Contemporary American Women Writers

Gender, Class, Ethnicity

Lois Parkinson Zamora

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317893059
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This collection brings together critical essays that examine questions of identity and community in the fiction of contemporary American women writers among them Alice Walker, Toni Morrison and Sandra Cisnernos. The essays consider how identities and societies are dramatized in particular works of fiction, and how these works reflect cultural communities outside the fictional frame - often the communities in which their authors live and work. The essays included here concern fictional representations of African American, Latino, Asian American, Native American, Anglo and Euro-American communities and their working interactions in the multicultural United States. Each critic asks, in his or her own way, how a particular writer transforms her social grounding into language and literature.The introduction includes an overview of the range of literary criticism devoted to contemporary American women writers, and an extensive bibliography of complementary critical readings is provided to encourage further study. Undergraduate and postgraduate students of contemporary literature will find the text an invaluable guide to contemporary women's writing in America, and the range of criticism that this has given rise to.

1 Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La frontera: Cultural Studies, ‘Difference’, and the Non-Unitary Subject*

YVONNE YARBRO-BEJARANO

Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano is a leading example of the creative eclecticism characteristic of critics working in this area. Her discussion of Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza concerns 'identity polities', which she approaches by means of a variety of Anzaldúa's 'new paradigms': 'mestiza consciousness', 'border consciousness', 'Coatlicue state', etc. These terms call attention to the multicultural contexts they address: hispanic and anglo cultures in the United States, as well as the indigenous Mexican heritage and the gender crossings symbolically encoded in the Aztec goddess Coatlicue.

Beginning with an array of theories of difference and adding an anthropological element of her own, Yarbro-Bejarano constructs a polemical response to imposed structures of gender and cultural identity, in which feminist and postcolonialist critiques overlap. The unstated premise of Yarbro-Bejarano's argument is that if inherited boundaries among cultures, languages, gender scripts and class divisions can be 'transgressed', autonomy and solidarity, selfhood and community can be achieved. Such transgressive tactics as Yarbro-Bejarano finds in Anzaldúa's text are aimed at enabling Chicanas to become 'self-writing', self-determining subjects. This essay, like Anzaldúa's text, is impelled by an implied idealism: the 'neither/nor' of Anzaldúa's 'boundary state' contains the potential 'either/or' of 'the new mestiza'.

In 1979, Audre Lorde denounced the pernicious practice of the 'Special Third World Women's Issue' (100). Ten years later, the title of one of the chapters in Trinh T. Minh-ha's Woman, Native, Other – 'Difference: A Special Third World Women's Issue' – alludes to the lingering practice of acknowledging the subject of race and ethnicity but placing it on the margins conceptually through 'special issues' of journals or 'special panels' at conferences. In her 'Feminism and Racism: A Report on the 1981 National Women's Studies Association Conference', Chela Sandoval critiqued the conference's structure, which designated one consciousness-raising group for women of color yet offered proliferating choices for white women (60). Nine years later, a conference at UCLA on 'Feminist Theory and the Question of the Subject' replicated this scenario, presenting a plenitude of panels on different aspects of the question of the subject, while marking off a space for 'minority discourse' that simultaneously revealed the unmarked status of the generic (white) subject of the other panels. Isaac Julien and Kobena Mercer, the guest editors of a special issue of Screen, formulate its title as an ironic question: 'The Last Special Issue on Race?' They point out that the logic of the 'special' issue or panel 'reinforces the perceived otherness and marginality of the subject itself'. In their critique, they invite us to identify the relations of power/knowledge that determine which cultural issues are intellectually prioritized in the first place . . . to examine the force of a binary relationship that produces the marginal as a consequence of the authority invested in the center.

