Nature with Culture: Learning from Afro-Colombian feminists to imagine gender beyond the human
By Sowmya Ramanathan
*This is part of the multi-part series Holding Movements, Agitating Epistemes: Remembering, Retelling, and Dreaming for Justice convened and co-edited by Richa Nagar and Ponni Arasu. Read the Series Co-editors’ Prologue to this piece here.*
Does a mangrove have a gender? Do the oceans? The rivers? The skies? If you are like me, you may have answered “no” to all of these questions. Perhaps you even justified your “no” by affirming that gender is cultural, and thus, a distinguishing feature of human (and not necessarily natural) life. The Cambridge English Dictionary would likely agree with you, defining culture as
1. the way of life, especially the general customs and beliefs, of a particular group of people at a particular time; or
2. the attitudes, behavior, opinions, etc. of a particular group of people within society.
Both of these definitions see culture as a defining feature of “people,” separating humans from all that is more than human. And often, this presumption is used to laud humans’ “superior” evolutionary capacity. After all, we have intellect, critical thinking, logic, reasoning, belief, religion, music, art, dance, and other cultural expressions that simply do not exist elsewhere. So, why not consider culture and—by extension, gender—uniquely human?
Last semester, I found myself struggling with this question alongside my students. That day, we were reading Afro-Colombian scholar, teacher, and activist Betty Ruth Lozano’s Feminism Cannot Be Single Because Women Are Diverse, translated by Diana Paredes Grijalva (2022). Our goal was to understand Lozano’s notion of a place-based, ancestral, and insurgent feminism in Colombia. Until the abolition of slavery in 1851, the Colombian Pacific region (see image) was a site of colonial extractivism, with the seat of the Spanish Inquisition located in Cartagena de Indias and enslaved peoples transported from there to Buenaventura, Chocó, and other areas, principally for gold mining.[1]Peter Wade, “Introduction: The Colombian Pacific in Perspective”, 2008. Developmental economists and other social scientists have considered the region the least developed and prosperous of the country’s departamentos, and as Lozano states, “experts” have painted Afro-Colombian women as “poor, vulnerable, illiterate, having too many children, and generally incapable of action” (534). However, inhabitants of the Pacific maintain strong connections to the ancestral legacy of maroonism and colonial resistance, and as “the Black community moves in a permanent present that includes the legacy of slavery” (535), they consistently resist victimization and racist stereotyping. My students and I wanted to understand just this: how Afro-Colombians—who make up 95.3% of the Pacific region’s inhabitants—resist and reimagine their identities, especially when it comes to questions of gender.
Map of Chocó and the Pacific Region with my annotations denoting main routes for transport of enslaved peoples, Google Earth, 2024. https://shorturl.at/nnLvs
When it comes to the question of gender, Lozano’s work can help us to do just that. In reviewing the dominant cultural understanding of the sex vs. gender binary, she says: “Importantly, gender as a category has relativized the meanings of being a woman and being a man, by linking them to culture—something made possible only after the sex/gender distinction. Thus, it could be stated that being a man and being a woman depend on the cultural expectations imposed on the sexes. However, several feminists have questioned the definition of sex as biological and gender as cultural” (emphasis mine).
She interrogates something we may take as a given: sex is biological, occurring in humans, animals, and plants alike, and gender is cultural and uniquely human. She also frames culture as the set of “expectations” that shape how we show up in the world. As we grow and perceive these external expectations, we embark on a performative journey of (dis)obeying cultural constraints in fierce defense of our individual rights to self-expression and determination. Working within this framework, prominent theorists such as Judith Butler uphold the notion that gender is a discursive phenomenon, or a set of ideas and practices that shape and are shaped by language, the performance of identity, and social and cultural life, more broadly.
I can still hear one student’s voice of disbelief in my head: “But, is Lozano saying that gender isn’t cultural?” Yes and no. Lozano’s invitation is to think of gender as both natural and cultural, and some of my students seemed triggered—yes, triggered: reactive—by this idea. I could see the wheels in their heads turning: if we accept gender as natural, are we not giving primacy to conservative rhetoric, religious ideals, and eugenics, which utilize biology to justify women’s subservience, male dominance, and other white supremacist norms? And to be totally transparent, I share this fear! Yet as I stumbled to answer, I had to go back to the personal: I am a dominant caste, cisgender South Indian woman raised in North America. At more times than I wish to admit, I have wanted to be white. At others, Chilean, Mexican, or Punjabi. Sometimes, I have even wished to be a man. All of the above desires were driven by a deep sense that I did not belong within my social context. And while I do not think that any of these feelings make me an expert on gender dysphoria, I was forced to give up the fantasy that I could change certain aspects of my identity by performing them differently. No matter how much I straightened my hair, plucked my eyebrows, or perfected my Spanish, I was simply beholden to my biology. Yet here, I believe Lozano would ask me to reframe my terms: I was beholden to my ancestry.
