone. Vengeance, right? So here, we have one image. Now, what if I told you that practitioners of Santeria receive this card, looking at Santa Barbara, but see Chango. OK?

Now, Chango is an interesting case because he was one of the Orishas who did spend time in human form. He was a former African King. And Chango is understood as a human ancestor who was eventually deified. And he often is associated with lustiness, masculinity, virility. And yet, he's associated with this pale skinned martyr, feminine martyr. What do we do with that?

I'm just going to take a minute to let it sink in. In its most radical versions, people talk about these correspondences as a way of masking or as gender crossing. And I want us to think about whether or not gender crossing-- what does gender crossing as a frame do? And what does it obscure? OK?

So given that, I'm going to take a moment and say, all right, the most radical version of this might be that we have some gender fluidity and gender crossing. But in order for that analysis to stay, I have to be kind of upholding the binary regime up under it for that to make sense. And I want us to think about another logic that is operative in the space that does not get talked about.

And for me, that includes the nonbinary logic of altars. So in Santeria, when you're building an altar, altars include the bringing together of objects that collectively embody the Orisha, OK? They collectively represent the characteristics and stories associated with a given Orisha. So for example-- I'm going to go back here-- Chango is the Odisha of thunder and lightning. So Chango can be represented by a fire engine because his color is red and he represents thunder and lightning.

And so for me, the nonbinary here includes this universe of ungendered objects. These objects are not gendered. But they collectively embody the Orisha. And that collective representation is not trumped by a representation that lives within the sexual binary. So one of the things that I'm thinking about is the nonbinary as both and, not as either or, which is the world we live in within the binary regime.

This nonbinary world is represented by this universe of ungendered objects, but is also represented by all of these binaries that are ruptured along the way. So for example, the subject-object binary is ruptured along the way because these objects are alive. It is a world of objects come alive. You feed them. You build relationships to them. So this coeval logic of alter building is being obscured through the gender analysis. So far so good? You with me? OK, cool.

So if we go back to Santa Barbara-- and in the case of Santa Barbara, I did say Chango's color is red, right? And what is she wearing? She's wearing a red tunic. Chango was a former king. She not only wears a crown, but she's standing in front of a tower, a castle.

So here, we're starting to look at the colors and the accouterments that remind us of Chango's story. Chango is the god of thunder and lightning. And there's the lightning bolt. So I could tell a story about gender crossing. And that would be true. That could be true, right? But the other thing that could be true is that it has nothing to do with the actual bodies in the figure, that it has to do with these objects that collectively come to represent an Orisha. And if we tell the story of just about the bodies, then we foreground the bodies in a way that bucks up against some of the logics that are in the practice itself.

So in this way, I'm inviting you to activate a nonbinary logic, in that it can both hold gendered and gendered formations. But it's not fully captured by either. So when I talk about the nonbinary as a methodological reorientation, I'm talking about a couple of things. So I'm going to talk about what it is not and what it is.

So what it is and what it is not. For me, the nonbinary within this project is not about gender identity. It is not about the taxonomy of identity, not because that's not important, but because that is just one branch of what's expansively available. To reduce it to just identities then doesn't allow us to rupture or think about the ingredients that buck up against the regime writ large.

So for me, it is a methodological approach that tunes into that which exceeds the binary regime and is not contained by it. So it's an invitation to go to those excesses. It doesn't ignore the binary regime. I'm not going to sit here and argue that colonization did not happen. It did. And so it is an orientation that has to take up that reality, but notices that it is only one of many possible logics that are operative and available.

Because colonization was imposed, but it didn't do away with everything. Otherwise, we should just call it quits. So it tunes into that which exceeds the binary, but does not seek to be legible with it-- within it. The argument around gender crossing even might presuppose endpoints that we're getting to. And that's not-- what if that's not part of the logic at all?

So it does not presuppose the oppositional and mutually exclusive logic of the binary regime. It doesn't presuppose that that's operative in all spaces in all times. It doesn't act like that somehow outside of history. It says, OK, let's take a look at what other things are operative in the space. And so it is a both and and neither or methodological approach. So I'm going to give you one more example of what that looks like.

