Notes about books and texts about gender, postmodernism, the body, ethnicity, minorities post-colonialism and other good stuff

Feminism/Postmodernism edited and introduced by Linda Nicholson

Intro

From the late 1960s to the mid-1980s, feminist theory reflected the viewpoint of white middle-class women of N America and western Europe. The voices of many social groups were silenced. Feminists replicated the problematic universalizing practice of the particular groups of thought to which their works was most closely allied. Academic scholarship failed to see the embeddedness of their own assumptions in a specific historical context. They sought basic ordering principles-like God’s in the past.

Because feminist scholarship had so much opposition, the scholars challenged the universalizing notion itself, claiming that all scholarship reflected the perspectives and ideas of its creators. (=No neutrality.)

Postmodernism argues that “a God’s eye view” must be situated within the context of modernity. It criticizes diverse elements such as the modern sense of self and subjectivity, the idea of history as linear and evolutionary, and the separation of art and mass culture.

p.3 Beyond historicist claims about “situatedness” of human thought within culture they go to the very criteria by which claims for knowledge are legitimized. Not only the questions are effected but also the answers.

Postmodern critique has come to focus on philosophy and the very idea of a possible theory of knowledge, justice, or beauty. The pursuit itself of such theories rests upon the modernist conception of a transcendent reason able to separate itself from the body and the historical time and place.

It exposes political agenda, Western supremacy, the legitimacy of science to tell us how to use and view our bodies, and separation art/mass culture.These ideas are overlapping with previous feminist positions.

Jane Flask: Feminist theory dealing with the notions of the self, knowledge and truth belongs more with postmodernism than with the enlightenment. It shouldn’t use one aspect of women experience (giving birth etc) as an underlying factor in human oppression.  It’s not inclusive enough-so it’s against the political objective. (This idea is related to intersectionality.)

Politics of Location

Sandra hardig and…Are worried that eliminating cross-cultural notions will take the basis from under the concept of gender.

Susan Bordo: theorizing needs stopping points and gender is one of them. (Post modernism is too relativist without it). 
Postmodernism may affect the same kind of the historical erasure of the body, and thus erases the (beneficial) positioning in space and time that was present in modernism. 
In the Cartesian world there is no place for the body, since the body, by situating a perspective, prevents an all-encompssing perspective.

The dance in postmodern writing, description of the body as fragmented and changing and invites confusion of boundaries.

Linda Nicholson: Metaphor-the body has boundaries-just like theories.

The question:

Are coherent theory and politics possible within a postmodern position?

Yes-if the theory is well-constructed.

Probyn:                                                     

We always negotiate our locales-working to make sense and articulate both place and event. Women are never fixed within locale. (Localization, unlike locale, is physical.)
We may live in patriarchy but the struggle to rearticulate locale continues at different levels and in different ways.

10 Probyn and Bordo:

Mere abstract invocation of difference is a political act that can be conservative.

Locale is a process, negotiable, and it has its specific characteristics.

Political implications of postmodernism

11 Donna Haraway-Cyborg-a phenomenon that violates certain previously established distinctions, particularly between humans and animals, humans and machines, minds and bodies, materialism and idealism. It rejects prior hopes of unity and wholeness as expressed ideas such as unalienated labor, pre-Oedipal symbiosis, community as family and female as goddess.

It reveals a heightened consciousness of boundaries, whose dark side is individualism.                

Prior means of control and representation give way to new forms. Dark aspects but a freeing aspect too. Liberatory-from certain definitions. Women of color-identity constructed out of recognition of otherness and difference. 12.

Domination is not based on normalization and medialization, but through networking, communication, redesign of stress management. WE need politics that embrace the multiple and contradictory aspects of our identities.

Iris Young

Community-individualism: not as opposed as people used to think: both may negate difference. Liberal individualism: self-sufficient, not defined by anything or anyone other than itself. Community denies difference by positing fusion rather than separation as the social ideal. Discourages respect for those with whom they don’t identify.

Gender – the concept helps to understand human thought and behavior, which is a feminist accomplishment. It represents a refining of “humanity.”

15 Judith Butler-Gender trouble, feminist theory and psychoanalytic discourse             

A central basis of the essay is that gender identity is a regulative ideal which fundamentally assists the norm of heterosexuality. Notions of gender identity are not the point of our liberation but the grounding of our continued oppression.
(More later.)

