Nos/Otras

Gloria E. Anzaldúa, Multiplicitous Agency, and Resistance

Andrea J. Pitts

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781438484846
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Féminisme et théorie féministe

In a refreshingly novel approach to the writings of Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1942–2004), Andrea J. Pitts addresses issues relevant to contemporary debates within feminist theory and critical race studies. Pitts explores how Anzaldúa addressed, directly and indirectly, a number of complicated problems regarding agency in her writings, including questions of disability justice, trans theorizing, Indigenous sovereignty, and identarian politics. Anzaldúa's conception of what Pitts describes as multiplicitous agency serves as a key conceptual link between these questions in her work, including how discussions of agency surfaced in Anzaldúa's late writings of the 1990s and early 2000s. Not shying away from Anzaldúa's own complex and sometimes problematic framings of disability, mestizaje, and Indigeneity, Pitts draws from several strands of contemporary Chicanx, Latinx, and African American philosophy to examine how Anzaldúa's work builds pathways toward networks of solidarity and communities of resistance.

Chapter 1

Interpretive Threads of Anzaldúa’s Work

Existential Phenomenology

One prominent strand of Anzaldúa scholarship takes up resources within existential phenomenology to approach her work. This field has highlighted elements of multiplicity as an important experiential dimension of human life and has drawn from the tradition of phenomenology to frame and interpret the nature of experiences of multiplicity. As a general tradition, existential phenomenology has been characterized in a number of ways. Many researchers outlining the methodological or contentful contours of the field have tended to use a historical lens to trace the tradition’s coherence. Beginning with German authors like Edmund Husserl and Franz Brentano, scholars within existential phenomenology demonstrate how commitments to studying themes such as human consciousness, intentionality, and perception have shifted over several generations of thinkers to form a distinct phenomenological tradition.1 This tradition includes twentieth-century European writers such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Martin Heidegger. Other historiographers of this field focus on the “phenomena” or appearance of the world given to experience. In this, the interpretative stance is one toward orientation within the world and the lived experiences one has of the world, which can include racialized, sexual, and gendered forms of being.2 Within this framework, Latina feminists have long noted the thematic relevance within existential phenomenology for studying how racialization and gender processes shape our experiences of and orientations toward the world.

Jacqueline Martinez (2000) is among the first U.S. Latina authors to explicitly trace how Chicana feminism and existential phenomenology bear deep resonances and shared methodological aims. Martinez’s Phenomenology of Chicana Experience and Identity: Communication and Transformation in Praxis (2000) is a groundbreaking work that outlines how practices of cultural assimilation, homophobia, racism, and colonialism have shaped Chicana orientations toward the world. Her work examines the shaping of consciousness and embodiment, drawing from resources within Anzaldúa’s work. For example, la conciencia de la mestiza within Anzaldúa becomes thematized in Martinez’s work to express a shifting sensibility toward radical contingency and contradiction (Martinez 2000, 86). Paired with the work of Merleau-Ponty, Martinez argues that Anzaldúa honors phenomenological insights that unearth how embodied and historicized orientations in the world demand grappling with ambiguity and ambivalence, central themes that I address in chapter 3.

Linda Martín Alcoff also deeply engages the relationship between Latina feminism and existential phenomenology. In Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (2006), Alcoff draws from both Merleau-Ponty and Hans-Georg Gadamer to develop her conception of the “interpretive horizon” that is self-understanding (82). Alcoff, like Martinez, by including her own experiences and the writings of Anzaldúa, explores how Latina feminists have provided interpretive lenses that capture the deep incompleteness of philosophical understandings of the self. Alcoff’s view supports a conception of selfhood as an ever-unfolding process, which requires hermeneutic resources from a socially and historically embedded environment. Additionally, Alcoff’s work addresses mixed racial identities and colonial histories, themes we return to in chapter 5.

