- Published on
There are a few feminist theorists I return to, over and over and over again. Sometimes, as with Simone de Beauvoir, it’s because of their intellectual audacity. Sometimes, as with Shulamith Firestone, it’s because they propose ideas so radical they take my breath away, even fifty years after they were published. Sometimes, as with Audre Lorde, it’s how they use metaphor to make powerful arguments about racism and the limits of feminist community.
I turn to Gloria Anzaldúa both because of the depth and lyricism of her writing (it’s gorgeous writing), and because of the way she asks readers to imagine and dream in and through the margins. In Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Anzladúa draws from her own experiences growing up at the Texas/Mexico border to interrogate what it means to live as a mestiza: in the borderlands, the space between cultures, worlds, languages, identities. As a book, Borderlands/La Frontera lives between languages (English, Spanish, Indigenous) and also between genres (poetry, prose, memoir).
“As a mestiza I have no country,” writes Anzaldúa,
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. (Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Third Edition, Aunt Lute, 1987, p. 102-3)
“Soy un amasamiento. I am an act of kneading.” This, I believe, is the work of feminism: to dwell in the intersections, and to knead in the borderlands, the margins, the edges, the frayings, the knots, and the tangles.
Feminism isn’t easy; it never has been and it never will be. For me, it exists not in rallies or slogans or t-shirts or shouting in the streets or commodified self-care candles, but in the hard conversations, the difficult silences, the careful navigations, and the mess of it all. Feminism is about sitting with discomfort and trying to figure out why.
Politics is messy because we, the humans who created it, are messy. Feminism for me about really thinking deeply about the possibilities – and perils – of alternative worlds, and finding ways to work towards them.
Sonja Boon
*
Sonja Boon is a mixed-race writer, researcher, flutist, teacher, and stitcher of stories. She is an adjunct professor in Gender Studies at Memorial University. Read more.