earticle

영어

Chicana feminist author, cultural theorist, and activist, Gloria Anzaldúa played a crucial role in transforming feminism into a more inclusive theory in the early 1980s by bringing into discursive focus a spectrum of differences: race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and so on. Her ongoing effort since then was to break down dualistic hegemonic paradigms and transform oppressive structures of power, while inventing new forms of subjectivity with new languages and knowledges for social change. Imbued with oppositional consciousness, the entire body of Anzaldúa's writings is characterized by resistance and rearticulation. As a Chicana lesbian writer, Anzaldúa challenged white middle-class feminists to address their biases on race, class, and other issues, and to recognize the presence of women of color in the front of feminism. As a gendered and racialized subaltern, Anzaldúa rewrote the myths of Malintzin, the Virgin of Guadalalupe, and La Llorna as well as the history of the Aztec origin of Chicano people, so as to create a counter-history for Chicana women who are doubly colonized by Chicano culture and by Anglo American culture. In so doing, she brought into light Coatlicue, a Mesoamerican Serpent Goddess, as a source of empowering modern Chicana women. In Coatlicue who represents a fusion of opposites, Anzaldúa found ways of healing the wounds inflicted by dualistic cultural logic and taking account of the conflicts and contradictions of her culture and her own being. Informed by Coatlicue and her modern counterpart, queer, Anzaldúa created a mestiza consciousness as an alternative to all binary modes of culture including feminist identity politics. A mestiza, as a form of subjectivity in the borderlands, enables us to deconstruct all unnatural boundaries set up by dominant power and hegemonic ideologies, and to build a coalitional network of struggle against the transnational militarist and corporate power of the globalized Empire.