De-naming

Abstract This article analyzes how the colonial naming structure creates and sustains what it means to be human and nonhuman in coloniality. It begins with a preliminary reading of Sylvia Wynter’s interpretation of Frantz Fanon’s “white mask” as a cultural technology, where the modern human’s names lie. The author argues that the “colored skin,” where the dehumanizing names are marked, is the other cultural technology inseparable from the white mask in constituting the colonial naming structure. By understanding skin technology as external to the embodied self, the author investigates how the modern idea of sex also functions as skin technology. The politics of women of color are then explored, interpreting the relation between sex and gender as the “sex-skin/gender-mask structure,” isomorphic to the Fanonian black-skin/white-mask structure. The article further engages with Naifei Ding’s concept of the “feminist knot” to analyze how this structure is reified and reproduced specifically in third-world Taiwan. It concludes with a proposal of “de-naming” as a decolonial methodology to shift away from dehumanizing names that fix a person into their sexed-and-colored skin and toward names that transform their embodied self.