A decolonial feminist critical social theory

While the critique of Eurocentrism is noteworthy and important, it should not exhaust what it means to decolonize political theory. Our hope is to advance and pluralize the project of decolonizing political theory by suggesting ways of generating political theory from and for the non-European world, that is, by imagining political theory of a truly global reach.

— Adom Getachew and Karuna Mantena (2021: 361) [emphasis added]

Introduction

This special issue on ‘The Philippine Condition: Threads of Critical, Decolonial and Feminist Contentions’ brings together articles by Filipino women critical theorists, that reflect on the social condition of contemporary Philippines through the lenses of critical social theory, that are intersectionally decolonial and feminist in their critical and emancipatory orientations. The intellectual formation of the authors in this issue is shaped by the tradition of critical social theory which began in the Frankfurt School as emancipatory social critique (Horkheimer, 1972), but builds on contemporary challenges to the Frankfurt School critical theory's patriarchal limitations (Benhabib, 1992; Fraser, 1985; Young, 1990; McNay, 2022) and criticisms against its underwritten script of coloniality and racism within the discourse of modernity (Allen, 2016; Dussel, 1996; Mendieta, 2007; Mills, 2017; Bhambra, 2021). The Filipino women authors of this issue stand within this tradition and its continued contestation as their lived experiences push them to interrogate critical social theory's shortcomings. The articles gathered here were first presented in the Philosophy and Social Science (Critical Theory) conference in Prague in May 2023, an annual conference that Jürgen Habermas helped found, and which Eduardo Mendieta along with other prominent figures of critical social theory continued and expanded. We honour both thinkers here, with gratitude and grief as their recent passing inspires us to continue the work they set in motion, and to insist that it remains unfinished.

In a plenary discussion in the conference, one of the authors asked Mendieta whether or not there is a distinction between rationalization and modernization processes – a question that delighted Mendieta because it clarifies how the colonial and patriarchal underpinnings of critical social theory can remain undetected. This points to how internal rationalization processes that spurred the social evolution of colonized nations were interrupted by colonization, and superimposed with modernization processes that had to be accelerated from without (Habermas, 2001: 126). What could have been an internally directed rationalization from within colonized nations became an uneven catching up with what counts as ‘rational’ and ‘enlightened’ from the perspective of Western modernized nations. The work done by the Filipino women critical theorists in this issue strives to disentangle rationalization processes from the colonial and patriarchal logics that accompanied the imposition of Western modernization in the Philippines.

In this special issue, our objective is four-fold: (a) offer our critical analysis of the Philippine condition; (b) challenge extant practices of critical social theorizing in our home country that unconsciously reproduce ideologies and structures of domination; (c) reaffirm global efforts to decolonize critical social theory; and (d) bring these into dialogue with intersectional feminist critique. In the following, we briefly describe what decolonizing and feminist critical social theory mean for us, and how these critical frameworks are brought to bear upon a long overdue analysis of the social conditions that paradoxically obstruct but also call upon transformative critique in the Philippine context.

Decolonizing critical social theory

From within the tradition of Frankfurt School critical theory, Amy Allen's (2016) work stands as a pioneer in uncovering the theoretical origins of the deep tension underlying Frankfurt School critical theory and post-colonial critical social theory. Allen (2016: 5) names the need to develop an ‘alternative framework for thinking about history and the question of normative grounding’ that is not committed to Eurocentric and imperialist assumptions of historical progress as crucial to the process of decolonizing critical social theory. From the same vein, the authors in this special issue are committed to practising critical theorizing from within the nexus of power relations and structures that have shaped and continue to shape their thinking, which effectively means doing critical social theory from within the Philippine condition, while simultaneously working towards radically transforming this condition for the better. Following Allen, this special issue affirms the understanding of critical social theory as ‘any politically inflected form of cultural, social, or political theory that has critical, progressive, or emancipatory aims’ (Allen, 2016: xi) − thus asserting that feminist and decolonial social critique are forms of critical social theorizing.