So for example, within this Orisha Olokun-- when we think about the Orisha Olokun, so this is one of the Orisha's within Santeria. And I point to it because, when describing Olokun, folks describe Olokun as half human, half fish or sea creature. But ultimately, Olokun remains undefined and expansive. And it's in these places of expansiveness that I want us to linger.

So sometimes, understood as both male and female-- this is what I mean, both and, right? Both male and female or neither male or female. So it moves between both and, neither nor. So it exists outside of the regime. And when you ask folks, there's this saying that no one knows what lies in the depths of the ocean because Odisha Olokun is the depths of the ocean.

So we can't know. That's the thing. It opens up a space for that which we cannot know. And for me, Olokun is a cipher for a cosmosense that makes room for and can actually countenance the nonbinary, not just in theory, but in practice. It forces us to be comfortable with the unknowable.

That doesn't mean that folks who have nonbinary identities or trans identities find themselves totally welcome within Santeria practice spaces. There's many, many folks who have been kicked out of those spaces. But one of the reasons why this matters to me is because we have to-- my suggestion is that the move towards decoloniality actually demands that we take a nonbinary approach that resituates the binary regime as just one-- not as universal, but as a local politics that had global designs.

It's just one of many. And we need to resituate that. Or we become part of the people that cement that binary regime into our futures. So without an attentiveness to that, which exceeds the binary regime, we often participate in the obfuscation of epistemology and ontologies that have a different story to tell. So we're participating in making things obscure.

And what's interesting and what makes these practices-- a lot of these practices dangerous is that they do contain ingredients that disrupt the operations of the binary regime, the coloniality of gender, and its hierarchies of power. They do buck up against that. And they're always available to be remobilized.

So if the coloniality seeks to forget that which is outside of it-- so there's a way in which the coloniality wants us to forget the constitutive outside doesn't want us to make more of those practices because they're dangerous. Then this project seeks to remember so that we can expand our imaginations towards more expansive modes of being and relating and heal from the epistemic violence of that reduction. Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

AUDIENCE: Oh. Whoa, can you all hear me? Anyway, thank you so much for that. That was really useful, really interesting for me. One question that I have-- it was really great to see you move from one image to another image, from the Catholic image to the image of Chango. I'm wondering if you think at all about how these binaries do or do not operate in the lives of practitioners or in the lives of communities. Does this methodological approach map onto communities and practitioners as well as onto images and literatures and theories and scholars?

XHERCIS MENDEZ: Yeah, I think that-- I wanted to give the example of the Orisha Saint correspondences because some of the ways in which the expansive opportunities are available for practitioners has to do with how folks get to inhabit their bodies within the context of actual practices like possession, for instance.

I think one of the arguments-- again, this is another area where folks have narrated the things like possession, where say, for instance, Chango possesses a female practitioner as another instance of gender crossing. And while I don't disagree that those things are operative in the space, we can read it as gender crossing.

We could also read it as a nonbinary vessel being occupied by an Odisha in that moment of possession. So a practitioner knows that they're going to have to share their body with the gods, as it were. And so what is the status of that body in the context of practice is an interesting one because one of the things that surfaced in conversation with some of the practitioners-- and again, I'm not arguing that people are not reading this in gendered ways in the moment.

But the other thing that I have seen is that folks are testing to see if the Orisha has successfully arrived. And in that moment, who your body-- what you body you inhabit does not matter as much when folks are trying to see if the Orisha has arrived. The other thing is there's this question about whether or not the power of that deity is diminished by the body that's in the space.

So if we think about the Orisha Saint correspondences, if we were operating from the modern colonial gender system, we would argue that the movement from being a man to a woman would mean a diminished location. Do you know what I mean? A loss of power, as it were. But that's not what's happening. The relationship between the Orishas is one that's really complicated. And we don't see, quote, "women Orishas" as less powerful.

So I think there is something to say about-- this isn't just another way, another-- more of the same. Everyone has sexual difference. And so we just think about it differently. You know how we put these umbrellas? I'll give you an example. The way the queer umbrella has operated-- we're now like, we're going to look for the queer in all the spaces. And then practices like two-spirit then fall under the queer umbrella.