INTERSECTIONALITY

Intersectionality as buzzwords/ Kathy Davis

The concept:

The interaction of multiple identities and experiences of exclusion and subordination.                 

It’s an important contribution for feminist scholarship. 
It has generated uncertainties, confusion and debate.

Davis claims based on Murray Davis that the concept's ambiguity and open-endedness are the secrets for its success, and it makes it good feminist theory.

68 Intersectionality refers to he interaction between gender, race, class and other categories of difference in individual lives, social practices, institutional arrangements and cultural ideologies, and the outcomes of these interactions in terms of power.

The term was coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 to address the exclusion of experiences and struggles of women of color both from feminist and anti-racist discourse.

A theory succeeds when it appeals to a concern regarded as fundamental by many scholars in a way that’s not only unexpected but inherently mystifying and open-ended.

70 This concept addresses the question of difference among women.

Matsuda 1991 :1189: suggested a method of asking “the other question”-when something looks sexist asks where’s the patriarchy in it/the heterosexism/class etc. (Already a cliché according to Davis.)

Intersectionality is related to black feminism and to postmodern feminist theory, and also to queer theory and diaspora studies.

History of it-p.73

What’s the TWIST?

It offered a novel link between critical feminist theory on the effect of sexism, class and racism and a critical methodology, inspired by postmodern feminist theory, bringing them together in new ways.  It solved the problems each group saw in the theory of the other, overcoming these incompatibilities, thus offering a new platform of collaboration.

Basic doubts:

Which and how many categories should be included?

Won’t the endless proliferation of difference be after all the weak spot?

Do we need to think across categories or focus on sites where multiple identities are performed?

What’s the scope of the analysis? Identity or detriment of social structure? Connection? Mobilization? Uncovering vulnerabilities?

It bridges between theorists and generalists.

77 Butler and Joan Scott- feminist theory needs to reach out to political objectives beyond these to which it was constrained.

Important notes-p. 79 with references.

81-Butler: categories: gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, able-bodiedness.

Luz Helma 2002: Categories: gender, sexuality, race or skin color, ethnicity, national belonging, class, culture, religion, able-bodiedness, age, sedentariness, property ownership, location (geographical), status in term of tradition and development.

The Politics of Postmodernism/ Linda Hutcheon 1990

Any attempt to define postmodernism would aim to say what it is and what it is not.

A phenomenon whose mode is contradictory and political. It takes the form of self-conscious, self-contradictory and self-undermining statement. A commitment to duplicity. It installs and reinforces while also subverting conventions.

Doxa=force of nature

Barthes: Doxa is public opinion or the voice of nature.

Foucault-power is not something unitary that exists outside us. It is spread across all fields of force.

Derrida-textuality and defferal

Layotard-intellectual mastery and its limits. 24-no unitary narrative but multiple ones.
Jameson 24-2.

Luiz Althusser-Marxist-notion of ideology both as a system representation and a necessary part of every social totality. 1969:231-2

By using and abusing general conventions and forms of representation postmodern art de-naturalizes them.

Postmodern critics acknowledge that the criticism is from their perspective.

Facts are events to which we have given meanings. (57)

We cannot avoid the past and escape it but need to access it through traces, come to terms and confront. (58) The history of representation.

About Narrative-p. 66

Postmodern theory doesn’t have an agency to cause change but it does question and does a de-naturalizing critique. It works to de-doxify.

In Hutcheon’s book the analysis focuses mainly on the ideological values and interests that inform any representation.

(Intersection): Nigel Wlliams’s 1985’s Star Turn (fiction) does not stop at the analysis of class difference: race is shown to enter into complicity with class on both formal and thematic levels of the novel. 5.

Postmodern theory and practice suggests that everything has always been culturally- mediated by representations.

No realism transparency.

No modern reflexive response

(Modernism-rationality, history as linear development, art vs mass culture centered subjectivity.)

p. 141 Postmodernism and feminisms

Feminisms-awkward and accurate. A multiplicity of POV’s that possess at least some common denomination when it comes to the notion of the politics of representation.

Politicizing desire-fear of disease, fetishization of fitness led to recessionary erotic economy. Problematizing the body and its sexuality-and the erotic is a part of it.

The body cannot escape representation-here: the feminist challenge to a patriarchal underpinning of cultural practices.  

Gendered art. (142-3)

Postmodernism is politically ambivalent for its doubly coded-complicitous with and contesting of the cultural dominants by which it operates. Feminisms have distinct, unambiguous political agenda of resistance. Feminisms radicalize the postmodern sense of difference and de-naturalized the traditional separation of private and public, personal and political. Both theories are interested in representations.

