The coloniality of gender is a concept developed by feminist philosopher María Lugones, which she defines as "the analysis of racialized, capitalist, gender oppression", while the process of potentially overcoming this phenomenon can be defined as "decolonial feminism". Central to these terms is the definition and recognition of indigenous social structures and their relation to land, and the articulation of how these epistemologies occupy an oppositional consciousness to colonial systems of social, sexual, ecological, spatial, and temporal hierarchy. María Lugones describes this difference as the 'oppressing ←→ resisting' relationship.
In relation to race, land, and sovereignty
According to Glen Sean Coulthard in his essay For the Land: the Dene Nation's Struggle for Self-Determination, Indigenous resistances against "capitalist imperialism" can be understood as struggles surrounding the question of land and knowledge-based practices encompassing the "relation to one another and our surroundings in a respectful, nondominating and nonexploitative way." Coulthard defines this system of relationality as "grounded normativity" stating, "the late Lakota philosopher Vine Deloria Jr. argues that one of the most significant differences that exist between Indigenous and Western metaphysics revolves around the central importance of land to Indigenous modes of being, thought, and ethics." Further to this, Coulthard argues that Indigenous "philosophies of nonoppression" are defined through spatial as well as temporal relationships. Lugones refers to these Western-versus-Indigenous epistemologies as 'cosmologies' in her essay Toward a Decolonial Feminism, where she analyzes these structures in relation to the colonial imposition of gender binaries on Indigenous communities.
According to Lugones, colonial modernity is positioned as "the dichotomous hierarchy between the human and the non-human", summarized by Lugones' use of the term "colonial difference". Lugones states that within the context of colonization in the Americas and the Caribbean, this hierarchy was employed as a tactic of subordination of the colonized to "Western man". Lugones argues that related hierarchies were constructed by colonizers to create a binary division between men and women, describing this distinction as "a mark of the human and a mark of civilization. Only the civilized are men or women," which excluded Indigenous peoples and Africans as being non-human animals, while upholding the status of "bourgeois European women" as passive reproductive servants of "white bourgeois" male colonizers. According to Lugones, colonial relations of power constructed through such binaries comprise the "colonial difference", a term with open-ended origins that Lugones attributes to Walter Mignolo's book Local Histories/Global Designs.
According to Lugones, colonial notions of femininity as inversions of masculinity did not grant human status, but rather established a gender dimorphism of hypersexuality and sexual passivity that rendered colonized "men" and "women" as non-human gendered entities. Through the performance of colonial anthropocentrism and the disruption of Indigenous cosmologies of grounded normativity, extreme acts of sexualized violence could be justified towards gendered and dehumanized colonized subjects, as stated by Lugones. Lugones writes that through murder and rape, control of colonized bodies institutionalized the internalization of colonial systems. Religious indoctrination, with divisions between good and evil equating colonized females with Satan, arguably established not only a colonization of bodies, but of memory. Systematic replications of these ideologies, according to Lugones, facilitated the erasure of Indigenous cosmologies of reciprocal relations to place, psychologically clearing the way for the re-appropriation of land toward the implementation of capitalist projects.
Within Lugones' analysis of Mignolo's usage of the colonial difference is her assertion that the colonial difference (and the coloniality of gender) is "not an affair of the past"; as such, as a contemporary phenomenon, Lugones argues that seeking parity with the colonizer by erasing colonial difference does not eliminate oppression. Rey Chow terms the act of seeking parity with the colonizer as "the ascendancy of whiteness", which Arvin, Tuck and Morrill further elaborate as taking part in the colonial "settling process" to dispossess "'other-ed' peoples globally." Instead, Lugones proposes a "feminist border thinking" that positions learning from subalternity at the colonial difference as central to a decolonial feminism. This concept embraces movements toward coalitional social relations between feminists of color, which Lugones describes as "the oppositional consciousness of a social erotics."
In this context, according to Arvin, Tuck, and Morrill, "Indigenous communities' concerns are often not about achieving formal equality or civil rights within a nation-state, but instead achieving substantial independence from a Western nation-state—independence decided on their own terms."