The servants

“Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception” famously develops around “two failures of love:” (i) Lugones’ failure to love her mother and (ii) white/Anglo women's failure to love women of color in the US (Reference Lugones1987, 5). These two failures, emerging from two unique experiences, shape Lugones’ understanding of perception, identification, and world-traveling. However, in the background lurks a third bond: Lugones’ relationship with her servants whom she did not love. Her essay thus contains not two but three failures of love: Lugones’ failure to love her mother, white/Anglo women's failure to love women of color, and Lugones’ failure to love her servants. Yet Lugones develops her essay with attention to only the first two failures. She never treats the servants with the same seriousness she affords herself, her mother, and women of color. Except for four passing remarks, Lugones passes over her failure to love servants in silence.

Unseen and unheard, Lugones’ servants haunt the entire essay. Though they fail to ascend to the status of a “third failure of love,” the servants are indispensable to Lugones’ arguments. Her relationship to her servants serves as an intermediary experience allowing her to smoothly transition from her failure to love her mother to the failure of white/Anglo women to love women of color. Thus, what at first glance appears like a seamless weaving of theory and experience, upon closer examination, is in fact held together by servants. Lugones builds her theory on the backs of her servants, using their services without acknowledging them. As this section shows, Lugones’ servants—in real life and in her essay—are marginalized and instrumentalized.

Lugones begins her essay by telling us that, as a child, she was taught to perceive arrogantly and was the object of arrogant perception. Following Marilyn Frye (Reference Frye1983), she understands arrogant perception as “grafting the substance of another to oneself” (66). Growing up in Argentina, she “watch[ed] men and women of moderate and considerable means graft the substance of their servants to themselves” (Reference Lugones1987, 4). Condemning the ethos of arrogant perception that characterized her childhood, she maintains that in such an environment she likewise learned to “graft” her mother's substance to her own (4).

At this point, we only know that those around Lugones had servants but nothing else is said about them. Rather, Lugones proceeds with her childhood story which culminates in an account of her failure to love her mother, an experience on which the development of her essay hinges. This failure, for her, is a constellation of abuse, identification, and desire for non-identification. As a child, Lugones writes, her love for her mother was imperfect because Lugones was “unwilling to become” like her (5). She was “taught to practice [the] enslavement of [her] mother and to learn to become a slave through this experience” (6). To love her mother, Lugones maintains, implied abuse: “using, taking for granted, and demanding her services” (5). But, simultaneously, loving her mother meant identifying with her. Thus, Lugones writes that to love her mother was at once to abuse her and to be open “to being abused” (5).

Importantly, having recounted, though not yet fully analyzed her first failure of love, Lugones does not immediately turn to the second failure of love. The road to the second failure is a rather bumpy one: the memory of her servants is triggered.Footnote ⁷

Before turning to the second failure, Lugones contrasts her relationship to her servants with her relationship to her mother, with whom she believed she was supposed to identify as a part of loving her. Immediately following the claim that her maternal relation merged love and abuse, Lugones writes: “I was not supposed to love servants: I could abuse them without identifying with them, without seeing myself in them” (5). This statement establishes the difference between a relationship that merges love and abuse (her relationship with her mother) and one founded exclusively on abuse (her relationship with her servants). Thus, Lugones juxtaposes the identification with the “enslavement” that occurs through her love for her mother to the lack of identification and love for her servants (6). However, Lugones elides that it is not merely her lack of identification with servants that causes her inability to love them. For had she identified with her servants she would have identified with servitude, thus still inhibiting love. With or without identification, it seems, loving the servants proves impossible. In fact, and perhaps ironically, it is precisely because Lugones does not identify with servants that she escapes identification with servitude.

Though Lugones complicates the relationship between identification and abuse through the servants, she does not engage with them further.Footnote ⁸ Rather, she returns to her mother because her experience of not feeling whole due to a lack of identification is exclusive to her maternal bond. Her inability to “welcome” her mother's “world,” she tells us, left her feeling incomplete, lacking “love” and a sense of “self” (6). Lugones’ inability to identify with the servants, by contrast, does not leave her lacking. The precise opposite is the case: her sense of self required indifference to the servants; the I am not crucial to the I am.

Lugones’ claim that she neither could nor was supposed to love servants is the final sentence her essay issues on the matter. This indifference is representative of Lugones’ treatment of servants throughout her essay. The comparison between her relationship to her mother and to the servants occurs in a passing sentence. Lugones’ affiliation with her servants is never treated exclusively but always relative to one of the other two failures of love; after all, it is no secret that her essay hinges only on two failures. Lugones’ relationship with her servants is best understood as an intermediary experience that lubricates her passage from one failure of love to another, a transitional relation without which the parallel between her failure to love her mother and the failure of white/Anglo women to love women of color would not function.

The passing mention of servants allows Lugones to equalize two discrete relationships, a movement on which her arguments hang. Upon arriving in the US, Lugones proceeds to tells us, she learns that “abuse without identification” is “part of racism” (5). She realizes that “she could be seen as a being to be used by White/Anglo men and women without the possibility of identification, i.e., without their act of attempting to graft [her] substance onto theirs, rubbing off on them at all. They could remain untouched, without any sense of loss” (5). This leads Lugones to conclude that the failure of women to love other women stems from a lack of identification: a failure to see oneself in others. Such arrogant perception, for Lugones, inhibits traveling to other worlds, that is, “world-traveling.”

