Anzaldua, Gloria

Gloria Anzaldua (b. 1942) was among the first writers to critique academic feminism for constructing theory and practice based on white, middle-class, heterosexual experiences and for excluding the experiences of “other” women from its analyses. In This Bridge Called My Back (1981), she joined with other women whose voices and experiences had been ignored. This anthology initiated a call for feminists to create theory and practice that address the situations of all women: women of color, working-class women, lesbians, and aging women as well as white, economically privileged, heterosexual women. Only through inclusion can real social change emerge. Indeed, Anzaldua's writings and theorizing partly reflect her lived experiences as a lesbian Chicana.

Drawing on her own experiences as a Mexican American, lesbian woman, Anzaldua explores the “borderlands” of experience. She describes the splintered aspects of social identity and refers to borderlands as both physical locations (life in border towns, on the margins of society) as well as the social-psychological states experienced when one's identity is simultaneously embedded in oppositional racial, political, and historical relations. Her work calls for the constant deconstruction of racial and sexual categories in which binaries limit the imagination of agents. For example, she names binary categories such as white/black or male/female as despotic dualities that enable us to see only one or the other, as well as to be only one or the other. Her work offers a complex analysis of race, gender, class, and sexual politics that is grounded in her own life experiences and attempts to synthesize the fragmented aspects of social identity.

Anzaldua offers the physical, mental, and conceptual borders in a new, inclusive intercultural and intracultural analysis of identity: a physical and cultural location she calls “the new mestiza.” This new location comprises racial, ideological, cultural, and biological “cross-pollination.” Genetic streams and chromosomes cross, mix, and become not an inferior being, but a hybrid progeny she sees as more mutable and richer. In this sense, and from this physical location, an “alien consciousness” can emerge: a new mestiza consciousness that is the consciousness of the borderlands.

Through her work on borderlands and the new mestiza, Anzaldua critiques the way language has been used to suppress “other” discourses, particularly those groups whose locations and ways of experiencing the world are outside the Anglo/white/Western perspectives. To counter Eurocentric language, Anzaldua's work celebrates diversity and multicultural experiences, creating texts that integrate Spanish, Mexican, and Native American voices and dialects as legitimate.

Anzaldua argues that Chicanas are an eclectic cultural/racial/gendered blend of Indian, Spanish, black, and Mexican, who typically learn how to negate their Indian and black heritage and affirm only their Mexican-Spanish heritage. By doing so, Chicanas inadvertently reinforce the racial and cultural hierarchy prevalent in the West, in which light/European culture is conceptualized and privileged as more civilized, progressive, and rational than dark/ Indian/black perspectives. For social theorists, Anzaldua's work is notable for emphasizing the importance of the researcher's life experiences as starting points and grounding points for all theorizing. Her work exemplifies embodied theorizing. She argues that it is only through the body that the social and physical world is experienced. The images and words we use and the stories we tell must arise from the flesh and bone of the body if they are to articulate a lived reality and offer any meaningful transformative power.

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