From within Germinative Stasis: Creating Active Subjectivity, Resistant Agency

Abstract

This writing is a personal engagement with Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera as a “text,”¹ a journey, that enabled me to occupy a resistant position. From within this position I learned to block the effectiveness of oppressive meanings and logics. This blocking is a constant, recurrent, first gesture in coming to understand the limits of the possible. The inhabitation of this place/vantage enables me to withdraw my energies from cementing and contributing to the relations of power that define me as servile or as nonsensical. This is a position of understanding myself as more than passive, docile, acceptable, within the “confines of the ‘normal’ ” (25). That is, I take lessons from Anzaldúa’s journey. But it is also a coming into intimate relation with Anzaldúa’s path to resistant meaning in a way that enables me to begin to know her. To inhabit a resistant terrain, a “vague and undetermined” space, is also a coalitional journey. It is this knowing each other that makes life livable.