It is striking how traces of Lugones’ relationship with servants haunt her description of the second failure of love. The relationship of white/Anglo women to women of color is not analogous to Lugones’ relationship to her mother. Rather, the analogy is to Lugones’ relationship to her servants. By Lugones’ own account, her relationship with her mother is one of abuse, love, identification, and lack of identification, while her relationship to servants is characterized by abuse without identification or love. The latter relationship contains the features Lugones attributes to the treatment of women of color by white/Anglo women. That is, Lugones’ attitude toward her servants perfectly grasps her experience in the US, as a woman of color who was abused without identification. As she used and abused her servants without identification, and without a sense of loss or love, women of color, on her own account, are “used by White/Anglo men and women without the possibility of identification” without “rubbing off on them” and “without any sense of loss” (5).

It is troubling, thus, that Lugones equates her failure to love—not her servants but—her mother with white/Anglo women's failure to love women of color (7). For Lugones, white/Anglo women's failure to see themselves in women who are “quite different” from them and, thus, to love them, is “directly abusive” (7).Footnote ⁹ She argues that they ignore, leave alone, ostracize, render invisible, and interpret women of color as crazy while they are “in their midst” (7). This suggests, she continues, that the more independent the woman of color is, the more independent she is left to be. The “world” and “integrity” of white women do not require women of color “at all” (7). White/Anglo women do not experience a “sense of self-loss” when robbing women of color of their “solidity … through an indifference they can afford” (7). White/Anglo women's desire to exclude women of color from their worlds and have them “out of their field of vision,” Lugones maintains, exposes the ills of independence (7). Their lack of concern, she writes, is “a harmful failure to love” that leaves women of color “independent from them” (8). Ultimately, for Lugones, such independence makes love impossible (8). This, she maintains, is a more “complex” failure of love because, unlike her failure to love her mother, it occurs not through grafting but independence (7).Footnote ¹⁰

A close reading of Lugones’ argument reveals that her treatment of servants figures as the archetype for her understanding of abusive relationships. Notice how Lugones’ description of white/Anglo women's treatment of women of color is identical to her treatment of servants: ignoring them, building a sense of self despite them—if not unconsciously through them—not experiencing self-loss due to independence, and, most importantly, assuming their non-existence by not identifying with them while they are in her midst. What applies to women of color, applies to Lugones in a much higher degree: the master ignoring the servants while they are in her midst, serving them.

Furthermore, when describing the above treatment, Lugones curiously states that she is not speaking of all the ways in which white/Anglo women are parasitic upon women of color. She similarly does not mention her parasitic relationship to her servants, remaining silent about her dependency on them. And yet because, upon arriving in the US, she is treated in the same way she treated her servants, outrage erupts, pushing Lugones to rethink her relationship with her mother, which is, even if unconsciously, infiltrated by her servants.

The archetype is concealed by Lugones’ attempts to parallel her relationship with her mother to white/Anglo women's relationship to women of color. Throughout the essay, she repeatedly runs to her mother, a defense mechanism in pursuit of maternal protection. While servants work behind the scenes, Lugones’ mother guards her from theoretical problems and protects her from her past and present.Footnote ¹¹ This reveals that world-traveling does not simply denote openness—the possibility for identification and love—but also exclusion.Footnote ¹² It is the immersion into a singular world that forecloses other worlds to the traveler. That is, it is by traveling to her mother's world that Lugones remains oblivious to the servants’ worlds.

Masters and servants

Lugones’ disregard for servants is evident in her omission of the racialized and gendered history of domestic servitude in Argentina.Footnote ¹³ The efforts to build a European, white Argentine nation, exemplified in depictions of the inferiority of indigenous and mixed-race women servants, are conspicuously absent from her essay.Footnote ¹⁴ Not a word is uttered about the establishment of the “gaucho” as a national symbol opposed to the image of the immigrant.Footnote ¹⁵ Instead, embodying this masculine, nationalistic image—the bourgeois attitude of pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps—Lugones emphasizes her defiance of arrogant perceptions through the inspiration and strength she gathered from her “‘gaucho’ ancestry” (Reference Lugones1987, 4).Footnote ¹⁶

Why does Lugones overlook domestic servants despite their presence in her own household? Why does she not journey to her servants’ worlds? For Thorstein Veblen, masters want servants out of their field of vision, in their separate quarters, getting the job done unseen.Footnote ¹⁷ Bourgeois education, he shows, teaches that personal contact with servants is “distasteful,” although their presence is “endured and paid for” (Reference Veblen[1899] 1994, 30). “The presence of domestic servants,” he adds, “is a concession of physical comfort to the moral need of pecuniary decency” (30). The servants’ labor is required but detested.

This is not an exaggeration; identification and independence are intimately related to class and labor. Thus, Veblen stresses, labor signifies different things to a master than to a servant. Though neither wish to serve, only the master cannot stand the sight of service. Despite the valorization of labor today and the cult of the hardworking billionaire, there is a shared hatred for certain forms of labor. This “[r]epugnance for vulgar forms of labor,” Veblen writes, is present in “all persons of refined taste” who feel “that a spiritual contamination is inseparable from certain offices that are conventionally required of servants” (Reference Veblen[1899] 1994, 21). “The archaic theoretical distinction between the base and the honourable in the manner of a man's life retains very much of its ancient force even today” (19). By contrast, slaves’, workers’, and servants’ dependence on work cannot afford such repugnancy. In fact, the person for whom labor is their life may even take pride in it.

