This article presents an analysis of works by Francisco Goldman and Jennifer
Harbury, which deal with “cataclysmic moments” of recent Guatemalan
history. It explores gender relations in these works with reference to three
themes: storytelling, communication and affective relationships. Conceptually,
I draw on the notions of decolonial love, the coloniality of gender, and the world
gender order as categories of analysis. I take Chela Sandoval’s methodology of
the oppressed as a guideline for my analysis, and look at the ways in which
different types of storytelling perpetuate or question the coloniality of gender,
at the consequences of intercultural misunderstandings produced by different
readings of the coloniality of gender and the world gender order, and at the
significance of a critical and liberatory practice of gender roles for decolonial
love. The practice of decolonial love is an alternative to what Tzvetan Todorov
has called “the dreadful concatenation,” which is a result of cultural encounters
during the conquest of the Americas and which conceptualizes as “love”
a feeling that sidesteps equality, an exercise in destruction and possession.
The coloniality of gender and decolonial love are explored through their
interactions with masculinities and femininities across the different case
studies.