Picking up the threads of the Filipinization and indigenization movement in the Philippine social sciences − prominent in the fields of History (Constantino, 1966/1982; Salazar, 1985), Philosophy (Mercado, 1974; Timbreza, 1982), Psychology (Enriquez, 1976; Pe-Pua, 1982) and Anthropology (Covar 1991), and then weaving these with the global epistemic−cultural movement against the coloniality of structures, systems and institutions of knowledge and power (Bhambra and Holmwood, 2021; Fanon, 1963; Gandhi, 1997; Mignolo and Walsh, 2018; Spivak, 1988), we decolonize critical theorizing in two steps.

First, we decolonize critical social theory through a process of subtraction or critical unweaving of the colonial network of power that continues to permeate our epistemic and social structures, norms and practices. For the Global South − here used as a political category to refer to the South ‘of’ the North and the South ‘in’ the North − this entails exposing how ineffective Euro-centric and Anglo-centric modes of thinking and critique are in addressing the Global South condition. In addition, this requires demonstrating how the colonial logic underpinning Euro-centric and Anglo-centric modes of thinking and critique perpetuates the cultural−epistemic subjugation, patriarchal domination and capitalist exploitation of the Global South. This step in our decolonial work is part of our resistance to the ‘whiteness’ (Mills, 1997, 2017) of critical social theory and our intellectual activism against our colonial, racial, gendered and capitalist ‘miseducation’ (Constantino, 1966/1982; Woodson, 1933), that continue to undermine the global struggle for ‘epistemological justice’ (Bhambra, 2021).

Pamela Joy Mariano Capistrano's contribution to this special issue, ‘Agency, Global Capitalism and Postcolonial Patronage,’ for example, demonstrates a way of uncovering the need to recalibrate the diagnostic lenses of critical theories developed from the Global North contexts when analysing situations in the Global South. Using the concrete experiences of farmers and traders from Southern Philippines, Mariano Capistrano brings to fore the limitations of both Iris Marion Young's and Sally Haslanger's accounts of structural injustice. Her critique goes two ways. First, she deploys a critique of the structural injustice resulting from the intersection of colonial and postcolonial practices of patronage and the practices of global capitalism as instantiated by the multinational biotechnology corporations that dominate the agricultural sector. Second, she reveals how the Global North context from which the conception of structural injustice has been drawn − and by extension, much of critical social theory − increases the risks of overlooking how practices of global capitalism have been enculturated differently in the Global South.

Second, we decolonize critical social theory through the process of conceptual transformation or reparative reweaving: we reconstruct new and reaffirm alternative modes of thinking and critique that are not only generated from and responsive to our local and lived realities but are hopefully better and more just at a global level. This means that while discarding aspects of our inherited concepts, categories, or frameworks that lead us to misperceive their value and (in)significance, we nevertheless salvage aspects of these inherited concepts, categories and frameworks that may be emancipatory − creatively repairing and transforming them so they may be made responsive and relevant to the experience of, and problems confronted by, differently situated subjects. This process is in contrast to the wholesale dismissal of theories and ideas only on the basis that they are ‘Western.’ We challenge the misleading tendency to reduce coloniality to what is Western and argue that such reduction risks reproducing the logic of domination in coloniality within non-Western spaces. To refer to Allen's work again, this means taking up the emancipatory aim of critical social theory, that is to inherit it, but ‘simultaneously radically transforming it’ (Allen, 2018: xiii) so it may more adequately clarify the ‘struggles and wishes of the age’ (Marx 1843 cited in Fraser, 1985: 97).

