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Queering and Gendering Aztlán: Anzaldúa’s Feminist Reshaping of the Chicana/o Nation in the US–Mexico Borderlands

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Abstract

Through the creative writings of Gloria Anzaldúa, Jiroutová Kynčlová reveals a feminist borderland reconceptualization of Aztlán, where patriarchy is subverted through combinatory narrative structures that merge the personal with the grand historical. These queered narratives of territory and family undermine hierarchical authority by transforming nationalistic male sovereignty into an inclusive non-heteronormativity. Anzaldúa emphasizes that external forces of oppression are not the only kinds that marginalized Chicana/o subjects confront; the dominant hierarchical distinctions are also internalized, creating subjects that perceive themselves as abject. Jiroutová Kynčlová suggests, following Anzaldúa, that queer identity (which Anzaldúa identifies as parallel to her notion of mestiza consciousness) offers a path of resistance to heteronormative, hierarchical, and androcentric discourse and its corresponding power structures, where borderland spaces can become sites of transformation.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Cf. Alma García, ed., Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings (London and New York: Routledge, 1997).

  2. 2.

    Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute, 1999), 25.

  3. 3.

    Ibid., 24–25.

  4. 4.

    Ibid.

  5. 5.

    Homi, Bhabha , The Location of Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 1.

  6. 6.

    At the time of the writing of Borderlands/La Frontera – The New Mestiza, 139 years had elapsed since the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo that established the US–Mexico border in its current form.

  7. 7.

    Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 24.

  8. 8.

    Robert McRuer , The Queer Renaissance: Contemporary American Literature and the Reinvention of Lesbian and Gay Identities (New York: University of New York Press, 1997), 128.

  9. 9.

    Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 24.

  10. 10.

    Ibid., 25.

  11. 11.

    Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus,” National Park Service, Accessed December 18, 2016, https://www.nps.gov/stli/learn/historyculture/colossus.htm

  12. 12.

    Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 24.

  13. 13.

    Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 25.

  14. 14.

    Ibid., 26.

  15. 15.

    McRuer , The Queer Renaissance, 131.

  16. 16.

    Ibid., 128.

  17. 17.

    Arturo J. Aldama, “Millennial Anxieties: Borders, Violence and the Struggle for Chicana/o Subjectivity ,” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 2 (1998): 52.

  18. 18.

    Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 26.

  19. 19.

    McRuer, The Queer Renaissance, 139.

  20. 20.

    Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 43–44.

  21. 21.

    Cf. Anne McClintock, “Family Feuds: Gender, Nationalism and the Family,” Feminist Review 44 (1993): 61–80. Nira Yuval-Davis, Gender & Nation (London, Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2005).

  22. 22.

    Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 109.

  23. 23.

    McRuer , The Queer Renaissance, 142, 143, 153.

  24. 24.

    Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 41.

  25. 25.

    McRuer , The Queer Renaissance, 128.

  26. 26.

    Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 41.

  27. 27.

    Ibid.

  28. 28.

    Ibid.

  29. 29.

    Sara Mills, Michel Foucault (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 33.

  30. 30.

    Judith Butler , Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London and New York: Routledge. 1993), 257; emphasis hers.

  31. 31.

    McRuer , The Queer Renaissance, 150.

  32. 32.

    Butler , Bodies That Matter, 124.

  33. 33.

    Butler , Bodies That Matter, 124.

  34. 34.

    Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 101.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., 102.

  36. 36.

    Ibid., 41, 42.

  37. 37.

    Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 42.

  38. 38.

    Gloria Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality , Reality. Ed. AnaLouise Keating (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2015), 67.

  39. 39.

    Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 43.

  40. 40.

    Elizabeth Jacobs, Mexican American Literature: The Politics of Identity (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 146.

  41. 41.

    Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, 85.

  42. 42.

    Anzaldúa, Light in the Dark, xxv.

  43. 43.

    McRuer , The Queer Renaissance, 145.

  44. 44.

    Rudolfo Anaya , “Aztlán: A Homeland without Boundaries” in Aztlán: Essays on the Chicano Homeland, eds. Rudolfo Anaya and Francisco Lomelí (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989), 241.

  45. 45.

    Bill Ashcroft , “Chicano Transnation” in Imagined Transnationalism: U.S. Latino /a Literature, Culture, and Identity, eds. Kevin Concannon, Francisco Lomelí, and Marc Priewe (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 14, 19, 27.

  46. 46.

    Gloria Anzaldúa, “Bridge, Drawbridge, Sandbar or Island. Lesbians-of-Color Hacienda Alianzas,” in Bridges of Power: Women’s Multicultural Alliances, eds. Lisa Albrecht and Rose M. Brewer (Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1990), 224–225; emphasis hers.

  47. 47.

    Ibid., 218, 219.

  48. 48.

    Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 25.

  49. 49.

    Rafael Peréz-Torres , Movements in Chicano Poetry : Against Myths, Against Margins (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 96.

  50. 50.

    Peréz-Torres , Movements in Chicano Poetry , 96.

  51. 51.

    Peréz-Torres , Movements in Chicano Poetry , 96.

  52. 52.

    Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 24.

  53. 53.

    Peréz-Torres , Movements in Chicano Poetry , 94.

  54. 54.

    Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 216.

  55. 55.

    Pierre Bourdieu , Masculine Domination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 35.

  56. 56.

    Cf. Sneja Gunew and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak , “Questions of Multi-Culturalism,” Hecate 12.1–2 (1986): 136–142.

  57. 57.

    Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak , “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).

  58. 58.

    Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 216.

  59. 59.

    Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera, 216.

  60. 60.

    Peréz-Torres , Movements in Chicano Poetry, 95.

  61. 61.

    Michel Foucault , The History of Sexuality . Volume I. An Introduction (New York, Pantheon Books, 1978), 100.

  62. 62.

    Anzaldúa, Borderlands/La Frontera , 217.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

    Tereza Jiroutová Kynčlová

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  1. Tereza Jiroutová Kynčlová
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  1. California State University, San Marcos, California, USA

    Jessica Elbert Decker

  2. California State University, San Marcos, California, USA

    Dylan Winchock

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Jiroutová Kynčlová, T. (2017). Queering and Gendering Aztlán: Anzaldúa’s Feminist Reshaping of the Chicana/o Nation in the US–Mexico Borderlands. In: Elbert Decker, J., Winchock, D. (eds) Borderlands and Liminal Subjects. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-67813-9_8

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