Completely decoupling gender from nature risks overemphasizing its cultural dimensions, thus exaggerating the importance of performativity. In my view, this risks demonizing what we inherit, biologically, naturally, or ancestrally. It also places an unfair and overwhelming responsibility on the individual to “correct” parts of themselves through their performance of gender or, more extremely, through cosmetic and medical interventions. Debates on gender that center questions such as “are trans-(wo)men really (wo)men?” or “should trans-(wo)men participate in (wo)men’s sports?” ironically give into binary thinking, despite the fact that being transgender is about much more than the unrelenting defense of what is male or female about a particular individual. From chicken to egg and back again, the debate remains stuck in a loop, which Lozano calls “cultural relativism,” in which non-conforming people are stuck with the responsibility to critique, distance, and distinguish themselves from normativity through a hyper-vigilant performance of dissidence.
In this back-and-forth, both my students and I may prefer to contribute our energy to defending the rights of gender non-conforming people, rather than the alternative: reverting back to a notion of gender as biological phenomenon, a hallmark of the far-right war against “gender ideology” today. But this is Lozano’s point: if we only think in contemporary dominant terms, we fail to recognize the fact that a consideration of how gender and nature are linked is far from regressive; it is actually central to matriarchal, feminist, and ancestral knowledge systems today. Through an exploration of ancestral, place-based, and insurgent feminism and the work of grassroots coalitions such as Proceso de Comunidades Negras (PCN), Lozano shows how blackness, womanhood, and land are inseparable parts of community identity. Historically, the region’s dense foliage, snaking rivers, and mangroves offered protection to marooned communities escaping from colonization and today, this is the home they must defend from the capitalist proliferation of paramilitary violence, femicide, and agro-business. And black women, the historic leaders of community sustenance and well-being, are the pioneers of this effort.
But how can territory form as equal a part of identity as gender and race? Afro-Colombian poet, Mary Grueso Romero, captures exactly this: how intricately linked gender, race, and territory are for her. I share one stanza of her poem “Negra soy” / “Black I am” below:
Yo soy negra como la noche, | I am black like the night,
como el carbón mineral, | like coal,
como las entrañas de la tierra. | like the entrails of the earth.
y como el oscuro pedernal. | and like the dark flint.
The Spanish word negra already speaks of an identity that is both gendered and racialized, but for Grueso Romero, blackness is much more than the sum of these two terms. It is also associated with organic materials such as “coal” and “flint,” both used to make fire. It is associated with the land and with the body simultaneously, illustrated by the line “the entrails of the earth.” And finally, it is even associated with the night, revealing, once again, the expansiveness of Grueso Romero’s understanding of identity.
Like Lozano, Grueso Romero sees race and gender as connected, which may remind you of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s term “intersectionality.” As an analytic device, “intersectionality” helps us understand why we cannot separate gender and race, just as we must consider other factors that impact our social position, for example, class, age, ability, family, education, and the list continues. However, we remain limited when we only consider as intersectional that which is human or social, since the instances above show how human categories, including race and gender, are mirrored and reflected back by the earth. For Grueso Romero and Lozano, “intersectionality” must be understood in more inclusive terms that permit us to understand how gender is both cultural and natural; both human and non-human; and it is racialized, embodied, earthly, organic, biological, material, and territorial. All at once.
An obligatory caveat must follow: much to our chagrin, there is simply no world beyond the sex binary. As Lozano points out, in the Pacific, knowledge, religion, space, labor, and many other fundamental aspects of daily life are gendered in binary terms. For example, medicine and healing practices are feminized forms of knowledge due to women’s historic leadership in these areas. Conversely, certain geographic spaces are off-limits to women depending on their age or time in the reproductive cycle. Further, the division of labor is also gendered, with men doing the more physically demanding jobs. But Lozano offers the wisdom that the binary becomes problematic when there is “complementarity without fluidity” (533). Thus, there is no perfect escape from the power relations that come with binary categories. However, there are ways in which opposites can work together to complement one another, such that gender can be both human and nonhuman, cultural and natural, and thus, much more than our dominant categories can account for. Regardless of where you are, there is no comfortable escape from the biological or natural reality of sex. We must accept this fact, and once we do, our categories and our practices can strategize to incorporate more expansive notions of identity, experience, and ancestral legacy than we have often imagined.
