Vulnerability and the coloniality of performativity

What happens when vulnerability is addressed by considering the historical positioning of subjects crossed by or on the other side of the colonial difference? Our text answers this question by revealing some of the limits of current feminist understandings of vulnerability thought from intersectional positions of privilege as a passive, or negative condition [Gilson, E. (2011). Vulnerability, ignorance, and oppression. Hypatia, 26(2), 308–332. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.2010.01158.x], or that remain within the confines of those who can perform within the polity and enacting therein forms of resistance to power and/or oppression [Butler, J. (2015). Notes towards a performative theory of assembly. Harvard University Press; Butler, J., Gambetti, Z., & Sabsay, L. (Eds) (2016). Vulnerability in resistance. Duke University Press]. We are concerned with thinking vulnerability under conditions of erasure, of eviction from ‘sociability’, in dialogue with approaches inspired by Jacquie Alexander, Gloria Anzaldua and Maria Lugones Black, Chicana and Decolonial femnisms.