Darlene Demandante's contribution, ‘Can Dead Bodies Do Politics?’, demonstrates an example of this decolonial critical orientation that does not lose sight of the emancipatory core of a framework that has been developed by a Western thinker. In her article, Demandante engages with established frameworks of political subjectivity, particularly Jacques Rancière's influential concept of political subjectivation, and challenges how the concept reinforces the understanding of political agency as an activity engaged in by autonomous living subjects. Countering this understanding, she interrogates and argues for the political agency of dead bodies. She takes as her case in point the dead bodies produced by state violence during the Philippine drug war during Rodrigo Duterte′s administration (2016-2022). By emphasizing embodied experiences, relational autonomy and the symbolic agency of the dead, Demandante proposes a decolonial phenomenology of power that reclaims an understanding of death as a form of resistance. Using the Philippine case, she elucidates how mourning, memory-making and solidarity serve as decolonial practices that deflect the legacies of colonial violence that result not only in the literal decimation of bodies, but also the erasure of their identities, undermining of their agency and the creation of systemic relations of domination.

Beyond the self-referential critique of Euro-centrism and Anglo-centrism therefore, and beyond the identitarian aim to assert what is ‘Filipino,’ our decolonial objective in this special issue is to uncover how colonial logics continue to be woven through Philippine social relations and structures. Through our work, we collectively unpack how such colonial logic is supported by both the social−epistemic condition we are in globally − for example, how the political and economic superpowers of today also hold dominion over the politics and economics of knowledge − and the neocolonial education and culture that continues to be cultivated in the Philippines.

Kelly Agra in her contribution, ‘(Mis)educating the Empire’ writes for instance that the Philippines, after decolonizing itself from its European colonial past, still had to contend with an American neo-colonial present. She follows the lead of historian Renato Constantino who referred to the American epistemic colonization of the Philippines as the ‘miseducation of the Filipino’ (Constantino, 1966/1982). Through neocolonial miseducation, Constantino contends and Agra echoes, that the Filipinos have become an ‘uprooted race’ (Constantino, 1966/1982: 432) and ‘un-Filipino Filipinos’ (Constantino, 1966/1982: 437) − esteeming their foreign overlords (Constantino, 1966/1982: 444) and viewing centuries of colonialism ‘as a grace from above rather than as a scourge’ (Constantino, 1966/1982: 437). Agra argues that the coloniality of Philippine education betrays education's promise of knowledge and emancipation from forms of oppression − ‘pag-ahon sa kahirapan tungo sa maginhawang buhay at maunlad na bansa’ [‘rising from poverty to a comfortable life and a developed country’]. Colonial (mis)education, she contends, generates harmful epistemic paralysis, which she refers to as the stifling of knowledge and thinking, especially those that are developed from the standpoint of marginality and attentive to the ideological effects of power and history.

The situation of colonial miseducation that Agra describes resonates with the epistemic domination that thinkers such as Mohandas Gandhi, Carter Godwin Woodson, Frantz Fanon, Paulo Freire and Charles Mills have diagnosed in a colonized mind. Adom Getachew and Karuna Mantena describe the colonized consciousness as a consciousness characterized by an enthralment with the West, desiring ‘to emulate its values and institutions’ (Getachew and Mantena 2021: 373). Such ‘enthralment’ can still be observed in the Philippines, where a premium remains to be placed in what is Western − considering it to be a cultural symbol of prestige, wealth, education, class status and intellectual superiority.

Maria Lovelyn Paclibar's contribution, ‘Kwentuhan as the active weaving of kapwa relations,’ aims to address this problem. Her critical aim is to challenge the dominance of logico-scientific cognition in the postcolonial classroom − a form of cognition that is often associated with Western modern societies, and characterized as masculine due to its linear progression. Building on Iris Marion Young's contention that argumentative discourse favours a particular subject that is, the Western white male (Young, 2000), Paclibar contends that certain pedagogical and discursive practices in Philippine education may be denigrating the indigenous Philippine discursive practice of kwentuhan (conversation). She writes that in the Philippine context kwentuhan is argued to be a meandering, goalless and therefore unserious mode of communication commonly associated with women or the feminine. Countering this, Paclibar affirms kwentuhan as a legitimate pedagogical tool in the classroom and an effective mode of political communication in the public sphere. She emphasizes that kwentuhan has similar critical functions as argumentative discourses but one that preserves kapwa (self-and-other) relations rather than undermines it.