Sexual difference is continually reproduced.

Feminisms focus on politics of representation of knowledge, therefore power.

They made postmodernism think about the female body and its desires, and how its socially constructed through representation.

Visual or linguistic-it’s always systems of meanings operating with socially produced and historically conditioned codes.

144 Both theories de-doxify the notion of desire as individual fulfillment.                

Desire is a value of poststructuralist theory. It is also a norm of consumer society. (Marxists deconstruct it.)

145 Angela Carter’s Black Venus-Jeanne Duval denied Bauldaire his advances and wasn’t treated kindly by biographers though he had syphilis. Also he might have wanted more desire than consummation while she wanted sex. (paradox?) Her not understanding his poetry-occured simply due to language + he forced it on her. Manet painted her without sympathy. The woman is just a mediating sign for the male. Carter codes and re-codes the colonized territory of the female body. Erotic masculine fantasy Vs female experience…For the West Indian woman the island paradise he imagines is “glaring yellow shore and harsh blue skies.” (Very interesting.) Carter allows her to have back her history. 

Feminist theory and postmodernism influence one another in regard to change. Parody is postmodern strategy.

Problematizing gendered representations.

##

POSTMODERN THESAUROUS

Discourse, deconstruction, fragmentation, representation, subversion, questioning the center/universality/nature/truth, context, corporeality, language, system of meaning, resignification, power relations, counter-discourse, marginal, resistance, subversion, access to knowledge and power, the investigation of social, cultural and historical production of meaning, ambivalence.

The Empire Writes Back
Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literature is a 1989 Bill Ashcroft, eds. Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin

Bill Ashcroft: Re-placing Theory: post-colonial writing and literary theory (chapter 5)

Post-colonial literature and postmodernism

Post-colonial writing and literary theory intersect with the movement of poststructuralism, and Marxist and feminist criticism among others. There is an undeniable interaction. However, the appropriation of these recent European theories introduces the danger of going back to internationalist paradigms. 
Literature in the 20^th century is closely determined by its relation to imperialism. The best theory to analyse it is the post-colonial.

Modernism/colonial experience

Through modernism Europeans realized that their culture was one amongst the plurality of ways of conceiving reality and organizing its representation in art and social practice. (156)

African art, artefacts that arrived in Europe during the oppression generated interest and appeared in literature (D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow).

19^th century: “primitive” “savage”

20^th: re-discovery

This art called into question the European basic assumptions of aesthetics.

Slavic culture sought its roots and with this it questioned basic ideas of culture.

158 The African was unique, on the margin, positive and negative force in the European conception of itself. It was considered a prior stage, the dark side of the European (Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.)

Yeats: "After us the savage God." (The true face of the savage, a threat.)

World War I dismantled the belief in civilization. A tendency toward postmodernism to deconstruct the culture and discover the “Other” in the form of non-European culture in order to produce and reproduce European art. There is an effect on BOTH cultures.

Indian and Chinese cultures were more respected than African.

Hegel: defines the African continent as being “outside history”. It could serve as a mirror, as a negative of the positive, the black Other to the white norm, demonic opposite. 
Two main views: either horror or a liberating form from “civilization.”

(Rimbaud—Nicholson-his relations to Africa)

“Discovery” of Africa by Europe heads to rediscovery and self-doubt.

New criticism and post-colonial theory

Influential modern movement called the New Criticism: a product of the post-colonial USA: their intent to establish a literary canon against the English traditional supremacy.

They begin again with each work.
 It emphasizes the individual work.
It gave validity to work previously denied, including African.

The negative aspect: assimilation of post-colonial writers, assumption of objectivity, unseen in their context, unseen as innovative and subversive of European values.

Thanks to it, post-colonial criticism began to investigate theoretical problems in a different model of literature. Comparative study reveals postcolonial characteristics beyond national ones.

Postmodernism and post-colonial

Exposing formations as culture-specific.

Foucault: casts doubts on objective historical consciousness: the fictive nature of historical reconstructions. Despite the recognition of “otherness” structuralism and poststructuralism sometimes operate like Western historicizing consciousness to appropriate and control the Other.

Rather than seeing poststructuralism and postmodern as decentering forces, they reaffirm certain lit as subversive thus allowing USA to recapture their own culture through Eurocentric assumptions.   
USA is postcolonial too, which means both appropriation and subversion.