In the bourgeois view, servitude is in itself disreputable, and yet its acquisition showcases nobility. All persons of “considerable means,” to use Lugones’ expression, find the sight of domestic service and menial labor vulgar and to be avoided (Reference Lugones1987, 4). Labor marks “poverty and subjection” and is thus “inconsistent with a reputable standing” (Veblen Reference Veblen[1899] 1994, 19). By contrast, abstention from labor, or certain forms of labor, marks “superior pecuniary achievement and the conventional index of reputability” (19). Such abstention, demonstrating wealth and status, is evidenced by the presence of servants. In Argentina too, the maid, considered inherently different from the master, contributed to the construction of the wealthy, white Argentinian (Dunstan and Pite Reference Dunstan and Pite2018).

We can see the bourgeois abhorrence to servitude exemplified in Lugones’ affirmation of dependence against an independence that precludes love. She claims that she is utterly dependent upon—“incomplete and unreal” without—other women (Reference Lugones1987, 8). For her, however, this dependence is mutually exclusive with subordination. She is dependent on others without being “their subordinate, their slave, their servant” (8). This aversion to servitude shows that Lugones inhabits the bourgeois belief that, in Veblen's words, “a spiritual contamination” inevitably accompanies tasks typically designated for servants (Reference Veblen[1899] 1994, 21). The noble and the free are not fit for servitude.

This relation of dependence is one found historically in classes that own the means of production, such as slave holders, landed aristocracies, and, in Lugones’ case, the bourgeoisie. Lugones was indeed dependent on other women without serving them. She was dependent not only on her mother, but also on her servants, who were most likely women of color. Lugones’ relationship to servants is precisely the one-sided dependency she admires because having servants is conditioned on not serving. Indeed, Lugones’ servants themselves showcase that she was neither “subordinate” nor anyone's “slave” or “servant” (Reference Lugones1987, 8).

That dependency sans servitude is exclusive to a class is old news; since, at least, Wollstonecraft, Beauvoir à la Hegel, and Wittig, this relationship has been central to feminist critique.Footnote ¹⁸ Servants, including Lugones’, were dependent on others by way of being “subordinate” (8). Perhaps it is Lugones’ awareness of this fact that motivates her to attempt to cultivate an alternative, loving dependence incompatible with subordination. But this aim comes to an immediate impasse because she does not seriously consider the literal servitude of those dependent on subordination for survival.Footnote ¹⁹ If Lugones’ mother is enslaved, what are her servants?

Class(ed) perceptions

Underpinning Lugones’ marginalization and instrumentalization of her servants is a more general tendency to elide class analysis. Lugones’ essay mentions class once, pointing out that upper-class women are taught to perceive arrogantly (5). Elsewhere, Lugones registers awareness that class is important for decolonial feminist critiques of capitalism and mentions the need to extend loving perception to lower-class women.Footnote ²⁰ However, these instances do not amount to an analysis of class. Generally speaking, Lugones is silent on questions of class. In what follows, I explore this elision as a feature of her own classed perception.

In “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception,” Lugones is concerned with altering ways of seeing, perspectives, perceptions, and attitudes, but not real social conditions. This is evident from the outset. Consider that her reflections are not sparked by racial relations or conditions of servants in Argentina but by her experience of being ignored by white/Anglo women in the US. Lugones was invisible to them, and they were indifferent to her.

What was it in Lugones and in her world that white/Anglo women overlooked? Her race and gender were certainly perceived because, as Lugones recounts, they were used against her (5, 10). Rather, what seems to have been imperceptible to white/Anglo women was Lugones’ class. Perhaps it is not an exaggeration to claim that Lugones experienced herself as having been misclassed. Was she outraged by white/Anglo women's audacity to treat her as a commoner? This would explain her response, which echoes aristocratic distance and pride. How dare you? Don't you know who I am? If you only traveled to my world, you would see. Ostensibly, even in this moment, Lugones’ servants work for her, their subordination fueling her sense of indignation. Her servants, though physically left behind, are psychically present, solidifying her mastery and symbolizing all that she wishes not to be.

The disparity between her servants’ experiences and her own experience in the US reeks of class difference. And it is precisely class distinction that she forcefully and unwillingly experiences upon arriving in the US. Lugones’ membership within a class that has servants in Argentina did not grant her privileged treatment in the US. Precisely the opposite: she was treated as a servant—white/Anglo women neither identified nor loved her but merely considered her as a body to abuse with indifference.

Feeling unseen and unheard, Lugones develops world-traveling as a loving perception that invites people to travel to the worlds of those with whom they do not identify. While loving perception may alter attitudes it neither affects class relations nor changes the fact that some people are forced to sacrifice their lives for the leisure of others. Indeed, it does not even purport to address social conditions. As failures of love result from a lack of identification, for Lugones, the loving eye is the solution because it can consult more than the self, travel to the other's world, see with the other's eyes. Indeed, by refusing to perceive arrogantly, Lugones traveled to her mother's world, saw with her eyes, perceived their relation in this world, and witnessed, there, her mother's own sense of self. Only then did she cease to “ignore” her mother and come to identify with her (8). Love, Lugones concludes, entails an identification that world-traveling makes possible because it changes one's attitudes and perceptions.

