Notes on María Lugones, "Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception”

Lugones, María. “Playfulness, ‘World’-Travelling, and Loving Perception.” Hypatia, vol. 2, no. 2, 1987, pp. 3-19

Lugones writes about the importance of being able to "travel" to other people's "worlds" and to see "what it is to be them and what is is to be ourselves in their eyes" (17). She suggests that this travel "is not the same as becoming intimate" with someone else because "[i]ntimacy is constituted in part by a very deep knowledge of the other self and 'world' travelling is only part of having this knowledge" (17). 

I take this to be about empathy, although that word doesn't ever show up in her article. Maybe Lugones would disagree and say that it's different from empathy. I'm not sure. I've read critiques of empathy that argue that it is a projection of oneself into someone else, so that you're not really feeling what they feel but feeling what you think they feel. It's almost as though you're colonizing someone else's mind and experiences. Lugones' comment about intimacy involving "a very deep knowledge" of another person might lead to the idea that empathy, which doesn't really seem to require a deep knowledge of others, relies on a person's guesses about the other or a kind of speculation ("how would I feel if I were in that situation?") that some scholars have argued results in people feeling empathy more for members of their in-group than members of their out-group. (An interview with a psychologist named Paul Bloom, author of Against Empathy, suggests this.) So I wonder what Lugones would say about whether this "world"-travel relates to empathy.

She also writes, relatedly, about her feeling that people on the outside of the mainstream (such as herself, who is a woman of color in the United States) have "necessarily acquired flexibility in shifting from the mainstream construction of life where [they are] constructed as an outsider to other constructions of life where [they are] more or less 'at home'" (3). She sees a value in that (although she says a lot of times it's done unwillingly) because she sees it as connected to traveling to others' "worlds" and to "cross-cultural and cross-racial loving" (3-4). 

She also critiques westerners' "agonistic sense of play" for its emphasis on winning and connects it to problems with "[a]gonistic travellers [who] fail consistently in their attempt to travel because what they do is try to conquer the other 'world'" (16). People who want to cross "racial and ethnic boundaries" need to give up agonistic attitudes in order to travel across "worlds" (16).