Abstract
When Anzaldúa was writing in the 1970s and 1980s, she cut and pasted the pages she had written and distributed them in the room, lining them up all over the floor. On hands and knees, she tried to find the right order for words and concepts. She rearranged the pieces in new settings, gluing sentences and paragraphs together like a puzzle. This tactile dealing with text guided her way of constructing concepts. She did not aim for a linear, logical structure. When theorizing, she started, as she said, in the center and spiraled around, until she came back to a particular idea, expanding it to another, more complex level. Anzaldúa usually did not follow an academic abstract or outline, not even for her dissertation when her advisors expected her to complete and hand in one chapter at a time. Instead, Anzaldúa wrote her work at once and then reworked it as a whole, not knowing where she would end up (Anzaldúa 2000, 175, 2015c, 169).
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Radlwimmer, R. (2023). Scissors and Glue: Material Writing Dynamics. In: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Hemispheric Performativity. Literatures of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21870-5_2
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