This is crucial because, for Lugones, we are dependent on others for “the possibility of being understood” (8). Note that she is concerned with being understood without having to change one's class or social position. Thus, she wonders how she can be intelligible to others without surrendering herself and her position; how she can achieve dependence without servitude (8). At stake, then, is a form of loving dependence and identification that precludes the servants.

Not preoccupied with emancipation from literal servitude, Lugones provides a theory that articulates a dependence that escapes the risk of sinking down to the lower classes. She accomplishes this by assuring that her analysis never steps foot in the servants’ quarters but swims at the level of abstractions: understanding, perception, intelligibility, and attitudes. Given the attention Lugones devotes to situating her narrative within her raced and gendered positionality, it is striking that she never mentions her class. Nonetheless, her theory is not devoid of class, but directly expresses her class position. After all, it is not generated from the position of the servants—who know well that understanding and loving perceptions will neither feed nor free them—but from her position as master. Lugones presents a theory that seeks to change perceptions while leaving the conditions of servitude unaltered. While it allows for those in power to keep their seats, it slightly adjusts them for comfort: they are no brute masters but loving ones.

Fundamentally, then, Lugones’ theory of world-traveling is an ideology of bourgeois class defense. Her occlusion of class analysis springs from a desire to preserve her class position. A close examination of her essay reveals that she develops world-traveling as protection against the risk of descending to a lower class upon her arrival to the US. Notice how this development occurs. Lugones purports to understand women of color based on the indignities that reminded her of her race in the US. Not treated with the dignity afforded to people of her stature, she experiences being raced as a demotion from whiteness. Outraged that others did not care who and what she is, nor bothered to travel to her world to discover what was not immediately visible—that her race obscures the truth that she is a wealthy master from Argentina—she proposes an ethical-feminist stance that is not a judgmental but loving, encouraging world-traveling and understanding; an invitation she herself never takes up by refusing to step foot in the servants’ quarters.

Lugones is not willing to travel just anywhere—and especially not to worlds that would confront her with class. Her unwillingness to travel to her servants’ worlds implies, on her account, that she is not interested in understanding them. It also indicates—like her flight into her mother's protection—a defense mechanism. The class anxiety of someone who grew up around servants—a guilt coupled with fear of becoming or being treated like them—explains why Lugones can only provide the master's perspective. Therefore, though she maintains that it is crucial for her to understand “what it is to be” the other and “to be ourselves in their eyes,” she does not care to see herself reflected in the servants’ eyes (18).

Master–servant relations—as class relations—invite class analysis; but not for bourgeois thinkers. In Lugones’ case, her class position inhibits the analysis of class. She does not acknowledge her class because it would be distasteful to do so. It is offensive to the bourgeois ear to dirty conversations about love and identification with profane talk of money. The same iron curtain of class that physically and psychologically distances her from her servants ideologically separates her reflections about abuse and identity from class concerns.

The class distinctions that distance Lugones from her servants everywhere infiltrate her thinking. Her omission of class is exacerbated by her reliance on personal anecdotes, which reveal too much about her and nothing about the socioeconomic world that many women of color, her servants included, inhabit. Or rather, Lugones inaccurately depicts the world of women of color as one of women with servants because she universalizes her own experience as that of “women of color.” She can do this only by omitting class. The fact that she identifies as a woman of color only in the US reveals that she still sees herself as an Argentinian who has servants.

In sum, Lugones’ experience of being misclassed due to racist perceptions in the US triggers her sympathy for her servants; but that is all. She does not analyze the class character of her relationship to her servants as their master nor grasp their real conditions and class position. Her analysis remains, from beginning to end, concerned with mere perceptions and selfish wounds.

Just as gazing into Medusa's eyes risks turning one into stone, traveling into the servants’ worlds risks hardening Lugones to the reality of her mastery. Always shifting her focus elsewhere—at times to her mother, at others to women of color—she concludes that “women who are perceived arrogantly can perceive other women arrogantly in their turn” (5). This statement perfectly captures the class character of Lugones’ theory. Not the servants but her experiences form the locus of her reflections on arrogant perception and are mobilized to make the almost banal claim that the abused become abusers. If arrogant perception leads to failures of identification, and thus of love, Lugones seems to suggest that domination and abuse are caused by the wrong form of perception; and, concomitantly, that the correct form of identification remedies abuse.

Lugones’ idealist theory gives ways of seeing, and not social relations, causal agency. She does not treat perception as resulting from relations of domination (like, say, master and servant) but as causing them. Therefore, to domination and abuse Lugones provides the naïve solution of identification, said to make love possible and abuse impossible.Footnote ²¹ She fails, however, to examine the class character of identification itself. Consider that a basic component of bourgeois etiquette is that one ignores the servant. As Lugones herself recognizes, it is a feature of bourgeois identity, and middle- and upper-class education, not to identify with servants (5).Footnote ²² By stark contrast, the poor are educated to identify with and to emulate the upper classes. That is, it is ignoble for both the servant and the master to identify with the servant; but the same cannot be said about identification with the master.