Against this background, decolonizing critical social theory for us means subtracting our forms of critique from hegemonic categories, rules and standards of knowing. We reiterate, however, that this form of subtraction does not mean subtraction from any influence from the West or the Global North. This is not only a naive way of thinking, but such a task is also impossible. What such critical unweaving refers to instead is the articulation of a counter-critique of the ways in which we reproduce the relegation of our ways of thinking as ‘inferior’ to Anglo-European thinking, and of our local concerns as ‘inconsequential,’ because of the misleading view that they are not ‘universal.’ This is then paired with the transformative task of reparative reweaving of critical social theory that is generated from and attentive to the lived realities of the Philippine condition. Rather than merely engaging in abstract theorizing and only secondarily attempting to identify areas in our material condition where such theories may apply to or become relevant, the kind of critical social theorizing that we uphold is one that is born out of and mobilized by the exigencies of our concrete situations, and one that seeks to combat the very suffering or injustices that we observe and/or ourselves experience, including their corresponding ideological backups. In this second task, we take our cue from scholars such as Robin Celikates (2018), Linda Martín Alcoff (2018) and Patricia Hill Collins (2019) for whom activism and resistance are not divorced from critical theorizing; but also, from thinkers such as Uma Narayan (1997) and Getachew and Mantena (2021) who remind us that we can creatively transgress inherited ideas and categories and invent alternative ways of using, fusing and transforming them, rather than simply rejecting them altogether.

Intersectionality and feminism as critical social theory

After the double process of decolonization, however, we make one more step. We pay attention to gender oppression as has been done by earlier feminist critical theorists (Allen, 2007; Benhabib, 1992; Fraser, 1985; McNay, 2022; Young, 1990). We engage in feminist work, however, with a specifically intersectional approach, bringing together the concerns against coloniality to bear upon the concerns against women′s oppression. We use the term intersectionality here in its broader sense, not restricted to the narrow understanding of it as simply suggesting that different forms of oppression come together and pile up. It asks, not ‘where is the nexus of power where multiple oppressions meet?’, but ‘what are the multiple structures and systems of power that cause and sustain different forms and degrees of oppression?’. Intersectionality pays attention to how these structures and systems connect to one another and how they can be unentangled or weakened. Intersectionality theory is not a one-size-fits-all critical framework, nor one that endorses an ‘mpa#lsquo;Oppression Olympics’(Martínez, 1993). Its guiding thread is to assert the urgency to widen and pluralize the critic's diagnostic lenses and acknowledge how every site of oppression has its own degree of complexity and that differing subjectivities and identities within this site get affected differently. To this extent, it alerts us to the need to increase our degree of caution against offering blanket proposals to ameliorate forms of injustice and helps unveil how one site might actually be ‘a site among many sites’ within a network of domination.

Raphaella Elaine Miranda's contribution, ‘Filipino Feminism from the Margins,’ speaks precisely to this agenda by highlighting the conceptual limitations of Frankfurt School critical theory in making sense of women's oppression within the context of the Philippines. She does this by first, strongly criticizing and cautioning against extractive and uncritical idealization of indigenous values as a mode of doing ‘critical theory at the margins’ − a practice that she finds in some versions of critical theorizing in the Philippines. Second, she emphasizes the importance of thinking with (instead of for) the marginalized, with specific attention to their lived contexts within the intersection of power structures. Drawing on the work of women and development scholars, Miranda points to the experiences of urban poor Filipino women in order to locate possibilities of emancipation.

