El Mundo Zurdo 7

Selected Works from the 2018 Meeting of The Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa

Sara A. Ramírez, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Larissa M. Mercado-López

• Publisher: Aunt Lute Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781939904355
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria feminista

A collection of diverse essays and poetry that offer scholarly and creative responses inspired by the life and work of Gloria Anzaldúa, selected from the 2018 meeting of The Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa.

QUEERING NATIONS AND IMAGINATIONS

QUEERING TERRORISM

DISRUPTING THE TERRITORIALIZATION OF GENDER THROUGH CONVERSATIONS ABOUT THE BORDERLANDS OF BODY AND NATION

LOBAT ASADI & MARIO I. SUÁREZ

INTRODUCTION

El Mundo Zurdo, the left-handed Anzaldúan world, nudges those concepts that have been neglected and hidden in normative society to shine light on the issues that remain dark, much like that which lurks in the periphery of Anzaldúa’s writing—indigenous wisdom about gender. We, the authors, Lobat, a cisgender female, and Mario, a transgender male, investigate post-gender space by disrupting modern paradigms about what it means to be in brown bodies that instill territorial fear over the borders of nationality and gender. These lingering and disturbing issues of colonialism continue the oppression of brown women and transgender people. We assert that genderism and transphobia exist in our everyday spaces and conversations. Heteronormativity and nationalism alone may have the potential to impact identity, but when these norms are questioned through self-reflective shadow work, we learn to illuminate those engendered perceptions. Through duoethnography, our voices queer gender norms and expose how that queering can impact one’s identity both with and without societal identifications. Thus, we reflect on our friendship as a heightened awareness in the form of binary resistance with respect to the interconnectedness of respective gender roles and expectations.

Anzaldúa (23) offers insights about a new indigenous mestiza consciousness that emphasizes intersectionalities that emerge from the physical and astral spaces of the borderlands and evoke non-binary paradigm shifts. Similar to control over female bodies, in order to control neoliberal economic gains, geographic borderlands have been created to legitimize poverty on one side and encourage working class labor under the premise of a more glamorous life on the other side of the Rio Grande River (Noguera 314). We argue that patriarchal figures of cultural domination have created fictitious explanations of gender which have caused binary terrorism in the bodies of people. Women are either fetishized or mutilated in order to possess and propel biopolitics (Puar 522). Thus, we attempt to merge indigenous knowledge, while acknowledging it is not monolithic, with Western thought that may have appropriated and commodified practices. This response comes as a result of the fetishism of the female body that has induced personal traumas, thus these power structures that control femininity must be deconstructed in order to complicate the current issues in gender that we have faced. We ask: What are some ways in which two people with seemingly different upbringings and backgrounds find similarities on issues relevant to ways of thinking about engendered discrimination?

METHOD

In typical ethnographies, participants state their gender and background to presume a so-called realist account (Denzin 4). That normalizing practice is part of a larger “crisis of representation” (Denzin 9) in which anthropology and its sibling ethnography have used to represent cultural phenomena. After four centuries of land occupation and the impact on people of color in North America, we have opted to draw upon indigenous knowledges to focus on our intersections as participants in this self-study. As gatekeepers of gender non-conformity, our respective yet dual self-exploration organically flowed into the shadow work of autohistoria-teoría (Anzaldúa 169) because it was an intervention “into and transformations of traditional Western autobiographical forms” (Anzaldúa 9). Realizing the potential of this assemblage, we decided to blend cultural and personal biographies with memoir, myth, personal (her)histories and storytelling in the form of a duoethnography.

Duoethnography, conceptualized by Norris and Sawyer, is a methodology rooted in post-colonial inquiry that stems from Pinar’s process of self-reflection in curriculum studies known as currere, in addition to storytelling (Norris 233): “Their stories weave back and forth in juxtaposition to one another, creating a third space between the two into which readers may insert their own stories,” (Norris 234). Through our conversations and re-storying, we discovered how we have both been living in “undocumented” bodies.