The ambiguity of identification in Lugones’ essay—she never defines it—can also be traced to her lack of class analysis. Decolonial feminism, however, requires a critical engagement with identification and even an interrogation of Lugones’ own identification. This means not collapsing identification with self-identification. Just as we would not take a bourgeois individual's resistance to the label “bourgeois” to mean that they truly do not belong to the bourgeois class, Lugones’ class position and social role are not reducible to her self-identification. That Lugones does not present herself as classed—but merely sexed, gendered, and raced—should not prevent us from recognizing her class. Neither should it inhibit us from analyzing the class perspective her analysis unwillingly presents and, thus, the very class character of her theory.

We do not have to dig deep to discern Lugones’ class belonging. In the presence of her servants, Lugones is a master. In the presence of women in Argentina and the US, Lugones belongs to the upper class. This is true whether or not she was pleased by the fact that her household had servants; whether she was satisfied with the privileges her position afforded her or came to resent them; whether or not she identified with a master or a member of the upper class or fought her entire life to dismantle them; whether or not she identified with lazy aristocrats or self-made gauchos. That Lugones does not acknowledge her class position does not mean that she transcends it. Her theory of world-traveling is a bourgeois defense of her class.

Traveling to the servants’ quarters

What would have happened had Lugones traveled to her servants’ quarters? Her theory of world-traveling would crumble upon entry. The realities of servants’ worlds would reveal the classed character of perception and traveling that her bourgeois perspective conceals. Consequently, it would make apparent that class cannot be seamlessly integrated into her theory, for world-traveling is constructed upon its exclusion.Footnote ²³

Having analyzed the class character of world-traveling through Lugones’ role as a master, this section examines it from the servants’ position. This requires analyzing servants not as Lugones’ pseudo-concrete “servants” but as a socio-historical category that grasps, rather than conceals, the concrete: the social role and class of servants in capitalist society.Footnote ²⁴

In investigating the world of servants, I am not purporting to embody the servants’ position or to speak on their behalf.Footnote ²⁵ We cannot transcend our class positions and truly understand the experience of the servants. In fact, a key limitation of world-traveling is that it presumes that we can take the standpoint of others and promotes a politics terminating in sympathy. Expanding world-traveling to encompass differently classed people reifies class distinctions while affirming the agency of the bourgeoisie to sample experiences at will. By contrast, I am suggesting that we engage in analyses that begin with the concrete reality of servants as a class in capitalist society. Put otherwise, I am not critiquing Lugones for not seeing as a servant, but for not seeing the servants.

Pseudo-concreteness

Failing to acknowledge her own class position as well as servants as a class, Lugones knows only “servants.” Having turned our gaze to the servants, we can now see that she does not treat servants in any concrete sense; rather, her theory is pseudo-concrete. Pseudo-concreteness captures the failed attempt to grasp the concrete against the abstract that culminates in new abstractions. It results from the hasty repudiation of the abstract for the concrete. It denotes, in Theodore Adorno's (Reference Adorno[1966] 2007) words, “[t]he obsession with the concept of the concrete” bound up “with the incapacity to achieve it in thought” such that “[t]he conjuring word replaced the thing” (75). Lugones’ claim to capture the concrete is just that, a mere claim; pseudo-concreteness is concreteness in name only. Though her project attempts to grasp concreteness, it is unable to do so because the realities of the capitalist world, class, and servitude escape her. Pseudo-concreteness thus captures Lugones’ class ideology, the remnants of bourgeois thought in her theory, and her mystifying language that obscures present conditions of domination.

Servants in Lugones’ essay appear as “servants” in general. She fails to grasp even the most rudimentary fact about servants: that servitude is a class category. There is no analysis of her servants as gendered, raced, sexed, classed, within a particular household, time, and place, or with a history and name. Erasing their individuality, class, social position, and role in her life and in her theory, and reducing them to servants as such, Lugones renders them pseudo-concrete: an abstract group conjured as a memory—“servants.”

Similarly, she presents white/Anglo women and women of color as anonymous, homogeneous groups against and through which her own experience is highlighted. Here, she exclusively considers gender and race, two axioms she withholds from her commentary on servants. Without class, citizenship, ethnicity, or history, white/Anglo women are reduced to a monolith. In all actuality, I do not know what “white woman” signals to an Argentinian woman who grew up around servants. Likewise, Lugones treats women of color in the US interchangeably, discussing neither their class nor any concrete features of their identity and experience beyond race, which is reduced to a phenotypical attribute: color.

Lugones singles out characteristics, such as race and gender, to assemble women into groups—for example, “women of color in the US.” Thus, she groups herself in the category of “women of color in the US” by virtue of “race” and “gender,” though race here plays the predominant role. Lugones, moreover, abstracts concreteness by erasing differences within groups (Terrefe Reference Terrefe2020).Footnote ³⁰ For example, “women of color” appear undifferentiated, as unclassed bodies with shared experiences. Similarly, “Argentinian women” equally groups mothers, servants, children of servants, children who grew up with servants, and heads of households with servants, mirroring the identity politics criticized by Kimberlé Crenshaw for erasing differences within groups (Reference Crenshaw1991).Footnote ³¹ This erasure of differences within groups also renders differences among groups irrelevant. For example, Lugones identifies with “women of color in the US” because race and gender are the group's exclusive particularities. Though she is indeed racialized in the US, Lugones, an Argentinian woman who grew up with servants, can identify with “women of color in the US” only if this group lacks class distinctions or a shared history.Footnote ³²

Lugones, who has a sharp eye for racial differences, sees no class, thus blurring her experience with “women of color.” This omission allows Lugones to parallel her experience, growing up in Argentina with servants, to the experience of “women of color” in the US. If “women of color” were qualified by class, Lugones would cease to belong to the group and be granted membership to “upper-class women.” In fact, her class position and social status—not to mention her treatment of servants—illustrates that she has more in common with upper-class white/Anglo women than women of color in the US.