“Well, that’s Colombia! Not the U.S.! They live near the Pacific Ocean. They have mangroves!” is what many of my students say when faced with this challenging lesson. And so, I must remind them: people who maintain ties to their ancestral communities in North America already know and practice these ideas. More recently, I have found some solid examples. The first is black American feminist poet, lesbian, and mother, Audre Lorde, whose poem “Coal” resonates across geographies and temporalities with Mary Grueso Romero. From the title alone, Lorde evokes a material substance that is known for its deep black color. Coal is mined from the earth’s interior, proving one of the most sought after combustibles. Despite the poem’s evocation of a non-human materiality in the title, the first verse is an unabashed affirmation of subjecthood:
I | Yo
Is the total black, being spoken | Es el negro total, hablado
From the earth’s inside. | Desde el interior de la tierra.
There are many kinds of open. | Hay muchas formas de abierto.
How a diamond comes into a knot of flame | Cómo un diamante deviene el nudo de la llama
How a sound comes into a word, coloured | Cómo un sonido deviene palabra, colorado
By who pays what for speaking. | Por quién paga qué por hablar.
In these verses, Lorde constructs blackness as both material and human, creating a semantic field in which the word itself is associated with coal, both emerging from an unseen interior. It is thus that speech is born, through mining what lies within and passing it through a process of inevitable combustion until it emerges. Lorde ends the poem with another affirmation:
I am black because I come from the earth’s inside | Soy negra porque vengo del interior de la tierra
Take my word for jewel in your open light | Toma mi palabra como joya en tu luz abierta
She continues to associate the word—and therefore, language, speech, and poetry—with the transformative process by which coal, under immense pressure and through the ages, becomes a diamond. This poem reflects Lorde’s powerful and lifelong commitment to poetry as a vital necessity for combatting the fear and silence of a racialized existence. Yet like “Negra soy,” “Coal” also conjures subjecthood as inseparable from matter, and therefore, a form of black identity and ancestry that far exceeds and expands upon what anthropocentric categories can capture.
I have also been pleasantly surprised by contemporary figures who reconfigure normative understandings of gender while standing proudly in the cultural spotlight. Kali Reis, the actress from True Detective’s 4th season, Night Country, who plays the character of detective Evangeline Navarro. Off-screen, Reis is a 37-year-old Rhode Island native and a former professional boxer who frames her identity in extremely generative and expansive ways. An interview with Metro Weekly reads as follows:
Reis is biracial—half Seaconke Wampanoag and half Cape Verdean—and also identifies as Two-Spirit, an umbrella term, popularized in the 90s, to refer to “male, female, and sometimes intersexed individuals who combined activities of both men and women with traits unique to their status as two-spirit people” (IHS.gov). Walking between worlds, black and indigenous, masculine and feminine, negotiating belonging is an unsteady endeavor for Reis, and her comments about not checking the boxes remind me of Gloria Anzaldúa’s affirmation in “La Prieta” (1981) when she says: “Who, me, confused? Ambivalent? Not so. Only your labels split me.” Like Anzaldúa, Reis also experiences a fragmentation of identity labels, especially in relation to her race, but in her Two-Spirit identity, we glimpse a flow of masculine and feminine within. And this is not ambivalence. It’s not that Reis can’t decide. Rather, her ancestral rootedness permits a complementary and fluid relation between binary opposites that produces comfort in her relationships, something everyone deserves.
Another example is Lily Gladstone, one of Reis’s contemporaries known for her appearance in Reservation Dogs, Killers of the Flower Moon, and other exciting films featuring native storytellers. Recently, people mistakenly assumed that Gladstone was also Two-Spirit. She then took to the internet to clarify her use of “she/they” pronouns, and in an interview with People magazine, she explains: “And in most Native languages, most Indigenous languages, Blackfeet included, there are no gendered pronouns. There is no he/she, there’s only they…So in Blackfeet, we don’t have gendered pronouns, but our gender is implied in our name. But even that’s not binary…So, yeah, my pronoun use is partly a way of decolonizing gender for myself”
Gladstone’s use of rolling pronouns showcases both the creativity and political conviction that undergird her gender identity. Unlike Reis, Gladstone is not Two-Spirit, but she utilizes “she/they” pronouns as a form of connection to and reverence for Blackfeet knowledge and naming systems, which signal gender differently. Her gesture shows that we can utilize dominant categories in ways that are informed by community-based systems and practices, modeling more integral forms of being and knowing.