However, the philosopher who has perhaps done the most extensive analyses of the relationship between existential phenomenology and Latina feminism is Mariana Ortega, whose work since the 2000s has continued to expand questions regarding the relationship between the two fields. Ortega’s work is deeply inspired by both Latinx feminism and European strands of phenomenology, and similar to the ways in which theorists of phenomenology have reframed the question of agency through notions of intersubjectivity, Ortega develops a series of extensive arguments that explore the experiences and theoretical resources within the lives of Latinas. Specifically, Ortega develops a conception of multiplicitous subjecthood that offers a site for selfhood that is plural and impacted by multiple intersecting norms of identity with varying historical and hermeneutical resonances. Against a Kantian or Cartesian framing of subjecthood, Ortega elaborates the means by which Anzaldúa develops a form of multiplicitous selfhood that resists unified agential modes. Ortega examines whether Anzaldúa’s framing of identity would allow agents to simply choose their own specific identities (Ortega 2016, 45). Ortega explicitly rejects this position, arguing that the material situatedness of multiplicitous selfhood requires negotiations among differing positionalities, including those of social identity categories such as race, gender, class, ability, nationality, religion, and so on (74–76). Ortega notes that “as a self in process or in the making, the multiplicitous self is continually engaged in these negotiations, which include sometimes having to strategically deploy certain identities in certain worlds” (75).

Building on a productive tension present throughout Anzaldúa’s work, Ortega examines the relationship between unification and multiplicity within understandings of the self. Specifically, she proposes a kind of existential pluralism “that recognizes the individual and multiplicitous character of the self in terms of the way in which the self fares or is in different worlds” (89).3 Cleaving a difference between her view and that of another reader of Anzaldúa, Lugones, Ortega seeks to retain the important tensions of lived, experiential forms of heterogeneity, while also rejecting the stronger ontological pluralism that Lugones proposes. Ortega’s approach draws from a mode of consciousness whereby the self is multiplicitous in its experiential character, but singular in terms of its ontological status. Ortega’s view, then, interprets the functions of remembering oneself in different worlds and how first-person experience is possible under a many-selved view without assuming that a plurality of ontologically distinct selves are acting/existing in the world. To make sense of plural experiences, as Ortega proposes, does not require a plurality of selves that move across differing sites of sense and meaning. Rather, experiential differences arise from negotiations with meaning and power across different worlds. On this point, Ortega notes, “There is continuity in myself even when different aspects of myself are highlighted or covered over. … Whether I can highlight or cover over a particular characteristic of myself remains tied to normative structures” (101). Such normative structures, including those that clash or do not cohere neatly, thereby frame terms, meanings, and possibilities for understanding oneself across multiple sites, but do not require a multiplicity of selves that experience or undergo/negotiate those experiences.

I take this insight from Ortega’s phenomenological strategy as crucial to this book’s framing of multiplicitous agency. While Ortega notes that Lugones opts to move away from the language of “agents” and instead relies on notions of “active-subjects,” I would like to honor the interpretive importance of holding the meanings of actions made by an existentially multiplicitous self and the corporeal and ontological possibility of a plurality of selves. If we then further examine the need to negotiate meaning and self-understanding as an intersubjective process, what are these negotiations? Are there ways to negotiate our identities that are oppressive and constraining, and are there ways to strategize our identities that cleave open further possibilities for marginalized communities to strengthen their own self-definitions and shared efforts? To address these questions in the context of this book, understanding multiplicitous agency requires us to think through the locations and sites of enactment for selfhood that stem from these phenomenological investigations. Taking my lead from Ortega’s articulation of the multiplicitous self, I contend that agency is a pluralized site of historicity, material positionality, and meaning. The conception of social formation outlined in unified and individualized models of agency appears to presume a consistency among agents and their interpretive communities and a unified conception of intentional states that allow agents to uphold their normative, and, thereby, social commitments to one another. Yet our social lives and histories are more complex than that. Similarly, the lived experiences and histories of oppression, and the many resistant forms of mobilization against oppression, are more multifaceted than a series of shared deontic powers. Existential phenomenological interrogations into Anzaldúa’s work thereby help us address these questions by focusing on issues such as the functions of intersubjectivity in our experiences of ourselves, others, and the world. Specifically, unlike phenomenological framings that place self and world in a seemingly separate or dualistic relation, for example, that of Heidegger’s Dasein or José Ortega y Gasset’s “yo soy yo y mi circunstancia” (I am myself and my circumstance) (1961 [1914]), Latina feminist phenomenological framings of selfhood and world build from the deep multiplicity and interdependency of both seemingly distinct domains of experience, requiring that we take more seriously the plurality and relationality that constitute their stability/instability.4 Such frameworks also require us to consider the role of our social and historical contexts for understanding how the world appears to us as embodied multiplicitous agents who are capable of acting in the world. Lastly, such existential interpretations honor Anzaldúa’s commitment to exploring the depths of first-person experience, and, drawing from Alcoff, how the world appears from within a given embodied interpretive horizon.