Through feminist critique, this special issue thus also unravels how the philosophical institution, as well as the ways in which critical social theory has been practiced in the Philippines, could be reproducing identity-based forms of oppression despite best intentions. For instance, in Marella Ada V. Mancenido-Bolaños and Darlene O. Demandante's (June 2020) editorial for the ‘Women and Philosophy: An Initial Move Towards a More Inclusive Practice of Philosophy in the Philippine Context’, special issue of Kritike: An Online Journal of Philosophy and Jacklyn Cleofas’ (2025) ‘Can Brown Women be First-rate Philosophers?’ in Resilience and the Brown Babe's Burden: Writings by Filipina Philosophers, one discovers how the status of women philosophers in the Philippines are not only unfortunate, they are specifically unjust. Recent developments in the last decade, such as the formation of the Women Doing Philosophy group (Teodosio, 2025) shortly after the journal's publication, the review of the gender balance in membership and officership in the largest philosophical organization in the country, the mainstreaming of gender concerns in philosophical conferences and seminars, and taking action on gender inequality in faculty hiring, tenure, promotion and administrative assignments in some universities − show stronger and more active efforts to combat the patriarchal forces undergirding philosophical institutions in the Philippines. At the same time, these developments clearly expose the historical marginalization of Filipino women philosophers. In this special issue, the women authors attempt to break away from the limiting and limited ways in which critical social theory may be marginalizing women's concerns by virtue of marginalizing the women theorists who not only would have first-hand and contentful knowledge of these concerns, but would have a vested interest in addressing them, as they not only affect women, but also the society at large.

Krissah Marga Taganas’ contribution, ‘Addressing the Mother-gap,’ addresses precisely this situation, interrogating the absence of motherhood in Filipino feminist theorizing and exposing how both patriarchal institutions and even feminist agenda have reproduced a ‘mother gap’ that renders maternal subjectivities invisible. Intersectionally, she advances a decolonial feminist project by situating motherhood within the Philippines’ colonial history and its enduring religious and cultural impositions, arguing that prevailing ideals of the Filipina mother are not natural but historically produced and therefore open to contestation. Grounded in feminist theory she insists that motherhood is not peripheral but constitutive of the lived experience of women and advances motherhood studies as a necessary expansion of Filipino feminism. Motherhood, she argues, is a site of both oppression and empowerment. In doing so, she calls for a feminism that is historically grounded, materially attentive and accountable to the complexities of Filipino women's lives.

It is in response to identity-based forms of oppression that our decolonial work comes into critical dialogue with a two-pronged intersectional feminism: we use critical social theory in diagnosing and addressing feminist issues and concerns, but also challenge white privilege in feminism. While feminists of colour such as Uma Narayan (1997), Audre Lorde (1979/ 2017), or María Lugones (2003) have not technically referred to their feminism as intersectional per se, we consider them proponents of an intersectional decolonial feminism insofar as one can find in their works some of the most astute articulations of and challenges against white superiority within feminism. With them, we disentangle the racial, ethnic, colonial and economic complexities of the living conditions of formerly colonized communities that are in most cases, also communities of colour, and bring into the surface the identity-based genealogies of expectations, norms and ideologies that structure these communities.

Towards a decolonial feminist critical social theory

There has been no shortage of works on decolonial critique especially since its reception in North American academia and its spread to the Global South, so much so that decolonization has been dismissively described as a ‘fashionable subject’ in academia (Filho, 2024: 67). Far from simply taking on what is in vogue in academic discourses, the articles in this special issue together serve to continue to disrupt the tendency of decolonial conversations, which gained prominence more than two decades ago, to devolve into a monologue of dominant voices. It is interesting to note that the story behind the development of these papers is suffused with events and personal experiences of the authors that remind of the need for the continuing work of disrupting this monologization. While the authors of this issue took hold of the opportunity to present their papers in the Critical Theory conference in Prague, they had to contend with the prohibitive costs of travelling from the Global South and the added strain of having to prove their worthiness to obtain Schengen visas just to have their voices registered in the conversations. At the conference itself, the authors were also confronted by the paradoxes of decolonial critique within academic institutions: the uneven conditions of access and representation as well as the tendency for decoloniality to be institutionally centred through canonical figures and Global North scholarly structures. The papers developed here are therefore written without the illusion that decolonial critique and practice are free from their own contradictions.