164 Intellectuals want to define themselves against their colonial past and against international postmodernism. In general, however, USA tends more toward postmodernism than toward post-colonial.

Post coloniality and contemporary European theory

Jen Francois Layotard 1979: narrative is an alternative mode of knowledge to science.

(Less text and more context.)

In oral societies narrative dominates and it’s an integral part of society, not a category above

Science classifies narrative as savage. This is the beginning of imperialism.

For him postmodernism will articulate a weave of practices grounded in the particular and local.

Post coloniality and discourse theory

167 A discourse in the Foucauldian sense is best understood as a system of possibility for knowledge.

Edward Said proposes “orientalism” as the discourse which constituted the Orient in the consciousness of the West. “such locales, regions, geographical sectors as “Orient” and “Occident” are man-made.” (1978:5)

To him, identity is constructed based on the difference (King or Stewart Hall won’t agree?) distancing from the center and self-assertion.

Foucault: The post-colonial discourse is grounded in a struggle for power over truth, the power focused in the control of metropolitan language. What rules allows the construction of maps.

Homi Bhabha: this struggle may mimic the struggle for colonial dominance. Solution-only in a theory that embraces difference and absence as material signs of power and not of negation, of freedom and not subjugation, creativity and not limitation.

Post-colonial theory can appropriate what it wants from the European system discoursive formations overlap and intersperse.

Counter Discourse-Richard Terdiman

1986-recognizes in language the material site of text’s social production.

Against the view of Saussure that language systems can be split into system of meanings and nonsystematic.

Agrees with Foucault that culture is a field of struggle.

169 Discourse comes into practice in a structure of counter-discursive practices. The conflict is not a contamination of the language but a defining function in power relations.

Post coloniality and theories of ideology

The works of Marxist critics-Althusser, Michel Pecheux, and Frederic Jameson is relevant to the problematic relation between language and literary practice addressed by post-colonial critics. (Bhabha 1984, 257) and to the problem of building an identity within the self-Other imposed by imperialism.

=creation of subjects through ideological language and practices. (Foucault).

Pecheux: 1.The good subject-identification, consent

2.The bad subject-counter identification-refuses the image offered and turns it back on the offerrer. “What you call the oil crisis.”

3. "Dis-indification”-recognizes that ideologies are transformable-working of the subject form and not just its abolition.

The meaning of words change according to who utters them.

Jameson-literature is informed by the political unconscious. Reading=unmasking.

Led to - Postcolonial narrative as reconstruction.

172 Jameson: The text transforms the historical subtext which it draws up into itself=a symbolic act, relationships between authors and their societies,
A book is more influential than the experience itself. (Jameson or Bhabha?)

Reciprocity between Other and self. The identity of the other doesn’t emerge only from ideology or resistance to ideology. 
In post-colonial society there’s a hierarchy and set relationships.

European postmodernism labels the world-again constructing peripheral and central areas.

…

174 Feminism and post colonialism

In many societies women have regulated the position of the “Other”.

The same concepts: language, voice, silence, mimicry, other, difference. (subaltern-Gayatri Spivak 1981)

Feminist critics reject the patriarchal bases of literary theory and criticism, subvert them and show their relativity.

Feminist and post-colonial discourses both seek to reinstate the marginalized in the face of the dominant.

They question, unmask. No inversion.  Rereading. Subversion of patriarchal literary forms.

Binarism-if we lose sight of it we may lose the problem of racism among others.

The projects of both discourses are directed toward the future. Intersections between the two.

177 The Politics of Theory-Decolonizing colonialist discourse

Through appropriation of poststructuralist theory critics offer ways to dismantle colonialism’s signifying system and exposing the silencing and oppression

Gayatri Spivak: Colonized women-a double subjection. There’s no space from where the subaltern (sexed) subject can speak.” (1985:122) -extended to the whole colonial world. There’s an absent of text that can answer epistemic violence.

Homi Bhabha disagrees: the colonized is indeed constructed within a disabling master discourse. Colonial discourse of ‘reform, regulation and discipline’ appropriates bad mimicry and the Other. But the subaltern has in fact spoken and thus, properly symptomatic readings can recover the native voice.