Ignoring class distinctions and merely focusing on perspectives affects Lugones’ account of perception itself. For Lugones never asks how women of color in the US perceive her. Simply by having been misclassed she inaugurates herself as a woman of color in the US. Is her experience of being slighted comparable to years of violence experienced by poor and working-class racialized women in the US? Certainly, it is not comparable to the experiences of women under slavery, Jim Crow laws, police brutality, and servitude.

Despite her intentions, Lugones offers little insight into the concreteness of women of color. Historically, for instance, many women of color in the US experienced slavery, servitude, low-paying menial work, and domestic work—social positions foreign to Lugones’ experience.Footnote ³³ They have more often been servants for households than housewives. By contrast, housewives, though oppressed under patriarchy, represent the prosperity of middle- and upper-middle-class bourgeoise families; their experiences are thus closer to Lugones’. The history of women of color in the US, and mestizo, indigenous, and mixed-raced women in Argentina, hardly captures Lugones’ class position and experience.Footnote ³⁴ Like Lugones’ servants, women of color in the US have been housekeepers for white households, standing, in Angela Davis’ words, “in the shadow of the housewife” (Reference Davis1981, 203).

Lugones does not utter a single word about the race of her servants nor the class of women of color. But, in Selma James’ words (1974), “there is no class ‘purity’” (95). Rather, “[t]he objective oppression of black women in America,” as Davis (Reference Davis1977) argues, “has a class … origin” (185). For James and Davis, the material connections between race, nationality, ethnicity, sex, and gender exist within, not outside, class relations. Class analysis thus does not erase differences but orients us toward the abolition of exploitative labor as a step toward liberation.

Unlike Lugones, James and Davis analyze the historical specificity of women's oppression in capitalism. Davis characterizes feminisms without class analysis as “narrow bourgeois feminis[ms]” (184) that disregard women's labor, distort the class character of gender relations, and veil the social character and function of women's oppression in capitalism. Such feminism, Davis writes, “fails to acknowledge the specificity of the social subjugation of the women who live outside the privileged class under capitalism” (184).

Lugones’ pseudo-concreteness epitomizes such bourgeois feminism. She speaks of servitude without expressing any indignation for literal servitude. In occluding class, she neglects the capitalist subjugation of poor and working-class women and fails to grasp that liberation from toilsome labor, servitude, and oppression is central to feminism. Anti-capitalist emancipatory theory cannot do with mere changes in perception but requires class analysis because, as Davis maintains, women's oppression is “inextricably tethered to capitalism” (185). The pursuit of women's emancipation requires emancipation from capitalism.

The proper response to Lugones’ pseudo-concreteness, therefore, is not to reject all abstraction as such. Davis’ and James’ analyses, in demonstrating the importance of class analysis for feminism, are decisive on this point: we can understand women's oppression in capitalist society only through historically specific categories that grasp capitalism's structure.Footnote ³⁵

The pseudo-concreteness of play

Having abandoned the servants, Lugones proceeds to provide solutions that further solidify the barrier between obscene wealth and poverty. Like past soul-saviors—from St Augustine to Mother Teresa—she turns to love to combat arrogant perception. But this solution provides rewards and no punishments, thus leaving servants in their despicable conditions.Footnote ³⁶ For Lugones, playfulness is the “loving attitude” of world-traveling (Reference Lugones1987, 13–14). To understand the limitations of loving playfulness, in this section, I show how pseudo-concreteness infiltrates her playful world-traveling and crystallizes in sterile play. Lugones’ play stages the proper environment for pseudo-concreteness: the ground of playful world-traveling as a sanitized space where no difference can shine through.

Lugones contrasts playfulness with the “serious human” who has “no fun in life” and lacks “multidimensionality” (15). In a moment of honesty, she expresses her fear of becoming a person who has had “the fun constructed out of them” (15). Lugones, lucky to have escaped the world of mere survival to which servants belong, fears descending into the hell that is a life lived only to work. For, indeed, who is this serious, one-dimensional, person that has no fun and even lacks the necessary attitude required for fun if not the worker? Given the context of the essay, Lugones seems to attribute seriousness and lack of fun to the privileged person. There may be some truth to the familiar image of the curmudgeonly capitalist, but in actuality it is the working class, the poor, and the servants who have long been stripped of their right to have fun.

The image of the lifeless worker haunts the bourgeois, who forever fears becoming like them. The no-fun person that Lugones fears she might become is the person she cannot become; it is the person with whom she neither identifies nor loves: the servant. She fears of becoming nothing but a poor old worker, a servant, a pauper whose anger penetrates so deeply that it leaves no room for a smile. This fear is real. For the sadness of the wretched is indeed serious; the fun has been beaten out of them.

