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De La Rosa, Vileana Writing Sample Cyborg Mestizaje: Locating a Chicana Feminist Futurity Through Critical Praxis “Every technology is reproductive technology,”- Donna Haraway There has been recent debate in feminist scholarship on the issues of identity, epistemology, and ontology and whether theories of intersectionality, post-humanist cyborg, and assemblage are useful for understanding the condition and experience of women of color. This essay is an attempt to negotiate between various critical conversations on race, identity, narrative, and their significance in collective organizing and knowledge making to engage in a collective thought process. By bringing diverse theorists together in collective conversation, I seek to bring out various tensions between postmodern theory and Chicana writings to mediate the discussion and turn towards a feminist praxis that is informed by a history of struggle and engaged with theory proper. For instance, Donna Haraway’s seminal post-humanist text “A Cyborg Manifesto, ”seeks to define a feminist politics and identity by turning towards “non-material” matter to return to the “original innocence” of the subject, before structural oppression and corruption. Theorists Norma Alarcon and Chela Sandoval then turn to discourse to define women of color subjectivity outside the paradigms of an Anglo male centered ontology and epistemology. But scholars such as Paula Moya argue that such a turn is impossible because the experience of structurally oppressed subjects is materially defined and organized. Moya argues for a politics, epistemology, and ontology through a post- positivist realist framework that posits racialized structurally oppressed subjects possess a

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Page 1: Chicana Cyborg Essay

De La Rosa, Vileana

Writing Sample

Cyborg Mestizaje: Locating a Chicana Feminist Futurity Through Critical Praxis

“Every technology is reproductive technology,”- Donna Haraway

There has been recent debate in feminist scholarship on the issues of identity,

epistemology, and ontology and whether theories of intersectionality, post-humanist

cyborg, and assemblage are useful for understanding the condition and experience of

women of color. This essay is an attempt to negotiate between various critical

conversations on race, identity, narrative, and their significance in collective organizing

and knowledge making to engage in a collective thought process. By bringing diverse

theorists together in collective conversation, I seek to bring out various tensions between

postmodern theory and Chicana writings to mediate the discussion and turn towards a

feminist praxis that is informed by a history of struggle and engaged with theory proper.

For instance, Donna Haraway’s seminal post-humanist text “A Cyborg Manifesto, ”seeks

to define a feminist politics and identity by turning towards “non-material” matter to

return to the “original innocence” of the subject, before structural oppression and

corruption. Theorists Norma Alarcon and Chela Sandoval then turn to discourse to define

women of color subjectivity outside the paradigms of an Anglo male centered ontology

and epistemology. But scholars such as Paula Moya argue that such a turn is impossible

because the experience of structurally oppressed subjects is materially defined and

organized. Moya argues for a politics, epistemology, and ontology through a post-

positivist realist framework that posits racialized structurally oppressed subjects possess a

Page 2: Chicana Cyborg Essay

unique experience and thereby possess a unique knowledge of structures that is useful for

politics and epistemology. In light of this debate, Jasbir Puar’s essay “I’d Rather Be a

Cyborg than a Goddess: Becoming Intersectional in Assemblage Theory” reinterprets

Haraway’s position and argues for a deleuzian reading of feminist subjectivity alongside

intersectionality and emphasizes new potentialities for feminist struggle. By reading

feminist projects through these various lenses, we work towards a feminism that inherits

the issues and questions of the past to develop practices for the future, as evident in the

work of the Santa Cruz Women of Color collective and by reading groups in Los

Angeles. These collective groups shed light on the relevancy of an intersectional analysis,

which Puar interestingly reminds was a project born out of anti-essentialism and political

necessity.

In her essay, Puar urges a coherent reading of intersectionality and assemblage

theory to inform feminist epistemological processes. Drawing from Kimberle Crenshaw

and Donna Haraway’s seminal work to re-imagine a cyborg-goddess hybridity (51), Puar

seeks to read an intersectional women of color identity through a postmodern lens,

embodying both matriarchal connection to the past and the tools and epistemologies of

the future in response to late capitalist domination. Analyzing the tensions between

intersectional and assemblage analysis is useful for urgent feminist critique of current

power structures and dynamics to analyze feminist politics in the continuous process of

becoming. Locating a process of becoming is important for particular sites of feminist

struggles, resistances, and development of feminist solidarity. Puar borrows from

Deleuze’s reading of becoming as “generative of a new way of being that is a function of

influences rather than resemblances. The process is one of removing the element from its

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original functions and bringing about new ones (58)”. Tracing a process of becoming is

important for locating simultaneous sites struggles, resistances, and development of

feminist solidarity. This is because in order for social movement politics to work people

assembling through a shared commitment have to be sensitive and aware of the various

positions of privileges people hold and how to navigate through them. Interpreting single-

issue politics based out of fixed identities is not possible. If socially constructed identities

are relevant for anti-racist and anti-patriarchy politics, then it is crucial to recognize how

certain racialized and gendered bodies have different stakes in the process.

Through assemblage, we also understand that identities are not homogenous and

are structured and disciplined through various interweaving forces; “a process involving

an intensification of habituation, thus discipline and control are mutually entwined” (62).

