Genders, GYnealogies, GYne(co)alogies of Decolonial Geo-thalasso-corpographies: A Theoretical Reflection on Interconnectedness in Gender Configurations

Drawing upon a variety of recent theorizations of borderlands and anti-border resistance, this chapter offers a framework to think about borderless consciousness and convivencia, looking at the intersections among genders, genres, and genera of borders. The 1980–2010 reconceptualization of the border by various decolonial feminist thinkers, including bell hooks, Chandra Mohanty, and María Lugones, is at the core of the chapter, which promotes a decentering of Western epistemologies in favor of African, Afro-descendant, and decolonial theories of gnosis interlaced with Gloria Anzaldúa’s Chicana feminist theory of conocimiento. Anzaldúa’s transformative visions are then compared with those of Israeli feminist psychoanalyst, theorist, and artist Bracha Ettinger, with special attention for their respective notions of nepantla space and matrixial borderspace. The chapter also proposes a revision of the feminist notions of genealogy and gynecology, offering a polysemic neologism, ‘gYne(co)alogies’, as a way to overcome the boundaries of traditional feminist categorizations. The last section reflects upon the borderless and liquid nature of a Southern peninsular thalassographic ‘gyno-corpo-graphical’ and ‘transMediterranean’ perspective in order to enact a shift from a transAtlantic to a transMediterrAtlantic positionality as a key to encounters with non-nationalistic thinkers, no-border activists, border crossers, and diasporic creative talents.