Relational Ontology

A second relevant interpretive thread for this book is the shared reading by authors such as AnaLouise Keating (2015, 2008), Kelli Zaytoun (2015), and Robyn Henderson-Espinoza (2016). Delving into questions of intersubjectivity, these readers of Anzaldúa emphasize that within her work is a deeply relational approach within metaphysics. For example, Keating, in a book she edited, describes Anzaldúa as developing a “metaphysics of interconnectedness” that is based on what Keating calls a “constantly changing spirit or force that embodies itself in material and nonmaterial forms” (Anzaldúa 2000, 9). Several authors have described Anzaldúa as following a form of “animism” or “new animism,” the latter of which is, according to Keating, “an immanent materialism in which everything that exists is interconnected, conscious, and imbued with/composed of spirit, awareness, mind” (Keating, Zaytoun, and Dahms 2016, 205). Keating contrasts this “new animism” with forms of animism denigrated by anthropologists and philosophers. As part of a colonizing project aimed at primitivizing beliefs regarding consciousness, life, and the place of the human in relation to a given natural order, “animism” has been used to critique and reject the ontologies of colonized peoples across the world. Keating writes that Anzaldúa developed a metaphysics of interconnectedness throughout her work, and that the aim of such a philosophical project was to address deep “social injustices at a root level—to decolonize and, thus, transform the worldview (ontology, epistemology) that, she believed, was foundational to social injustice” (Keating, Zaytoun, and Dahms 2016, 206).

Adding to this interpretation, I would note that Anzaldúa was well aware of the criticisms used within the human sciences to reject relational views of ontology. She states in a 1986 talk at Vermont College that anthropologists like Claude Levi-Strauss and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl who offered depictions of the “primitive mind” of Indigenous peoples have discredited worldviews that value interconnectedness and relationality (Anzaldúa 2009, 105–106). Within such a colonial framing, she notes that rationality is assumed as the pinnacle of a given natural order, and with it, a conception of reality that privileges a kind of epistemological correspondence between rational human subjects and a world of objects. Yet Anzaldúa challenges this view by defending a conception of “spirit” that exceeds or resists such a correspondence view of the world. Such a view assumes that all things can be quantified and understood from an objective point of view. Moreover, as Henderson-Espinoza (2016) has explored, Anzaldúa’s view demonstrates deep affinities with a number of theorists in the Western tradition such as Baruch Spinoza, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson whose work likewise rejects conceptions of a pregiven natural order, and who turned to ontological conceptions of becoming (rather than being) to understand the role of the human knower within a broader relational framework.

Moreover, as Keating, Zaytoun, and Henderson-Espinoza point out, such an approach to metaphysics also stemmed from Anzaldúa’s affirmation and valuation of Indigenous ontological worldviews and from various forms of mysticism within the Western world. For example, one of her early poems in Borderlands/La Frontera, “Holy Relics” (1983), writes of Saint Teresa of Ávila, the Spanish mystic whose body was disinterred and torn apart in order to be used as relics in rituals of veneration for the saint.5 Additionally, as we explore in chapter 4, Anzaldúa had a keen interest in Mexica/Aztec creation stories and relied on these stories to frame critical aspects of her approach to embodiment and transformation.

