“Then I want to take up the practice [of world-traveling] as a horizontal practice of resistance to two related injunctions: the injunction for the oppressed to have our gazes fixed on the oppressor and** the concomitant injunction not to look to and connect with each other in resistance to those injunctions through traveling to each other’s ‘worlds’ of sense**.”

—Maria Lugones, "Playfulness, “World”-Traveling, and Loving Perception," my emphasis.

During one of my earliest visits to Portland, I stayed with my friend T., whose childhood home was on the outskirts of the city. On this occasion, I discovered that if you wanted to travel from our location to anywhere other than downtown, you had to first journey into the heart of the city and then transfer to another train to head back out. This public transit pattern prioritizes centralized routes, ones that support our having to go to work in the center of the city, but ignores the community-sustaining connections between adjacent communities. If I recall, we ended up riding bikes to where we were going, and that was faster and more fun, even in the rain.

Take another example, a similar structure: In the early 20th century, the United States played a decisive role in the separation of Panama from Colombia to ensure control over the construction of the Panama Canal. The U.S. supported Panamanian independence, effectively sidelining any direct negotiations between Panama and Colombia, and ensuring that any resolution served American interests. This is an example of how U.S. influence often dictates regional interactions, leaving neighboring countries with limited sovereignty over their bilateral relations. One of the levers of US American dominance of its Central and South American neighbors is control over relations between one nation and another. In this case, the U.S. is the centralized power through which all relations are run.

These analogies, one spatial and the other psycho-political, illustrate how I think about the relationships between women. We may be right next to each other on the map, ideologically or geographically, and still have difficulty reaching each other. We may just have to get on half working bikes, in the rain, to be able to visit each other in our worlds. In the meantime, in central hubs downtown, or in online valleys where we have buried our existence, we may not even show up as our selves, and this makes it difficult for us to form authentic connections. There are worlds in which we are not intelligible as ourselves, or in which it would be even dangerous to be authentically ourselves, or in which we are overdetermined as something we are not. The way we are “drawn” makes it harder for us to see each other, and we may even get confused and begin to identify with our assigned at birth roles.

Conventionally, our relationships are mediated by men and their needs, in worlds where women's connections are relegated to secondary importance. Whenever a woman friend gets “with-man”, it can feel like a loss unless the woman is intentional in centering the women in her life. And we are often expected to give up our youthful girlfriends and best friends as we take on adult pursuits. It can be hard to make women-friends later in life, we are divided in so many ways.1 As Simone de Beauvoir noted, forming a political "we" among women is fraught with difficulty because we are spread out across all of society.

In "Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception," Maria Lugones gives us a strategy for moving towards what she calls a pluralistic feminism, “a feminism that affirms the plurality in each of us, and among us, as richness and as central to feminist ontology and epistemology.” In this piece, I offer a quick synopsis of Lugones’ essay, and then I want to focus on what she says about identification and her implicit critique of independence/individualism. But this essay touches on so many interesting and relatable issues that I hope we can develop a conversation about it in the context of Philosophy Publics mini-seminars - look out for that in the new year.

Like many who are outsiders to mainstream culture, women of color have had to travel between worlds by necessity, as a matter of survival. We often think of having to travel to hostile worlds in negative terms, but as Lugones’ points out, world-traveling is a skill that can be deployed to good use. Building deep coalitions in the revised sense that Lugones imagines in this essay means purposefully traveling to each others worlds as a way to build up identification across differences, and ultimately as a practice of learning to love other women and to center women in our lives. By traveling to each others’ worlds, she tells us, we are able to see how the other woman sees herself, but also you are able to see yourself through her eyes. The other woman’s being able to see that you see how she sees you is a necessary movement in the emergence of self-consciousness. This intersubjective reflexivity is (at least one of the things) we are often missing, a failure of identification, and of love.

There is a good discussion of what counts as a world, and how we are constituted in different worlds, in Lugones’ essay as well as in other feminists texts about this essay. I will leave others to explore the richness of that account. For now, I want to focus on two types of perception. Lugones anchors her thinking in Marilyn Fry’s ideas of “arrogant perception” and its opposite “loving perception” in "In and Out of Harm’s Way: Arrogance and Love."2 Frye is most interested in how women are subject to arrogant perception from others, but Lugones wants to expand on Fry’s idea to explore how women can also be the perpetrators of arrogant perception. Lugones draws a significant distinction between two types of arrogant perception: one without identification and one with identification.