The challenge with that is we lose something along the way. There's a spiritual component to two-spirit that gets lost when we put it under a queer umbrella that hasn't really taken up the spiritual. So this is what I'm interested in thinking about. What do we lose in those categorizations? And what are we looking for when we're trying to name everything-- this is queer, this is this, this is this. We're looking for something that's-- I think a lot of folks are looking for liberatory ingredients, something that bucks up against this arrangement that we don't like.

But what I'm interested in is not performing some form of epistemic erasure along the way. And I think that if we put both of those side by side, we can actually talk to both the intergenerational impact of colonization, and then what ingredients are available to us that move from a totally different logic. I hope that's helpful. Don't all jump in at once.

AUDIENCE: To what you were saying, I wonder if that's because we understand queer in a colonial lens.

XHERCIS MENDEZ: I think that's one of the questions that kind of emerges out of the decolonial. I think, though, we have to be thoughtful and careful, right? So I do want to mention something that has come up for me recently and something I'm contending with. So transnationally, there's an anti-gender movement. And we see that, where there's this move to shut down any conversation about gender. But what's, I guess, bananas about it is that part of the move transnationally has been to appropriate the language of the decolonial to make the argument to shut down the gender conversation.

And obviously, that wasn't its intent, right? So in that context, I do think that the way people are thinking about gender to push up against heteronormativity and the status quo, that is radical. That does make sense to do. That's how it should be. It's denouncing those-- that structural formation. And in that sense, yes, it's useful.

But it's been proclaimed as imperialist, including the categories of queer and trans as imperial formations, because it's been taken out of the nuance of the context that we're talking about here, right? So how do we both hold the realities of the coloniality of gender and its operations, the way it's woven into everything-- how do we hold that?

And then also, how do we start to think about a world that isn't utterly defined by that? At the same time, it's a both and approach, right? And so for me, I think, when I think about the communities of color that I'm most concerned with, the coloniality of gender is dangerous because it can almost seem as if it's undermining this political project to push back against these external assaults. And the external assault seems very pressing.

But I think that we can't successfully fight the external assaults if we're not willing to think about how capitalism and all of the exacts complicities is from within our own communities, complicities that-- so we're tearing each other inside and have no way to talk about that. And I want us to be able to talk about both.

AUDIENCE: Thanks.

XHERCIS MENDEZ: I don't know if there's any questions for me.

AUDIENCE: I have a question.

XHERCIS MENDEZ: Yay.

AUDIENCE: So this is just wonderful work. Thank you so much for this. There's so much to think about here. As you've been thinking about this, clearly, you've really been focusing on Santeria. Can you think of any examples of the nonbinary actually operating in a colonial context? In other words, so there's a kind of binary here between the colonial and the non-colonial. Have you been thinking at all about the nonbinary, say, in Catholicism or outside of Santeria in other contexts?

XHERCIS MENDEZ: I haven't thought about it in terms of Catholicism, to be honest. I think that a lot of the things that I'm suggesting is true in a lot of Afrodiasporic practices within the Caribbean, for instance. So you'll see it in Winti. You'll see it in Candomble. You'll see it in [INAUDIBLE]. You'll see it in a lot of those practices-- the Gaga cults. You'll see it in a lot of different practices throughout the Caribbean. Obeah, you'll see it in a lot of different practices.

So I'm more interested in seeing-- OK, I don't know how that shows up. But I know that we've told a story about the ways in which religiosity in particular is restrictive to certain communities. We continue to tell that story. And it is true that Christianity in particular played a large role in how we end up with certain kinds of hierarchies, hierarchical formations that then get woven into scientific practice. We are aware of that.

I'm less aware or less attuned to-- and I invite people to do more work in that direction because I think it will behoove us to-- the more we tell that story-- there's this sociologist, I believe, named Zine Magubane, who I think teaches at Boston College, who talks-- who talked a lot about Saartje Baartman, you know AKA, also known as, the Hottentot Venus.