POSITIONALITY

Lobat is a cisgender woman, a naturalized U.S. citizen, hailing from the national borders of Iran, and is ethnically half-indigenous to Central Asia—the Lor Bakhtiari tribe. Mario is a transgender Latinx man from the Texas-México border, born to a Mexican-American mother and a Mexican father. When responding to this self-illuminating urge towards mutual understanding, both sensed a need for a critical friendship to develop as they met walking on the same path—in the between spaces. When concepts fail to describe one’s state of existence, due to their systemic restrictions, spaces of liminality can emerge (McLaren 92). That is, we both occupy spaces between two different worlds or cultures. This crossing of dimensions, in which our hybrid identities are validated because binary dominant normativity does not exist, challenges Anglo structures and territories. Thus, border identity is an “anticentering experience” of postimperial spaces, while housing cultural possibility.

Intersectional (Crenshaw 139) peoples identifying as hybrids of Latinx, immigrant, subaltern, and especially transnational women of color, disabled women of color, and LGBTIQ+-identifying women of color have been omitted from common discourse. When intersectional identities cannot be placed in clearly defined binary categories, they may accrue less social and cultural capital within a nation (Bourdieu 17). Thus, people who live in the periphery are deemed to be inferior or unworthy through unspoken expectations and resultant judgement, which results in implicit oppression. The authors, embodying intersectional identities, inhabit the crossroads of their identities as a transgender man from the borderlands and a non-gender-conforming cisgender woman from Iran—in the Anzaldúan (243) sense of a Nepantla consciousness. This shape-shifting awareness may be a socio-spatial understanding of each one’s marginalization. In this way, the multiple forms of oppression—social, cultural, national—that each person faced, was palpable. While developing a critical friendship, Mario’s and Lobat’s known yet unspoken spaces of existence emerged as sources of strength.

THE PHOTOVOICE PULSE STUDY

Initially brought together in 2016 by a study about the Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting in which 49 LGBTIQ+ people were killed, Lobat and Mario became inspired by reflections of the participants of the study. After interviewing the participants, Lobat and Mario shared their feelings with one another about gender, sexuality, and “outness.” In this way, a parallel track of inquiry emerged and resulted in a duoethnography around personal feelings of liminality, queerness, and associations with the physical and mental borders of territory. Thus, two forms of territorialization emerged in this duoethnography, both of which fall under nation building: a) binary enforcement through cultural and medical oppression of bodies and b) hybridized identities disrupting the standards of nation-building.

LOBAT ASKS WHY MARIO DEVELOPED THE PULSE STUDY:

The Pulse nightclub shooting has produced a different reaction for me (Mario) than it might for another person, as I am a Latinx transman from the Texas-México border. I still remember the day I heard about the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida. My wife, a cisgender female, and I had traveled to El Paso, Texas, for my top surgery with one of the premier surgeons in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua. Upon hearing of the news of the massacre, I remember crying at night for several days, watching the news and my social media newsfeed, hearing the stories of the victims. That could have been me or any one of my friends. I have always sought refuge in the lesbian and gay community, so I was drawn to this study in order to further understand how my LGBTIQ+ siblings processed their grief after the event.

MARIO ASKS LOBAT WHY SHE WAS DRAWN TO LGBTIQ+ RESEARCH:

The Pulse study was like witnessing love conquer violence. I (Lobat) had witnessed how gender norms and human sexuality have been fought way before my own realizations by courageous, non-heteronormative souls such as those I was interviewing for Pulse. Through this work, I realized I have always questioned my expected role(s) and desires as a woman. Thus, I began to question whether in fact they were mine or the result of environmental brainwashing. I was inspired by the brave participants in the study and wanted to face my gender after having a hysterectomy in 2016. If the womb has been removed, what is the female body comprised of? Clearly, it is a bag of hormones coupled with societal expectations. When modern medicine removes these reproductive parts, they are, arguably, also removing the physical constructs of the female gender. Yet, we are still expected to perform and present as women.

TOWARDS NEPANTLA

Nepantla is a space where the queer become entrenched and thrive, and the pathway for artists to become shamans (Anzaldúa 181). Anzaldúa describes nepantleras as people who are mediators that can assist the passage into other worlds. For Anzaldúa, that third space may be unsafe but can also serve as a bridge where humans may find they have more in common with each other than previously anticipated (The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader 243).

Mario asks: “Is Nepantla a transition toward something? Is it okay for a person to remain in transition forever? In a way, is society working towards something that might not exist in the neo-colonial world?”

