ELIT 48C Class 36

Imply or Infer?

Imply / Infer

Imply means to suggest indirectly (you’re sending a subtle message).

To infer is to come to a conclusion based on information (you’re interpreting a message).

Chair Poet?

The poet is the priest of the invisible.

Wallace Stevens

AGENDALa conciencia de la mestiza/ Towards a New Consciousness

“El Sonavabitche” Postmodernism and Intersections of identity and oppression

Discuss

Five minutes!

Gloria Anzaldua was a self-described "chicana dyke-feminist, tejana patlache poet, writer, and cultural theorist."

Intersections of identity and oppression

As a Mestiza I have no country, my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are mine because I am every woman’s sister or potential lover. (As a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races.) I am cultureless because, as a feminist, I challenge the collective cultural/religious male-derived beliefs of Indo-Hispanics and Anglos, yet I am cultured because I am participating in the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet. Soy un amasamiento, I am an act of kneading, of uniting, and joining that not only has produced both a creature of darkness and a creature of light, but also a creature that questions the definitions of light and dark and gives them new meanings. (841)

Gloria Anzaldua is among the many feminist theorists that move into the realm of addressing postmodern identities. In her discussion of a new emerging consciousness in La conciencia de la mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness, Anzaldua suggests the construction of identities as multiple, hybrid, and more specifically, created as a result of the Borderlands, those spaces that intersect. While the people who live in the intersections are privy to a world others don’t see or understand, it is a space where cultures collide, often with incompatible values, opposing histories, and contradictory experiences. It can be difficult to be an individual, or member, of several social, classed, gendered, racialized groups but never feeling quite at home in either.

An example of the contradictions of which she speaks is through a brief discussion of the identities of women of color. For instance, if an African-American woman advocates for women’s rights, does this mean that femininity and the struggle against gender oppression takes precedence over her racial identity and her struggle against colonization and racial oppression?

The inverse question can also be asked. If an African-American woman of color takes a political stance for the end of her racial oppression, does this mean that she devalues her experience as being oppressed by her gender identity?

Anzaldua makes a plea to feminists to bridge identities and to understand identities as always being constituted in the Borderlands. The sorting out the contradictions embedded between these social identities requires a tolerance for ambiguity.

Discuss Postmodernism, or Feminist Theory, or Minority Theory in terms of Anzuldua

Multiple Languages Not understanding

Mixed Genres Embracing change Acknowledging difference

Blended Identities Living in ambiguity Living a narrative of fragmentation—not a neat

beginning, middle, and end.

Language and Postmodernism

1. Q: How does using Spanish in her work help Anzaldua give her theories more depth than just using English?

2. How does Anzaldua’s use of “Spanglish” affect the reader of her works?

3. How does Anzaldua’s use of Spanish support of take away from her writing?

4. Q: Is Anzaldua writing in both English and Spanish to describe how she is mixed and struggling in both worlds?

Queerness and Postmodernism Q: Can the same transcendent social power

with which Anzaldua imbues queerness be found in another groups? Can it be found in every person? Does Anzaldua inadvertently invoke a binary opposition between queer and non-queer, or Chicana and “other”?

Q: Why did Anzaldua say “colored homosexuals have more knowledge of other cultures” (844) when she refers to herself as “cultureless” ? (841).

Blended Identity Q: Does Anzaldua feel more empowered or

marginalized by her status as a mestiza? Q: Can a person who is fighting for the

rights of humanity labeled as one ethnic make, be a mestizo?

Q: How is Gloria Anzaldua’s La conciencia the answer or solution to the problems presented in W.E.B Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk?

Discuss themes or meaning in “El Sonavabitche”

The obvious themes in the poems are inequality, race, machismo, immigration, identity, and chicanismo.

“El Sonavabitche” documents and comments on the unjust treatment and advantages taken of undocumented field workers. One theme I find interesting is the way the law is manipulated as a means of profiting in the poem.

El Sonavabitche discusses the theme of power within the context of immigration. Many people have this power, the power of citizenship.

QHQ: “La Conciencia de la Mestiza” and Patriarchy

What does Gloria Anzaldua mean by “the new man needs a movement?” (844)

Q: How can men break free from being “fettered to gender roles” (Andzaldua 844)? And what can we do to make this a men’s issue while being sensitive to women, feminists and people who identify as LGBTQIA?

Q: Anzaldua calls white conventions patriarchal, but weren’t all old cultures patriarchal in some way?

Author Introduction: Maxine Hong Kingston

Maxine "Ting Ting" Hong Kingston grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Stockton, California. Born in 1940 to Tom Hong and Brave Orchid, Kingston is the oldest of her parents' six American-born children. Kingston's parents serve as the primary sources for the imaginative stories she writes. Part 1 of Kingston’s autobiography Warrior Woman is “No Name Woman,” a secret story of an aunt from China that she never knew she had.

HOMEWORK Read Maxine Hong Kingston

Warrior Woman: Part 1 “No Name Woman 793-801

Post #35: Choose one Discuss a theme or symbol from the

reading QHQ Comment on the text via a critical lens.