And one of the arguments that she makes is that in the process of telling this story, we've entrenched her as the epitome of sexual and racial alterity in a way that the history doesn't corroborate, that the Hottentot Venus was one of many. And that why do we need her to do that? So basically, in telling the story, we've put the nail in the coffin and kind of cemented her as that in our imaginations.

And so there is a question about, in the effort to name a oppressions, do we cement oppressive formations into our future? That's a question that I have. The more we tell that story, the more we tell these stories, the less we see what's possible. And it's not that we don't tell the stories. But I'm trying to figure out ways to tell the story-- tell stories that don't become what-- here, I'm thinking about Michel-Rolph Trouillot. He's a Haitian scholar, historian who passed away.

But he talks about challenging histories that, depending on how we tell them, can become a form of ongoing traumatism. And so how do we engage hard histories without then having them basically of narrate that there's no future beyond this? And you can see how that plays out in our classrooms. Sometimes, folks are like, it's been like this forever. What's it to say that's going to change now? So are we actually participating in the erosion of hope for a different future by telling stories in a way that seem fixed?

So anyway, all that to say I don't know what's going on in all the practices. But I do know that some of the ways we talk about gender and religion have predominantly been informed by monotheistic practices and that polytheistic practices often have way more to tell us. But even when we think about how religious studies programs are organized, they often are the subset of a subset of a subset. There's such a small group of people and thinkers and scholars. And the lion's share of our attention has gone to monotheistic practices.

AUDIENCE: My question, in some ways, is I think you've created a really fascinating theoretical framework. And I'm wondering about where else it goes and whether somebody looking within a colonial context might find a critique from within that might surface some of what you're seeing in a critique from outside.

XHERCIS MENDEZ: Thank you.

AUDIENCE: Thank you, Xhercis. This is really fascinating. And I have learned a lot. So my question is-- it's not very clear in my head. But I have been thinking about the role of language. So while you are theorizing the nonbinary, for instance, I kept-- I think of assuming you-- one bases the theory upon sacred objects in a specific culture. And the language of that culture is a gendered language. So I mean, I just want to hear more about--

XHERCIS MENDEZ: Oh, I love that question.

AUDIENCE: In terms of, yeah, the role that language plays, especially a gendered language.

XHERCIS MENDEZ: No, I love that question. Thank you so much for asking it. And I think that's one of the challenges. When you're looking at scholars who have written about Santeria, it's challenging for that reason. We have Yoruba as one, so the Yoruban language, which-- scholars, at different points, have argued that there's non-gendered aspects or ungendered aspects of the language.

And a lot of it is organized around the logic of seniority. So that's another part of the thing that I talk about, is seniority and how seniority plays out. But then you have that translated into Spanish, which is a highly gendered language. And then you have sites in Nigeria that were colonized by the British, highly gendered language. So accounts of Santeria-- historical, colonial accounts of Santeria that were preserved by British missionaries.

So what we have has been touched by gendered language. And that's the interesting part. I am interested in the tension between how we have language that is heteronormative, highly gendered permeating a space. I'll give you an example within the context of Cuba. The rhetoric of homophobia was real strong with the Cuban Revolution. Like, get these folks out of here.

So you have this really powerful gendered rhetoric thing. And then you have these practices that are incorporating exactly those folks into practice. And I'll just tell you this one story that I thought was really interesting. When I was in Cuba, I was hanging out with this taxi driver whose padrino was a very out, very queer Afro-Cuban male.

And I remember this moment where he was like, I don't like that queer stuff. But nobody better mess with my padrino. And to me, to me, a gender analysis might make a lot out of the homophobia in the discourse of it and pay less attention to the relationship that was built through the practice that now has him defending his padrino.

It doesn't solve the problem of homophobia or the heteronormativity of the space. But the discourse alone is not the whole story. And so I want to think about, well, these practices actually bring us-- bring folks in relation to each other that are structurally set up to not be in relationship to each other. There's something dangerous about that.

These practices are set up like-- in a lot of ways, allow folks who are structurally marginalized, don't have resources, to access resources in a way that they would not have been able to otherwise. So tuning into the rhetoric, the oppressive rhetoric is not enough. We have to think about how practices operate on the ground and to what extent they actually function-- and I use as modes of empowerment that are not legible.

