  The Question of Gender/Race. As in the liberation of theology, the philosophy of liberation was initially slow to address the questions of both gender and race, although the later was always a central theme of Latin American philosophy in general. The issue of race was addressed in terms of mestizaje, blanqueamiento (whitening, i.e. the idea that through racial mixing Blacks would become White and thus assimilate into the broader society), indigenity, negritude, and racial mixing in general. Mestizaje, however, has tended to cover up the distinct role that race has played in the formation of Latin American identity. The question of gender, nonetheless, was explicitly addressed by Enrique Dussel as early as 1977 in the third volume of his Filosofía Etica Latinoamericana (Dussel 1977), in which he developed an erotics of Latin American liberation. In 1980 Dussel published Liberación de la Mujer y Erótica Latinoamericana, which is made up of re-edition of the seventh chapter of this third volume, along with a new text titled “Toward a Metaphysics of Feminity,” which as the title suggests aims to offer a metaphysical understanding of gender, in which woman is the “Other” of man. Dussel’s metaphysics was critiqued for being an anachronistic and “machista” ontologization of Catholic, in particular, and Christian, more generally, understandings of sex and gender that negated the historical contingency of gender roles that resulted in a recalcitrant rejection of sexual difference other than man/woman (Schutte 1993). In the epilogue to the 1994 edition of Liberación de la Mujer y Erótica Latinoamericana, Dussel, however, rejected and critiqued his earlier views, noting that the Latin American feminism of the sixties was primarily oriented towards a critique of North American feminism, and that the category of “gender” had not yet being thoroughly absorbed and appropriated within Latin American thinking. He also rejected the unintended “homophobic” dimension of his earlier call for an “Erotics” of Latin American liberation. Over the last three decades, in dialogue with Linda Alcoff, Lynda Lange, Maria Lugones, Ofelia Schutte, and Elina Vuola (Alcoff and Mendieta, eds. 2000), as well as theologians such as Maria Clara Bingemer,  Ivone Gebara, and Elsa Tamez, philosophers of liberation have began to address what Lugones has called “the coloniality of gender” (Lugones 2010). 