ABSTRACT
This essay explores how coloniality has led to divergences in feminist conceptions of revolution across time and space. Using Maria Lugones’s concept of the modern/colonial gender system, I show how the rise of feminism in the Global South was not a response to Indigenous forms of patriarchy but to the way in which coloniality had transformed the role of gender. Focusing on revolutions in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, I show how revolutionary feminists challenged Eurocentric notions of women’s liberation by highlighting the inseparability of gender oppression from other forms of oppression. I analyze the role of feminists in nationalist, socialist, and decolonial revolutions and highlight the way in which decolonial feminism seeks to challenge the racist, sexist, and capitalist foundations of the modern/colonial gender system.