I mean, there's a lot of examples of that throughout, even what we tell in terms of a history of a place. I'll just say one last thing, and then I'll shut it. But one of the interesting things was that if we look at a history labor histories, we look at how folks organize-- and oh, there was a strike at the port. That's a labor history.

Well, within the context of Santeria, you can't think about a labor history without thinking about how the religiosity created the relationships that sustained the strike at the port because people will show up for their spiritual families in a way that they won't show up for some anticapitalist proletariat blah, blah, blah. You know what I'm saying? And again, those are things that become part of what gets erased by the analysis that we perform.

AUDIENCE: Hello, hello. Hi, Xhercis. Thank you so much for your talk. It was just brilliant and moving. And I'm so glad I got to take your class last year. And it was such a transformative experience for me. So I want to go back to the nonbinary methodologies. I know you said it's not about identity.

And as a nonbinary person, I'm feeling some sort of responsibility to have a more-- like a deeper relationship with a nonbinary methodology and maybe not be so easily placated by, oh, people are using the right pronouns for me. They're not harassing me. I'm good. And so I'm wondering if you think there-- how can nonbinary people be more mobilized to take on these methodologies beyond identity to-- is there a special place for us to be part of creating these epistemologies? And also I have questions around like cultural appropriation and how my immediate thought was like, well, Santeria isn't my tradition.

And there's so much to learn from this. And also, I think this goes back to Dr. Breckus's question of how can I find this within my own tradition, even if I'm-- I don't even really feel like I have a tradition. So just having a lot of questions about this just because-- thinking about going to my community, queer communities-- back home, not here at HDS, but this is just a really important conversation to be pushing them forward with, especially with people who are politically organized around-- we talked in class about this logics of rights, like we're citizens with rights. And as long as we get that, we're good. And that does not question the project of coloniality at all.

XHERCIS MENDEZ: I really appreciate that question. And I do want to share that one of the things that I've been thinking about is precisely how do we-- what does this mean politically? Honestly, that's the core of the question. And I say that just also recognizing that I'm a co-parent of a nonbinary child.

So I see the ways the binary regime reduces their life. We're always bucking up against-- I mean, everything from bathrooms to-- I mean, just watching somebody become small. So I think one of the challenges is thinking about what would a radical nonbinary political identity look like that's not necessarily about how one inhabits their body?

And I say that to say because when I look at my nonbinary baby, one of the things that I'm continuously struck by is, would this be the case if they had access to other ways of imagining the world? There's so many examples of non-western formations that push up against the binary regime. But because they're not so visible in K through 12 schooling, this child thinks that their position, their identity is about not fitting.

And then the project becomes, how do I-- how do I become legible? How do I fit in? How do I get included? And all of the language around what constitutes affirming. And I do think we have to think critically. Part of the challenge is that science. As we think anatomically, science has produced this language of anatomical distinction that doesn't create space for nonbinary and trans folks, and then comes back and offers a solution for your non-fitting in.

Oh, we'll offer you some hormones. And those things are really important. And they allow folks to survive and have a livable life. And they're presented as the only liberatory option. And I feel like there's an opportunity for us to think, what is-- there's so many things that people do and practice, ingredients everywhere, that we have not looked at, and not in an appropriate way, but in a way that expands our imaginations around, again, what's possible.

It just tells us, it doesn't have to be this way. And this isn't the only way. So I think ther'es that. There's a political formation. And the political formation isn't one that brings us back to biology, to be honest. I mean, I think here, this is where the Women of Color Project was really interesting. Being a woman of color was not being born a racialized female.

Being a woman of color was having a political commitment to learning each other's histories around folks who were also racialized. But it was a political project towards coalition. It wasn't like, oh, I was born this way. Therefore, I'm a woman of color. And the reduction to biology has been one of the ways in which that project has lost its political radicalness.

So I think there is something about being in conversation with people who want to think politically about the nonbinary as that which is-- and I have to say, I know I'm cis passing. I do see myself as cis passing. But I don't feel cis. I've never felt cis. There's a lot of reasons for that.