As an example of arrogant perception without identification, Lugones points to the way a wealthy family may exploit their servants’ labor without bothering to identify with them or their experiences. On the other hand, arrogant perception with identification is characterized by the act of arrogating the substance of another person onto oneself while still maintaining a sense of identification with that person. To illustrate this concept, Lugones uses her relationship with her mother, in which she was taught to see her mother as a subservient person who was there to fulfill the needs of the family. This created a situation where she was expected to love her mother while simultaneously perceiving her through this lens of arrogant perception. Lugones connects this arrogant perception to a failure to love, arguing that it prevents women from fully recognizing others as subjects with their own unique experiences and perspectives.

“There is something obviously wrong with the love that I was taught and something right with my failure to love my mother in this way. But I do not think that what is wrong is my profound desire to identify with her, to see myself in her; what is wrong is that I was taught to identify with a victim of servitude. What is wrong is that I was taught to practice servitude of my mother and to learn to become a servant through this practice. There is something obviously wrong with my having been taught that love is consistent with abuse, consistent with arrogant perception.”

In a loving way and without an interest in assigning fault, Lugones draws a parallel between the failure of love between herself and her mother, and the failure of love between white/Anglo women and women of color. It is a failure of identification across racialized (and often class) differences, rather than parasitism, that she further describes in terms of independence and indifference:

“I am not particularly interested here in cases of white women’s parasitism onto women of color but more pointedly in cases where the relation is characterized by failure of identification. I am interested here in those many cases in which white/Angla women do one or more of the following to women of color: they ignore us, ostracize us, render us invisible, stereotype us, leave us completely alone, interpret us as crazy. All of this while we are in their midst. The more independent I am, the more independent I am left to be. Their “world” and their integrity do not require me at all. There is no sense of self-loss in them for my own lack of solidity. But they rob me of my solidity through indifference, an indifference they can afford and that seems sometimes studied.”

This paragraph has always been the most striking for me, personally. Anyone that has been on the receiving end of that indifference knows that it is studied, a studied lack of recognition. Imagine walking into a room where no one meets your eyes and studiously does not see you, maybe turns their back as you approach. Is this not how Anglo culture is taught to deal with difference and social tension - not acknowledging it and carrying on as if nothing was awry. There is a whole protocol of politeness — I call it the patina of politeness — and a being-fake-nice that supports this attitude, as well as a pretension to fragility.3

What strikes me even more now, though, is what she says about how the effect of this is a lack of completeness on her side. The reason why women need each other is not primarily because we need to form a political “we” or even a deeper sense of coalition between women across differences. It is actually because we are ourselves not complete, not able to become authentically ourselves without the acknowledgement and mirror of women who are Other to us. The depth of our characters, and of our interactions, depends on this primordial seeing and being seen.

Through the lens of "world-traveling" and loving perception, we might challenge the arrogant perception that hinders genuine, deep connections and underscores the need for playful interactions to dismantle oppressive structures. By inviting us to travel to each other's "worlds," it pushes us toward a coalition of understanding that transcends racial, cultural, and systemic boundaries. The narrative emphasizes the importance of identifying with one another through shared experiences and resistant socialities, to combat fragmentation and forge deeper connections. Independence is a trap, much like the radical individualism sold primarily to young men, that incites us to care less about the basic human reality of interdependence. The refusal of recognition is the significant failure of love here:

“Their lack of concern is a harmful failure of love that leaves me independent from them in a way similar to the way in which, once I ceased to be my mother’s parasite, she became, though not independent from all others, certainly independent from me. But, of course, because my mother and I wanted to love each other well, we were not whole in this independence. White/Angla women are independent from me, I am independent from them; I am independent from my mother, she is independent from me; and none of us loves each other in this independence. I am incomplete and unreal without other women. I am profoundly dependent on others without having to be their subordinate, their slave, their servant.”

If we want to love each other, and we should since loving ourselves depends on this, then we must risk traveling to each others worlds. Perhaps if white/Anglo women can see their studied indifference through the eyes of (here) Lugones, they will recognize it as the failure, and trap, that it is. Whatever answers we can give to the ontological and epistemological questions of what it means to be a woman is always going to be preliminary, and it depends on the concrete forms that love might take, and the paths we are able to open up by traveling between our worlds of concern.

I like that the mode of travel is further described as playful, and contrasted with the agonistic forms of play that are theorized and practiced conventionally, by colonizers. There is a lot more that could be said about this. But to wrap things up for now, I think what this means is, first of all, being openly curious about the different ways we are constituted differently in different worlds we inhabit, and how we might develop rugged forms of resistance that can withstand the forces constantly at work to render us apart. We need to see each other, across space and time, that we may learn to better see ourselves and our current realities.

When we center women in our lives, we prioritize the work of friendship and of building up the capacity to see the Other in her world, where she is at home, and to share in her concerns there. It is to defy convention and do what sometimes feels risky or dangerous, to go adventure in a new part of town, and discover all the ways in which who we are depends on who we are with.