“Parry invokes Fanon as classic and alternative model whose position she characterizes as constructing a politically conscious unified Self…” She rejects both Spivak and Bhabha’s work as still connected to the same signifying systems, but her main complaint is their political ineffectiveness. (Total independence from the past despite Fanon’s int. Ascroft: she doesn’t speak about more complex colonialism-less military…180)

Ashcroft: Critical and creative post-colonial texts are hybrid. There are multiple forms of post-colonial difference-so hybridity will continue.

181 Post-colonial reconstructions: literature

Different styles: for instance: inherited from traditional, oral literature. Not linear, goes in swoops, reiterates, digresses off a new sudden idea etc. (Rushdie uses such narrative structure in Midnight Children.)

Cross-cultural literature. Combination of English styles with oral etc.

Reading without essentialism.

Return to traditional pre-colonial (indigenous) forms – brings a renewed sense of identity and self-value.

Meaning-how to read: three pillars: author, reader, text.

The text is the event. The participants may be absent.

Value-like meaning is “not an intrinsic quality but a relation between the object and certain criteria brought to bear upon it.” 187

Post-colonial as reading strategy (189)

“A canon is not a body of texts per se, but rather a set of reading practices (the enactment of innumerable individual and community assumptions, for example, about genre, about literature, and even about writing.”

A range of ways of engaging with texts from the canon have emerged…

Reading strategies, reconstruction, uncovering silences, showing the repression of the economic basis to civilized practices. Seeing the context, seeing its effects, revisioning in the light of post-colonial discursive practices. Subversive accounts.

Post-coloniality seen as a reading strategy and not as texts.

STUART HALL

From the Net-Signification is the meaning a culture gives.

Representation-comes through the language that gives meaning and signifies. The production of meaning is not fixed.

The media is one of the most powerful circulators on meaning.

Ideology is an attempt to fix meaning. 

Stereotypes-an attempt to fix meanings as well.

What you see/don’t see/expect or don’t expect to see in images. The absence of information subverts out expectations.

Making meaning-interpreting (contextually what is represented.

Stuart Hall: 1932-2014 (Thinking Allowed, 12/2/14) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g70bqF_1xAo

Born in Jamaica in 1932. His words: He was the blackest of the brothers. In Jamaica, your shade of color is the most important question. His mother never wanted to be Jamaican but “properly English.” Got to Oxford and realized he could not be “a part of it.” You can’t learn “Englishness”each learned text is a part of life. Became interested in contemporary cultural studies.

There is no authentic culture-culture is mixed and blended.  Mass culture coming from the US was also a significant place of culture-a lot of information. (Worked with Richard Hoggart.)

Looking at struggle and contestation.  
Class politics can’t be accepted. 
Came with coding and encoding, decoding images on TV-the hegemonic power transmits messages to people about race and class. 
Decoded in order to look at things differently.
In the end young people are going to be delivered into society as productive members but they can question.

Black politics-he wasn’t engaged in black community activity in the regular sense. 
The community found very little space especially in the academy. He focused on issues of identity and representation-realized there’s an opening (Caspar-resistance) resisting what the mainstream tried to impose upon people.

His disillusionment-a lot of rubbish mascaraed as culture. Didn’t want to interpret for others-they sought a new paternal role. He’s only interested in what can change the world. He is involved with cultural studies only in order to act socially, resistance -and not caricature, a generic study.

Lola Young: He kept negotiating different spaces and ideas regarding black people. Always in a dialogue with ideas and terms such as multi-culturalism (he rejected it because it became “harmony” fiction). 
He asked what kind of differences matter and how they are made to matter or to seem to matter in relation to race and ethnicity.

In the left people weren’t discussing race, gender et-as if asserting the classes everything else will fall into place, but he questioned everything.

Stuart Hall (Free Thinking, 13/12/04)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NSCjcyqIL50

His family orientation was toward England-critical of the Caribbean. A generation that decided they had to do something and get out-in order to go back. Didn’t have a moment of decision not to go back. He’s a part of the diaspora. It’s how life turn out. Discovered his Careabeanism only in London. Discovered who he was in West Indian. His mother said-I hope they don’t think you’re an immigrant-but that’s what he was. She said-black-and he realized he was black indeed. (It appears in his lecture). Identity doesn’t grow inside you-it’s a response from something of the outside and something of the inside.

Was interested in Henry James: very in-between: not American or European, wanting to go back but never would.

Multiculturalism (In Our Time, 13/5/99)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzarDosXIHM

Hall’s books (then) concentrated on cultural identity, race and ethnicity.