Regarding religion, Keating argues that Anzaldúa’s conception of spirituality is “highly political, always embodied [and] has nothing in common with conventional forms of religion” (Anzaldúa 2000, 8). Read in this register, her work may tend to connote “New Age” forms of spiritual belief.6 However, despite “New Age” trends circulating in the 1970s, Anzaldúa’s work, Keating argues, is less based in the “personal desires and goals” of the predominantly white New Age movement of this period. Instead, Anzaldúa’s investigations into metaphysical questions regarding life itself, matter, and ecological relations stemmed from her lifelong commitments to social transformation. This “relational worldview,” Keating suggests through an extensive analysis of Anzaldúa’s works across her corpus, including “now let us shift” (2002) and “La Prieta” (1983), is meant to serve as a “holistic worldview to transform one’s self and one’s world” (2008, 54). Anzaldúa’s work aims toward collective and personal forms of transformation that honor the dynamic relations between all forms of existence, including epistemological beliefs, ancestors, artifacts, rocks, soil, water, our bodies, our imaginations, and the materiality of the languages we use to communicate. Accordingly, and as I argue throughout this book, this relational ontology within Anzaldúa’s work allows us to frame a conception of multiplicitous agency, a view about action that takes seriously such densely embedded material relationships.7

This metaphysical stance, also, as Keating argues, reframes the meaning of “matter” and works within a conception of material dynamism or process metaphysics. Rather than a substance ontology that considers the qualities of matter to inhere within a pregiven substrate, such a relational ontology relies on the continuously transforming relationships that give rise to conceptions of stability and fixity. All matter is constituted via relational movement and multiconstitutive interdependencies. Even objects of traditional philosophical analysis, such as human life, consciousness, rationality, and so on are redefined as relational and interdependent with others and the world, including interconnectedness with the very descriptive claims and questions that emerge about them. So, too, as I argue in this book, language and action are reframed as doings and meaning-making processes, rather than being driven by predetermined intentions made manifest in the world through individual actors.

In this thread, Zaytoun highlights the specific functions of storytelling within Anzaldúa’s writings to defend a reading of her work as “post-humanist.” Zaytoun writes that “contrary to the self-determined, self-sufficient humanist subject, Anzaldúan subjects are strengthened, not undone, in creative connection to humans and nonhuman matter” (2015, 2). In this, Zaytoun argues, alongside Keating and Henderson-Espinoza, that Anzaldúa should be read as a precursor to contemporary “new materialist” traditions within feminist theory. Often, she notes, Anzaldúa and other women of color authors are “underread and assumed to be focused on strictly identity politics and critiques of white privilege” rather than considered for their extensive work on philosophical projects dedicated to metaphysical and epistemological questions (11). Thus, following this thread, this book delves into Anzaldúa’s writings by engaging her on such philosophical terms, and I seek to develop an account of multiplicitous agency, including acts of self-writing, that build within a robust relational ontology.

Coalitional Politics

Lastly, it is important that such a relational approach does not lose grip on relations of power and struggle, and thus the third interpretive strand that I use to analyze her work stems from such a political project. The communities from which Anzaldúa began writing and shaping her theoretical views were deeply engaged in practices of movement building among women of color, for example. Her first coedited collection with Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, demonstrates her early commitments to working with a number of women of color writers engaging in a plurality of struggles. For example, Black feminist scholars such as Toni Cade Bambara, Audre Lorde, and Barbara Smith, as well as Native scholars Barbara Cameron (Lakota), Chrystos (Menominee), and Max Wolf Valerio (Kainai Nation), and Asian scholars Nellie Wong, Merle Woo, and Mitsuye Yamada were all contributors to the landmark collection. Each author presented differing dimensions of struggle for women of color, and showed the immense plurality and range of issues that they face.

On this point, Lisa Tatonetti has highlighted in her work how the contributions from Native writers in This Bridge Called My Back demonstrated the specificity of harms to Indigenous communities such as government boarding schools, the reservation system, Native urbanization, as well as the manner in which lesbianism or queerness has become “a barrier” to belonging within some Native communities (Tatonetti 2014, 6, quoting Max Wolf Valerio in Moraga and Anzaldúa 1983, 43–44). Additionally, the Combahee River Collective statement included in the volume attests to the forms of political mobilization among Black women, tracing nineteenth-century freedom fighters such as Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Frances E. W. Harper alongside feminist contributions to Black liberation struggles of the 1960s and 1970s (1983, 210–211).8 Rejecting white feminist separatism, the Combahee River Collective voiced solidarity with Black men and their shared struggle against anti-Black racism and racialized sexism (213). Within this framing, the authors of This Bridge Called My Back navigated a number of important differences among communities of color and t...