Daring to ask Can the person submerged in poverty have fun? is to treat their condition seriously. It means facing up to the severe conditions that have hardened the worker. It also implies inquiring whether conditions for fun and play really do exist today. But Lugones does not venture there. Lugones wants to play! And in a very particular way. She critiques antagonistic play for centering winning, losing, risk taking, battling, competence, and rules. Play as agon, Lugones maintains, imbues players with a sense of superiority and renders the playful attitude “secondary to or derivative from play” (15). In contrast, Lugones presents loving playfulness as an attitude that makes world-traveling possible. This alternative play is delivered to us in an image:

Let us take her image of play seriously. Why is a boring activity of crashing stones for hours presented as a creative and desirable endeavour? Anyone who has ever played knows we have exited the realm of play, creativity, and fun.

Where could one engage in such play? There is no proper place for it, barring Lugones’ imagination. However, Lugones is not concerned with play but strictly with the playful attitude, which appears devoid of playing. This attitude is characterized by a lack of rules and an openness to possibilities. World-traveling, which requires playfulness, is considered by Lugones to be a form of resistance (Reference Lugones2003, 7, 10–12). Thus, for many readers the playful attitude is important precisely because it enables “resisting” and “self-construction” (Islekel Reference Islekel2020, 447); and that it is so open that it even includes “disrupt[ing] particular contexts that are oppressive or provid[ing] power to a particular group” (Dewart et al. Reference Dewart, Kubota, Berendonk, Clandinin and Caine2020, 370). We are assured that Lugones’ loving playfulness, unlike agonistic play, does not seek to win.

But it seems to me that nor does it seek to play. As the above scholars glean from Lugones’ rather vague and watery description, play is so open and directionless that it could be anything, even an activity in the service of a socio-political task. Play could become work.

Don't we sacrifice playfulness when we subject it to the service of politics? Doesn't play return to the realm of winning, taking risks, and battling if understood as resistance against oppressive groups and the accumulation of power for the oppressed? Lugones’ fear of becoming a serious worker does not permit her to capture playfulness; rather, play turns into resistance against oppression. In other words, play becomes agonistic and the playful attitude “secondary to … play” (Lugones Reference Lugones1987, 15). This is possible because playfulness is so undefined, undetermined, and open that it contains any possibility. The playful attitude, it seems, can do anything but play.

Lugones’ playful attitude raises other important questions: Who is Lugones playing with? Where are the raced, sexed, gendered, and classed bodies in her image of play? Exiled? Lugones’ image of play centers her but erases the other player. There is no concreteness of others. It seems that Lugones’ pseudo-concreteness contaminates even her conception of play.

The subjects of Lugones’ play are beings devoid of specificity. That the space of play is open renders the subject no one, thus anyone. But can the player really be anyone? I doubt the status and social realities that keep servants busy at work allow for such play; not to mention their seriousness which is not conducive to the correct attitude required to play with Lugones. But if they could embody the playful attitude, perhaps it would alleviate some of the exhaustion of their daily toils—though not the need for toil itself.

We do not know who Lugones is playing with, and this is precisely the point. If we venture into speculation about player two, we are forced into a thought experiment in which someone is playing with Lugones. I am coerced into playing with her, to center her, to be open, entertain, and surprise her. Whatever the speculation, we do not, and must not, know who she is playing with, or risk dirtying the scene of play with a concreteness that would put her commitment to openness into question. The subjects of Lugones’ play are abstract embodiments of the attitude required to play with Lugones.

Indeed, Lugones’ playful world-traveling is pseudo-concrete. The subjects of play are neutral and the scene of play attempts to achieve the same. Where is the plurality and difference promised to us by Lugones in the opening of her essay? Why is the image of play so sterile and sanitized, that is, lacking in concreteness? These are not Lugones’ questions. If they were, perhaps she would be forced to travel out of this sterile scene and into the filth of the concrete. Now, Lugones intends to deal with concreteness; but, despite the muddy water and colorful stones, she does not capture it; perspectives, perceptions, and attitudes along with imaginary traveling are her primary concerns. Thus, she constructs a dream-like world as the image of play, where “trout hid[e] under rocks” in a river that is “almost dry” (16).

We can bring the abstract character of the scene of play into view by resituating it amongst its primary historical referents. Lugones tells us that she chose crashing stones because there is no play with its own rules called “crashing stones;” rather the playful attitude “turns” this “activity into play” (16). Though she is correct that there is no play called crashing stones, nonetheless, in the US, crashing stones has a far darker history. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, crashing stones was an activity performed by individuals subjected to work on chain-gangs.Footnote ³⁷ It goes without saying that Lugones did not mean to suggest that chain-gangs’ stone-crashing was fun and games; nor that it would be fun to be in a chain-gang (though it does imply that it could have been play had the attitude been different). Nonetheless, it is not insignificant that this is the image of Lugones’ play.