"The divisions between people provoked and exploited because of differences in religion, culture, nationality and race seem to beset the planet the more information technology promises globalization. A recent estimate put the figure of people living in a country other than the one of their birth at 80 million. Does this mean that, amongst these eighty million people, their country of origin, their sense of self, and their cultural history are no longer as significant as they were? And how are those eighty million people and their descendants accommodated in the country to which they have moved - do their lives exemplify the success of multicultural policies or are they subject to racism? Is it possible to define how attitudes to race and identity have changed this century, given its vast shifts of population, cultures and peoples?”

Stuart Hall: Immigration. Problems of both England and the immigrants. Questions of co-existing. The English expected them to go home-Hall just chose not to. Questions: “Who are you? Where do you belong? Knows welll both cultures.

The dream of both sides that full assimilation will happen-that after a generation or two the immigrants will totally mingle clearly fell. No side actually wanted it. 
Multi-cultural: make a common life together. Multi-cultural drift-many ethnic backgrounds-it just happened.

Dr Avtar Brah (passed through many immigrations Uganda-Pakistan -US-England (?)) 
Assimilation into what? The dominant culture talks about it, but when outsiders enter, the insiders change too. 
Many kinds of Orientalisms have been directed at her, but in England she was soon called “Paki”. Subjected to discrimination in direct and indirect forms. 
The British never conceived themselves as a group of ethnicities. USA yes. 
Colonial relations in Britain make it different. Self-conception of themselves-USA make "Americans" out of many ethnicities. 
Both England and USA were slave societies but the British colonial is different. It constructs relationships in a different way. 
In the US there’s an intimacy between blacks and whites. England constructed it as if the relations started in 1954-as if they didn’t know where the colored people came for. Reconstructed as if there isn’t a history-but the history comes back.

Ethnicity-constructing a sense of belonging for a group, where the boundaries are shifting.  -The question is always there: how a group construct itself differently.

20 minute Melvyn Bragg (interviewer)-Jews feel obliged both to England and Israel and contribute to both.

Hall-the Jews are almost assimilated-or appear to be so, unlike African-American. This is because of the crisis of what is the British identity. We need public value that valorizes difference.

Brah: not only ethnicity but also class. Jewishness-which group? Black Jews? Then it’s not Jewish per-se. We cannot forget the color. There’s a European Jew-a different debate.

Hall: race – we think about genetic differences but need to be thinking about negotiating it socially.

Brah: Communality of experience-like football team unite a group: it creates belonging. But also there’s the construction of race-where you are talked about as different and outsider.

Stigmatism and pragmatism. In a global world maybe we should start with small local groups.

Hall: There are attachments, but culture is moving, changing, influencing and is influenced, and locality has a response to the globe and immigration. A multicultural being comes out of this context.

Thomas King

Thomas King was born in Sacramento, California in 1943. His father is Cherokee and his mother is of Greek descent.

The Truth About Stories - Thomas King - Lecture 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzXQoZ6pE-M

Gloria Anzaldua

Borderland

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON GLORIA E. ANZALDÚA

Shifting Worlds, una entrada / AnaLouise Keating

Nepantla means in Nahuatl “in between space”, indicating temporal, spatial, psychic, and/or intellectual point(s) of liminality and potential transformation. “During nepantla individual and collective self-conceptions and worldviews are shattered.” 
Apparently fixed categories based on gender/ethnicity/race/sexuality/economic status/health/religion/different combinations of these and others become more permeable and begin to break down.

Nepantleras: mediators, in-betweeners, those who facilitate passage between worlds (“(Un)natural bridges” 1)

2-her life as nepntlera

It shapes her work and life. She challenges and deepens through words.

A great citation p.2-“I am a wind-swayed bridge…” (205)

Multiple allegiances and worlds. She rejects the need for unitary identities and exclusive alliances. All is based on affinities-“new tribalism”. 
 She moves between ad among worlds, like her writing.

(Good for characters’ analysis.)

She says that Borderland is a part of a much larger project.

Autohistoria=autofiction, self-awareness employed in the service of social-justice work.

Nepantla…pathway to change-citation p.6

Intersecting selves p.7-we are the other, the other is us…alliance between us and others.

Expanding the vision p.8 knowledge shares sense of affinity…
Potentially transformative elements of the theories of mestiza consciousness and others.

New tribalism-the queer group- “the people that don’t belong anywhere, not in the dominant world nor completely within our respective cultures.”