Despite the irony of having to struggle for the spaces supposedly opened up by critique, the authors continue to validate the emancipatory promise of decolonial theory through critical self-reflection. Miranda particularly highlights the tendency for simplistic binarism of wholesale rejection of Western knowledge and the uncritical ‘idealization of indigenous values.’ Paclibar similarly does not dismiss Western education in the Philippines as the product of colonization but calls for ‘epistemological pluralism’ through the institutional inclusion of indigenous and informal modes of communication in the classroom. Capistrano strives to ground decolonial critique beyond mere academic exercise by ‘grounding structural injustice in a postcolonial rural context’ in order to expose what is often overlooked in critique: ‘that material conditions and social−cultural structures are not only difficult to distinguish, they are mutually sustaining.’ Taganas highlights a gap in decolonial feminist critique through the need to ‘defend the inclusion’ of motherhood scholarship especially in Philippine Feminist theory, which reveals the colonially internalized hierarchy on what topics deserve being privileged over others. Agra's reflections warn about ‘pernicious epistemic paralysis,’ which is generated by ‘entrenched structures’ from the colonial past that persist in the ‘present’ leading to ‘political and epistemic subservience’ to ‘colonial forms of repression and extraction.’ This shows that even a decolonial framework remains vulnerable to reproducing colonial logics especially through education. Demandante burrows through a deeper ground of critical self-reflection of decolonial critique by interrogating the latter's assumptions of what counts as a political subject and pushing for a radical rethinking of ‘the agency of dead bodies’ in political theory.

The articles in this special issue are thus not about a single concept or theme, but as elaborated, they are woven together by two dialectical motifs: (a) the employment of critical social theory, broadly construed, in order to examine problems in contemporary Philippine society, such as the perpetuation of the logic of coloniality and gender discrimination in Philippine education, politics, social imagination and philosophy, particularly in the area of critical social theory and feminism; but also (b) the centering of heterogeneous but interwoven Filipino experience, with the aim of interrogating and exposing the limitations of dominant forms of social critique developed in the Global North and as practised or adopted in the Global South.

‘Weaving,’ in the sense it is used here, is intended to be symbolically and imaginatively instructive. The activity of weaving has important significance in the material culture, local economy and symbolic representation of identity of indigenous and rural communities in the Philippines, but also more widely, in the Global South. Furthermore, albeit in varying contexts and significations, it offers an insight into the social labour and social agency of women in these regions, and in certain occasions of conflict, how it facilitated for them psychological and political refuge. This special issue is an effort to organize the resistant forces and critical agencies of Filipino women social theorists and provide a space for the interweaving of their works, which they are forced to reorient because of the oppressive politics undergirding the conditions and marginalizing rules of what counts as critique in the Philippines.

This special issue is not the first endeavour to bring together the works and reflections of Filipino women philosophers. Recent ones include: the recently published edited collection on the theme of resilience, Resilience and the Brown Babe's Burden: Writings by Filipina Philosophers edited by Tracy Llanera (2025); and the mentioned special issue of Kritike on ‘Women and Philosophy’ edited by Mancenido-Bolaños and Demandante (2020). However, this special issue is the first collection of writings on critical social philosophy by Filipino women critical theorists. Inspired by their shared experience of and learnings from their academic diaspora, and bonded by their shared struggle against intersectional forms of oppression, the weaving of their critical, decolonial and feminist contentions on the Philippine condition is their attempt to overcome the barriers to critique and social theorizing as they perceive and experience them, differently but intersectingly.

Taking ‘weaving’ as a metaphor for illustrating the interrelation of the multiple threads of Filipino women's emancipatory interests, critical frameworks and forms of resistance imaginatively introduces an understanding of such interlinking as non-homogenizing, non-subjugating, multi-layered, but also interdependent and advancing solidarity/resilience-building. In their engagement with Philippine politics, culture, economics, education, critical social theory and feminism, the articles in this collection draw attention to the diverse and entangled patterns of oppression in the Philippine context. Their emancipatory aim is the identification and organization of reparative possibilities within their intersectional consciousness and experience, for the unravelling, mending, or transformative reweaving of multidirectional forms and structures of domination.