Abstract
Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands has been celebrated across several fields, and yet little attention has been given to her engagement with disability. This article expands considerations of geographical and social mobility, so that they also take into account physical (im)mobility. Anzaldúa’s meditations on movement highlight a gap in borderlands literature to which a disability studies perspective has much to add: questions of mobility at the border raise awareness of the bodily violations that occur there among subjects with disabilities. I point toward alternative modes of mobility that surface in borderlands literature, ranging from spiritual movement in Anzaldúa’s Borderlands to rhythmic stasis in Gómez-Peña’s “Border Brujo” to creative and linguistic motion in Islas’s The Rain God. These forms pinpoint ways in which disabled Chicanas/os and Latinas/os can rerepresent their bodies as mobile.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Aldama, F. 2005. Dancing with Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas. Berkeley: University of California Press.
American History Museum. 2015. Conversations on Latino/as and the ADA. https://storify.com/americanhistory/conversations-on-latino-as-and-the-ada.
Anzaldúa, G. 2012. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, 4th ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
Baril, A. 2015. Transness as Debility: Rethinking Intersections Between Trans and Disabled Embodiments. Feminist Review 111: 59–74.
Bost, S. 2010. Encarnación: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature. New York: Fordham University Press.
Deleuze, G. 2004. In Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, ed. David Lapoujade. Los Angéles: Semiotext(e).
Dinshaw, C. 1999. Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Erevelles, N. 2011. Disability and Difference in Global Contexts: Enabling a Transformative Body Politic. New York: Palgrave.
Foucault, M. 1986. The Care of the Self: Volume 3 of The History of Sexuality. New York: Vintage Books.
Foucault, M. 1994. Lives of Infamous Men. In Power: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984, vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion, 157–175. London: Penguin Books.
Goffman, E. 1986. Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Gómez-Peña, G. 1991. Border Brujo: A Performance Poem. TDR 35 (3): 48–66.
Imrie, R. 2000. Disability and Discourses of Mobility and Movement. Environment and Planning 32: 1641–1656.
Islas, A. 1984. The Rain God. Palo Alto, CA: Alexandrian Press.
Islas, A. 2003. Swallow. In The Uncollected Works, vol. 3, ed. Frederick Luis Aldama, 163. Houston, TX: Arte Público Press.
Minich, J.A. 2014. Accessible Citizenships: Disability, Nation, and the Cultural Politics of Greater Mexico. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Minow, M. 1990. Making All the Difference: Inclusion, Exclusion, and American Law. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Ng, E. 1998. Linguistics and “The Linguistic Turn”: Language, Reality, and Knowledge. Berkeley Linguistics Society 24: 173–183.
Office of the President. 1991. Memorial Resolution: Arturo Islas (1938–1991). Stanford, CA: Office of the President, Stanford University.
Puar, J.K. 2015. Bodies with New Organs: Becoming Trans, Becoming Disabled. Social Text 33 (3): 45–73.
Toombs, S.K. 1988. Illness and the Paradigm of Lived Body. Theoretical Medicine 9: 201–226.
Wendell, S. 1996. The Rejected Body: Feminist Philosophical Reflections on Disability. New York: Routledge.
Williams, R. 1977. Structures of Feeling. In Marxism and Literature, ed. Frederick Luis Aldama, 128–135. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Withers, A.J. 2012. Disability Politics and Theory. Halifax: Fernwood Publishing.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Starkowski, K.H. Moving toward a disability-centric model of body politics in borderlands theory and fiction. Lat Stud 15, 498–515 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-017-0090-y
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41276-017-0090-y