Lugones is correct that crashing stones is not play in any ordinary sense. But it does seem to capture Lugones’ sense of play: the crashing of stones to which chain-gangs were subjected as punishment was certainly not agonistic play: it did not seek to win, lose, battle, or conquer. In fact, it signals the aftermath of loss and conquest. Even more, an important aspect of crashing of rocks was that it was not always productive labor. “State highway officials” in Alabama in 1995 “are reported to have said that they have no use for the crushed rock produced by the prisoners” (De jonge Reference De jonge1999).Footnote ³⁸ While at times crushed chunks of limestone were used to make gravel for roads, at others, limestone was primarily an excuse for crushing stones as punishment.

Seeking the antithesis of the conquering and arrogant attitude, Lugones’ loving playfulness invokes loving play as a form of punishment. We can chalk this up to mere chance or recognize the consequences of her pseudo-concreteness. Had Lugones taken the servants seriously, instead of leaping to play, perhaps servitude would not have haunted her riverbank scene of playful world-traveling.Footnote ³⁹

Lugones’ image of play is at best a boring pastime, and at worse, forced labor and punishment. In fact, it is the playful attitude itself which renders equivalent these otherwise distinct activities. Here, of course, “boring” is not an indictment of Lugones personally but proof that we cannot merely think ourselves into fun if we exist in a society founded on domination. Even the wishes and the images we conjure in search of emancipation capitulate into scenes of domination.Footnote ⁴⁰ Thus, instead of fleeing into experimental thinking, we must, as Adorno (Reference Adorno and Block1946) suggests, face the cold world with coldness (639).

Lugones’ theory is pseudo-concrete because it turns its back on the cold and harsh reality. The alien features of the world she has constructed to combat existing society are alien to her. One could object that Lugones is aware of the coldness of our world and, thus, wishes that all could be play. Indeed, on her account, all can play if they embody the correct attitude and find refuge in the right world. But, in Bayard Rustin's words (1970), the problem is not “bad attitudes but bad social conditions” (31).Footnote ⁴¹ To genuinely wish for the poor to play is to wish Lugones’ class out of existence. As it stands there is no evidence of such desire in her work. Lugones is aware of the limitations of playfulness—we cannot play all the time and not everywhere, especially not in agonistic worlds (Reference Lugones1987, 17). She fails to consider that “agonistic” worlds are for some the only worlds. Indeed, what is capitalism if not an agonistic world? But Lugones does not critique present conditions for the possibility of emancipated play, for a society where the very conditions and social relations allow for play; rather, she concludes by maintaining that we can play in some worlds and not others.Footnote ⁴² In reality, it is Lugones who can play in some worlds and not others. The confinement of the poor to agonistic worlds makes bourgeois play possible.

Only the master

Despite the merits of world-traveling for cross-cultural and cross-racial love, it is pseudo-concrete, and thus substantially freighted as a critical and political strategy for decolonial feminism.Footnote ⁴³ It is too historically and socially undetermined to grasp and challenge present forms of domination. Thus, to my mind, its burdens far outweigh its promises. Emancipatory theory, by contrast, requires a critical examination of class. It is not the case that perceptions and ways of seeing have no place in decolonial feminism; rather, my claim is that they do not transcend but rather express class relations.

This article proposes “pseudo-concreteness” as a critical tool for feminist analysis. Pseudo-concreteness exposes the limitations of feminist methodologies that abandon materialist analysis and obscure class by merely targeting perspectives and perceptions without condemning capitalist relations that bring them about. As a tool for materialist critique, pseudo-concreteness highlights the dangers of a hasty move from abstractions to what is apparently concrete. It critiques theories that obscure class as ideological expressions of class positions while simultaneously highlighting the necessity of class analysis for feminism. This essay thus seeks to reorient feminism toward real social conditions and class relations. Decolonial feminism must grasp the concrete socio-historical conditions of the marginalized. This, I have shown, Lugones does not do.

In a final act of avoidance, in the essay's closing moments, Lugones writes that she “always imagines the Aristotelian slave as pliable and foldable at night or after he or she cannot work anymore (when he or she dies as a tool)” (Reference Lugones1987, 18). But “Aristotle,” she adds, “tells us nothing about the slave apart from the master. We know the slave only through the master. After working hours he or she is folded and placed in a drawer till the next morning” (18). Thus Lugones concludes, having once and for all folded and placed her servants in a drawer.

But Lugones, as should now be clear, reproduces the very error she attributes to Aristotle: not another word is uttered about her servants. To be sure, Aristotle says more about slaves than Lugones does about servants.Footnote ⁴⁴ In fact, Lugones tells us nothing about them. When she does briefly mention them, it is to use them, like Aristotle's living tools, to make a point. Lugones’ indictment of Aristotle does not prompt her to speak of her servants at all, let alone about the servants apart from her; rather, she concludes by returning once again to her mother. Traveling to her mother's world, Lugones tells us, she realized that her mother “is not foldable and pliable” nor “exhausted by the mainstream Argentinian patriarchal construction of her” as there are “‘worlds’ in which she shines as a creative being” (18). Had Lugones traveled to her servants’ quarters, she would have found, to her surprise, that unlike her mother, they are exhausted. That their servitude to the likes of Lugones implies that there are no worlds in which they can shine. Like Aristotle's slaves, the servants are “pliable and foldable at night” after they “cannot work anymore” dying “as a tool” (18).

Concluding her essay with a guilty conscience, Lugones maintains that Aristotle tells us nothing about slaves just about the master. Likewise, Lugones tells us nothing about servants, only about their master.