Lobat responds:

Yes. The neo-colonial is meant to be closed off with defined, albeit arbitrary borders. Yet, Nepantla seems like an organic place you cannot access forcefully, that is why Anzaldúa said borderland artists could enter it. So, I am intrigued by the point you make about remaining in it. Have we always been ambiguous? We both suffered until we became comfortable with gender ambiguity, however. It is just that we are okay with that ambiguity at this point in our respective lives. I see that we both thrive in this intersection, yet the outside world struggles and thus we remain in Nepantla. For me I think it is also a place of refuge.

MARIO INTERROGATES THE SOCIO-SPATIAL UNDERSTANDINGS OF NEPANTLA:

Some people prefer staying in that in-between for different reasons, some societal, some physical—those in third gender and with gender nonconforming identities. As such they are able to genuinely and safely be themselves. In El Mundo Zurdo, it could well be that one is always in a state of transition working towards something that we might never get to, whether it be equality, gender, anti-racism, or something else. How do you feel, Lobat, about being ambiguous in the neo-colonial world? Would you prefer to stay in Nepantla?

LOBAT ADDRESSES RESIDING IN A SPACE PERCEIVED AS BEING OF CONSTANT TRANSITION:

While I am content with my decision to not procreate, not being able to fit into that maternal category causes judgment or I am simply omitted. I conceive of myself as post-female now and as such I seek refuge in Nepantla. Furthermore, I find that in la frontera where the transborderists reside, I can sit comfortably within that ambiguous space. Ironically, it is within this indeterminate vortex that I feel I am at home. I become lost in my memories of the deserts of the Middle East and recollect my father’s stories about our tribe who lived off the land. The borders and barriers I live with today as a North American and as a woman confine me.

SKINWALKERS

Over one year of such conversations, Mario and Lobat shared creation stories and discovered that they both dwelled within Anzaldúan Mundo Zurdo, not as touristic trespassers, but as permanent residents constructed by a spell that was both physical and spiritual. They inhabited this space for different reasons, yet these very differences have become a source of comfort, too, so they stayed within the membranes of this Nepantla cell, exploring and comforting one another and have yet to leave. Mario, born of the borderlands, physically and spiritually, grew up within liminality as he always wanted to physically look more like his brother and not be confined to activities set for little girls. On the other hand, Lobat never felt like she fit into America nor that Iran was her home. She lived between and betwixt notions of home, identity, and, as she would later discover, heteronormativity. In fact, both had been living under highly policed, regulated, and monitored borders of so-called normativity within neoliberal borders of nationalism. Yet, in order to survive in the neocolonial world, they both respectively learned how to become skinwalkers.

An elder in the Lipan Apache tribe, Julia Nava, defined the skinwalker phenomenon as a person who is walking as a human on Earth, but is unconscious about what is happening to the planet because they are not fully awake. According to Nava, this is because they have “fallen in love with themselves as skinwalkers and perceive themselves as their assigned human skin on this planet” (interview). Thus, their ancestral stories have been lost because they desire their material stories and power stances more than the genetic, ancestral memories buried within the fibers of their skin. In a sense, Mario and Lobat may have been skinwalkers at one time. Yet, within the physical and astral spaces of Nepantla, they both faced gender rebirth(s) and unraveled their struggles to emerge as the artists of their own bodies and their creators of their own mythologies.

MARIO DISCUSSES FEMALE SOCIALIZATION FROM A LATINX TRANSMAN’S PERSPECTIVE:

I have always been more comfortable working and speaking to cisgender women about my experience. Perhaps it is because I was brought up by mostly Mexican females, as a female, on traditional Mexican gender roles. As a result, I think I have always had difficulty being open about my experiences with cisgender men. I do not get the perception that you, Lobat, “claim to understand” me. I think you provide me with a space and an ear that permits me to be myself and to understand that while we have different experiences, there is a shared similarity. This, in my mind, is a way to move forward with a “queer connection,” as we both have had ovaries. In my case, I have no need for the female reproductive organs in my body, as I do not plan on bearing children. So, because I cannot conceive in a “male” way nor impregnate a woman, I am not medically perceived as a male. Similarly for you, losing your ability to reproduce, in some way, seems to have affected your role of “womanhood” in the eyes of society.

Undergoing a gender transformation for me (Mario), specifically, entailed...