I'm also a queer woman of color. But all of the ways in which the conceptualization of what constitutes the feminine and woman actually don't apply to me and the majority of the, quote, "women I know." So I think if we start looking, we're going to find that a lot more of us don't fit than do.

AUDIENCE: This was sort of a question that I kind of started with, but then jumped off on that one. When you were talking about Santa Barbara and Chango and you were talking about the similarities, one thing that you didn't mention was power and how they wield power similarly or how the power comes to them through lightning, through some of the other things. And so when you were just talking the politicalness of nonbinary identities and the diminished power that many feel, I think there's something in that, in exploring the power, and then reclaiming that power?

XHERCIS MENDEZ: Yes.

CATHERINE BRECKUS: And so I often use the two-spirit illustration with people to try and explain nonbinary. But how do you do that without co-opting that culture? How do we claim those positive aspects? Because the two-spirit does include spirituality. It does include a full identity of who people are.

And how two-spirit people existed in their culture at that time is a well-rounded illustration. And I think that's why it's so easy to use. And so I think that's a really good question. And how do we take the research that you're doing and the things that you're finding and expand that to reclaim that power for nonbinary identities?

XHERCIS MENDEZ: Yeah, I think this is an interesting thing. I think this is an invitation to know more, to know more instead of less, like take a deep dive. But the other thing is that when we think about where-- and this goes to-- this is why it's not about identity. Within the context of the US, the nonbinary sits outside.

And it's narrated as a disempowered position. And I want us to think about, well-- and it's similar to the way people talk about queer as outside and as a disempowered position. And when I think about queerness, here's some of the things that I see from my own life. So for example, one of the things is that because I wasn't out of the closet, I was able to explore things, and not be restricted, and not be policed in ways that I would have been had I come out.

So there is a freedom in these spaces outside. There's a freedom to think about different formations of family. There's a freedom to think about things that are not constrained by that binary regime. So it is about thinking about, OK, yes, folks are both the site-- the target of coloniality. But they're also the place where coloniality can be undone because it's in the dark. It's in these places that are not legible that really liberatory ingredients exist.

In the same way we can talk about the hierarchy between men and women, let's look at racialized communities. In a lot of racialized communities, cis women have power in ways that white women didn't have in their own communities, like a lot more power, a lot more authority, a lot more say in the future of the peoples.

So the move to gender, the move to being recognized as a man and a woman actually represents a reduction of power for a lot of racialized women. So think about that. If that's what being a woman means, no thank you. No thank you. So this is what I want us to think about. What are we trading? And what are the things that entice that trading?

Oftentimes, we're trading into that womanhood, playing at that woman. And I'm not talking about all spaces and all times. I'm really talking about some of the political spaces I've seen here where a lot of the arguments have been about we've been left out of this category or we've been left out of these rights or access. What folks are fighting for are access to being recognized as human, access to certain support-- support by the state to be protected and safe.

And the only way they can do that is by trading into that gender formation. And a good example of that-- I'm going to give you a good example of that. The Violence Against Women Act, which was supposed to protect women from domestic violence. But the women who defended themselves also got accused of domestic violence. So more women of color got arrested under that act for defending themselves because they didn't enter the legal system as that demure, victimized person because the law is meant to protect that woman.

And I don't think that woman is real. Listen, not even for the white women. But that's my point. She's not real. So we need to talk about that and disrupt that because it's everywhere embedded. And it has real consequences. People lose jobs for not looking a certain way. How many women of color-- and I'm talking specifically Black women who have lost their jobs for not wearing their hair a particular way because it fits, again, the standard of beauty that's attached to that woman.

There's example after example of the impact of this formation. So when we do a gender analysis, we can't act like-- I mean, I understand theoretically we say we're not all sisters. We get that. I think people have understood that. But the how we're not all sisters is where we lose our way. And that information is not meant to cause a beef between me and this other person. But it's meant to get us to attend to the structural formations that create that dynamic between us. So yeah. And on that note--

AUDIENCE: Thank you so much.

XHERCIS MENDEZ: Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]

SPEAKER 2: Sponsor-- Women's Studies and Religion Program.

SPEAKER 1: Copyright 2023, the President and Fellows of Harvard College.