The persistence into the 1990s of discourses and practices that reinscribe the margin and the center indicates the problems inherent in theorizing 'difference'. In 'The Politics of Difference', Hazel Carby suggests that discourses on difference and diversity in the 1980s functioned to obscure structures of dominance. Linda Gordon offers a 'white-woman's narrative and perspective about the appropriation of the notion of differences among women by a white-dominated women-studies discourse' in her article 'On Difference' (100). The reinscription of the politics of domination within the discourse on difference inheres in part in the practice of theorizing difference within a paradigm that implies a norm and the tolerance of deviance from it (Gordon 100 and Spelman). The 'additive' model, in which heretofore excluded categories are 'included' in an attempt at correction, works against understanding the relations among the elements of identity and the effect each has on the other (Spelman 115 and Uttal).

This critique has been accompanied by an awareness that the failure to produce a relational theory of difference (Lippard 21) is not just a sin of omission, a result of 'laziness or racism', but points to a profound 'conceptual and theoretical difficulty' (Gordon 101–2). What is needed is a new paradigm that permits the expansion of categories of analysis in such a way as to give expression to the lived experience of the ways race, class, and gender converge (Childers and hooks). The writing of women of color is crucial in this project of categorical expansion, producing what Cherríe Moraga calls 'theory in the flesh' (Moraga and Anzaldúa, Bridge 23). This embodied theory emerges from the material reality of multiple oppression and in turn conceptualizes that materiality. The embodied subjectivities produced in the texts of women of color allow for an understanding of 'gendered racial identities' or 'racialized gender identities' (Gordon 105).

Cultural studies would appear to provide ideal terrain for the mapping of this new paradigm, with its 'commitment to examining cultural practices from the point of view of relations of power' and its understanding of culture as both 'object of study and site of political critique and intervention' (Grossberg et al. 5). However, it is important to keep in mind that the current attention to the intersections of race, nation, sexuality, class, and gender within cultural studies is the result of struggles initiated by people of color within the British movement to construct 'new political alliances based on non-essential awareness of racial difference' (Grossberg et al. 5). Lata Mani and bell hooks, among others, express concern at cultural studies' potential failure to articulate a new politics of difference – 'appropriating issues of race, gender and sexual practice, and then continuing to hurt and wound in that politics of domination' (hooks, Discussion 294).

In what follows, I will examine Gloria Anzaldúa's theory of mestiza or border consciousness and its contribution to paradigmatic shifts in theorizing difference, as well as contentious issues in the reception of this text: on one hand, the enthusiastic embrace of Borderlands/La frontera: The New Mestiza by many white feminists and area scholars and, on the other, the critiques voiced by some critics, particularly Chicana/o academicians.

Given the above discussion on the conceptual difficulty in theorizing difference, it is understandable that a text like Borderlands would be warmly received. But, as Chandra Talpade Mohanty points out, the proliferation of texts by women of color is not necessarily evidence of the decentering of the hegemonic subject (34). Of crucial importance is the way the texts are read, understood, and located. Two potentially problematic areas in the reception of Borderlands are the isolation of this text from its conceptual community and the pitfalls in universalizing the theory of mestiza or border consciousness, which the text painstakingly grounds in specific historical and cultural experiences.¹

Unlike Sandoval's use of the adjectives 'oppositional' or 'differential' in her theory of consciousness,² Anzaldúa's choice of the terms 'border' and particularly 'mestiza' problematizes the way her theory travels. Clearly, non-Chicana readers and critics may relate to the 'miscegenation' and 'border crossing' in their own lives and critical practices. For example, in her discussion of David Henry Hwang's play M. Butterfly, Marjorie Garber uses the term border crossings' in a way similar to Anzaldúa to describe the activity of presenting binarisms (West/East, male/female) in order to put them into question (130). The point is not to deny the explanatory power of Anzaldúa's model, but to consider the expense of generalizing moves that deracinate the psychic 'borderlands' and 'mestiza' consciousness from the United States/Mexican border and the racial miscegenation accompanying the colonization of the Americas that serve as the material reality for Anzaldúa's 'theory in the flesh'. If every reader who identifies with the border-crossing experience described by Anzaldúa's text sees her/himself as a 'New mestiza', what is lost in terms of the erasure of difference and specificity?