Finally, I offer another example embodied by Micah “Big Wind” Carpenter-Lott, a Northern Arapaho tribal citizen (Hinono’eino), and queer, indigenous organizer, artist, and abolitionist. In a rejection of binary categories, Wind takes they/them pronouns and embraces their Two Spirit identity, stating on Instagram:
Situated in present day Wyoming, Big Wind’s comments show that there is simply no way to separate land, an ancestral legacy, from their gender identity. Big Wind’s two-spirited queerness is fundamentally natural, and again, pronouns enable a form of identity forged between their humanity and the connection to and defense of the natural world.
From Lozano to Big Wind, it is obvious that there is a way forward. These figures show a path beyond the stress, hyper-vigilance, and defensiveness of identitarian performativity, where we are constantly comparing ourselves to what’s “normal.” Boldly, they show us that “the norm” is itself relative, since both historically and today, bodies, livelihoods, and entire communities, here and globally, operate with different sets of assumptions about identity. Herein lies the opportunity and the challenge. It’s not only about noticing the things normative knowledge systems consider separate—nature and culture, sex and gender, man and woman—and learn to think about them differently without falling into 1) hyper-defensive progressive woke-ism, on the one hand, or 2) conservative biological determinism, on the other. Beyond this already formidable task, we must also learn, practice, fail, and then practice more how to be differently, that is, how to think, feel, and act differently. And we must do so within a world where separation and alienation seem inevitable and the pressures to perform and conform are pervasive. For me, my students, and anyone who has drunk the Kool-Aid within elite academic institutions in the Global North, Lozano’s gift will come at a cost to our fantasies of freedom and control, which have sold us the notion that we can and should manipulate our bodies and our surroundings to our liking.
Anyone who walks between worlds will know that being illegible to others comes with a feeling of in-betweenness, non-belonging, and a fragmentation that can feel unbearable. However, I hope that the examples I have offered above reflect that we can learn how to love the unreadable parts of ourselves, accept the unchangeable or fixed aspects of who we are, revalorize them… someway, somehow. This process differs from person to person and requires deep, persistent introspection. And it asks us to not only think but also find ways to be creative and curious about how we imagine gender beyond the tired clichés and circular conversations filled with defensiveness and reactivity. How might we walk between worlds, seeking fluid complementarity and rejecting rampant fragmentation of the distinct, yet very real parts of ourselves? From where I sit, it seems the path forward lies in:
learning about the distinct aspects of self; learning how and when they work in fluid complementarity; noticing when they do not, and doing all of this without passing judgment;
active place-making; witnessing how and where life is created and re-created; acknowledging how our own identities and lives are reflected in and shaped by these processes;
practicing memory by imagining ancestry in expansive ways; rewriting our histories to foreground survival and embody resistance to profit and greed driven capitalism; and
embracing the ancestral and alternative knowledge systems around us to learn without judgment or prejudice; recognizing that when our categories feel insufficient and out of sync with our lived realities, it is because they are.
Both on individual and collective levels, these fundamental changes in how we live in the world could help us to achieve an unshakeable sense of authenticity and belonging we have all been seeking. However, first, we must be willing to think, feel, and dream beyond the failed promise of individual freedom and prosperity to which some of us so desperately cling.
Bibliography
Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New York: Routledge, 1993.
———. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Routledge, 1999.
Cusicanqui, Silvia Rivera. “Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa: A Reflection on the Practices and Discourses of Decolonization.” South Atlantic Quarterly 111, no. 1 (January 1, 2012): 95–109.
Grueso Romero, Mary. Cuando los ancestros llaman: poesía afrocolombiana. Primera edición. Popayán, Colombia: Editorial Universidad del Cauca, 2015.
López, Quispe. “At These Powwows, Two-Spirit People Are Always Revered.” Them, November 21, 2022.
Lozano, Betty Ruth. “Feminismo Negro–Afrocolombiano: Ancestral, Insurgente y Cimarrón. Un Feminismo En-Lugar,” Intersticios de la política y la cultura, 5, no. 9 (2016): 23–48.
Suggested citation: Ramanathan, Sowmya. 2024. “Nature with Culture: Learning from Afro Colombian Feminists to Imagine Gender Beyond the Human.” AGITATE Now! https://agitatejournal.org/nature-with-culture-learning-from-afro-colombian-feminists-to-imagine-gender-beyond-the-human/Notes
| ↑1 | Peter Wade, “Introduction: The Colombian Pacific in Perspective”, 2008. |
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