Other readings are possible that resist the impulse to read the text as one looks in a mirror. Elizabeth Spelman cautions against what she calls 'boomerang perception: I look at you and come right back to myself' (12). Appropriative readings are precluded by the constant interrogation of the conditions and locations of reading. It is one thing to choose to recognize the ways one inhabits the 'borderlands' and quite another to theorize a consciousness in the name of survival, to transform 'living in the Borderlands from a nightmare into a numinous experience' (Anzaldúa, Borderlands 73).

A useful strategy in teaching or reading Borderlands is to locate both reader and text: the reader, vis-à-vis plural centers and margins, and the text, within traditions of theorizing multiply embodied subjectivities by women of color³ and living in the borderlands by Chicanas and Chicanos. Contextualizing the book in this manner, rather than reading it in a vacuum, helps avoid the temptation to pedestalize or even fetishize Borderlands as the invention of one unique individual. Given the text's careful charting of mestiza consciousness in the political geography of one particular border, reading it as part of a collective Chicano negotiation around the meanings of historical and cultural hybridity would further illuminate the process of 'theorizing in the flesh', of producing theory through one's own lived realities. Angie Chabram-Dernersesian documents Chicana texts dating from the early 1970s that represent 'shifting positionality, variously enlisting competing interests and alliances throughout time and space' and 'multiple evocations of a female speaking subject who affirms various racial identities' (85–9). Women of color thinkers such as the writers in Bridge and Sandoval were developing notions of multiple subjectivity in a context of political resistance in the early 1980s. In the mid-80s, Chicano artists such as David Avalos and the Border Arts Workshop attempted to expose, or even to celebrate, the political and economic contradictions of the border that sustain the officially illegal but unofficially sanctioned market in undocumented workers from Mexico. In Chicana/o criticism, the border constitutes a powerful organizing category in such works as Sonia Saldívar-Hull's 'Feminism on the Border: From Gender Politics to Geopolitics' and the collection Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology, edited by Héctor Calderón and José David Saldívar.

In her discussion of 'deterritorializations', the displacement of identities, persons, and meanings endemic to the postmodern world system, Caren Kaplan examines the process of 'reterritorialization' in the movement between centers and margins and how that process of reterritorialization is different for First World and Third World peoples. For Kaplan, the challenge of the First World feminist critic is to avoid 'theoretical tourism' (or in the case of Anzaldúa's text, becoming 'boarders in the borderlands'), to avoid 'appropriating . . . through romanticization, envy, or guilt' (194) by examining her simultaneous occupation of both centers and margins: 'Any other strategy merely consolidates the illusion of marginality while glossing over or refusing to acknowledge centralities' (189).⁴ Rather than assuming Anzaldúa's metaphors as overarching construc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• General Editors' Preface
• Publisher's acknowledgements
• Author's acknowledgements
• Introduction: Moveable Boundaries – Public Definitions and Private Lives
• 1 Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La frontera: Cultural Studies, 'Difference', and the Non-Unitary Subject
• 2 Subject, Voice, and Women in Some Contemporary Black American Women's Writing
• 3 Questioning Race and Gender Definitions: Dialogic Subversions in The Woman Warrior
• 4 History, Critical Theory, and Women's Social Practices: 'Women's Time' and Housekeeping
• 5 Making Familia from Scratch: Split Subjectivities in the Work of Helena María Viramontes and Cherríe Moraga
• 6 Native American Aesthetics: An Attitude of Relationship
• 7 Claiming and Making: Ethnicity, Gender, and the Common Sense in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God
• 8 Initiation in Jamaica Kincaid's Annie John
• 9 The Geography of Female Subjectivity: Ethnicity, Gender, and Diaspora
• 10 History, Memory and Language in Toni Morrison's Beloved
• 11 History, Postmodernism, and Louise Erdrich's Tracks
• 12 Literary Foremothers and Writers' Silences: Tillie Olsen's Autobiographical Fiction
• 13 A Perfect Marginality: Public and Private Telling in the Stories of Grace Paley
• Selected Bibliography
• Notes on Authors
• Index