Unlike Alarcon and Haraway, Puar takes into account critical violent relations of

structural power, as internalized, imposed, and inscribed on to the body. A rubric of

intersectionality that includes gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, and nationality is

practical for Crenshaw because it considers structural relations, political mobilizations,

and the representational struggles against racism and patriarchy (Puar 51). This

formulation of subjectivity and identity is grounded in experience and is not ontologically

reductive. It is worth noting how Puar’s interpretation gives more possibility to individual

agency, to move performatively in resistance to dominant hegemonic powers, where the

body is not rigidly held or bound but in the continuous process of defining itself and

being interpellated. The body is not structurally determined, but is continuously met by

various simultaneous forces. For example, a Chicana woman going to her court date is

not only structurally oppressed through any type of fixed race, gender, and class status,

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but rather her identity is constantly regulated and disciplined by forces, such as

interpellating her body as racialized other and criminalizing her. The body is not

ontologically bound from western origin, not pre-technologically determined and

experiences violence through structural and material levels. This assemblage model is

also more useful for understanding the pre-determined structural conditions, which

necessitate the importance of recognizing intersectional identity and the more porous

nature of identity politics. Similar to Haraway’s notion of affinity, the assemblage model

takes into account how politics occur, interact, and unravel through various spaces and

historical moments. Therefore, assemblage and intersectional theories are useful for

examining current materialist feminist struggles for institutional equality and organizing

against institutional racism by situating local and generational struggles as politically

insurgent sites of subject formation. The best quality of this reading is how Puar’s

formulation appreciates the legacies of women of color feminism to advance politically

and recognizing how structures shape and form their identity.

Unraveling the development of post-human, post-modern feminist thought

requires examining Donna Haraway’s seminal essay “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science,

Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” Haraway posits a new

epistemological and ontological status for socialist feminism, as embodied by the ironic

figure of the cyborg, which is ontologically problematic for women of color. The irony of

this post-human subjectivity is that it is a break from western ontological grounding of

the subject by creating a subject form by matter not formed by nature. Instead, this

cyborg subject is made out of man- made material, which is ironically still an identity

formed within a hegemonic model. Haraway pushes forth the myth of the cyborg, as an

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embodiment outside of the legacy of patriarchal, capitalist western history and dominant

discourse to create alternative discourses and modes of politics. This is an attempt to

remedy Marxist and socialist feminism’s inability to separate from typical sexist and

racist binaries and take into account changes in the means of production in a “post-

industrial” society. Haraway’s essay is also problematic because she is addressing a white

middle class audience of feminist activists and academics about how to absorb women of

color into her framework to ask how can they inscribe themselves into the integrated

circuitry of knowledge, science, and production. This is because for Haraway, the cyborg

correlates with a shift in technological production that requires a new type of subjectivity

that experiences a different relation to objects and gender roles. This intensification of

capitalist technological processes of production intensifies divisions and renders labor

invisible.

Haraway’s cyborg starts from zero to ironicize and destabilize the arbitrary nature

of racial and gender oppression in order to identify with women laborers in technological

global market. This summons the notion that human subjects are connected by some non-

dualistic notion of humanness and by their loose interaction with technology. Yet, this

cyborg figure does not seem enough to break apart from sex/gender binaries through the

mere act of incorporation, inclusion, and identification with the machinery. Instead, the

cyborg serves to continue to destabilize such boundaries and contribute to an alternative

politics of consciousness and recognition. But the major limitation in Haraway’s cybrog

is the over essentialization of all female subjectivities that does not create a space to

recognize the experiences and political goals of feminist women of color that is situated

within socio-historical space.

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Yet, Haraway’s key point that theorists such as Chela Sandoval and Puar expand

upon is how “the actual situation of women is their integration/exploitation into a world

system of production/reproduction and communication called the informatics of

domination” (Sandoval 205). Under this prescription, Haraway privileges writing as a

significant strategy of resistance against oppression and stratification of women via state,

capitalism, ideology, and coercive violence. She categorizes writing as a means of access

to power, where literacy is highly privileged and denotes social status and capital that

breaks from western myth of writing and oral cultures. Haraway insists that writing is

historical and political “on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the world that marked

them as other” (217). For example, In Speaking Chicana: Voice, Power, and Identity

Aurora E. Orozco utilizes personal narrative, or a testimonio as a mode to create her own

personal history and identity, as defined socially and culturally growing up in the 1920’s:

“The reason I am writing this testimonio is because I want my children to

know who I am and the way I was raised- the reality of life of a Mexican

and African woman. I want to show them that although there were very

hard times, the unity, respect, and love of familia helped me to grow into a

woman who loves education.” (Orozco 106).

This form of writing creates a space to capture an experience growing up as a mixed-race

child during the depression that is not depicted in mainstream history. Orozco is invested

in the project of developing a historical consciousness that details a racialized and

gendered experience of poverty, discrimination, and institutional disciplining. Sharing

testimonies like Orozco’s is how women can identify with her experiences and can

compare and contrast experiences of sexism and marginalization. Thus, writing is a

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potential means for “women of color” to inscribe themselves into the threads of

knowledge, restructure discourse, and share alternative decolonizing narratives.

Chela Sandoval’s text The Methodology of the Oppressed, also lends an

interesting perspective of Haraway’s cyborg figure as a key component of the

“methodology of the oppressed,” or an “apparatus for countering neocolonizing

postmodern global formations” (Sandoval 2). Through this framework, the cyborg is the

both the subject, object, and the social relation (action) responsible for the production of

knowledge and language, and what she interprets as a turning point for U.S. third world

feminism to form solidarity with U.S. Anglo feminism. Sandoval embraces Haraway’s

cyborg as a figure equipped with the technics “useful for oppressed people” to develop a

feminist consciousness and build alliances and resistances against capitalist patriarchy.

She idealistically situates this global methodology “form varying locations, through a

multiplicity of terminologies and forms, and indomitably from the minds, bodies, and

spirits of U.S. feminists of color who demanded the recognition of la conciencia de la

mestiza, womanism, indigenous resistance, and identification with the colonized” (178).

Sandoval ascribes to Haraway’s deconstructive conception of a cyborg subject, as

not “whole” and constituted of various parts, like an assemblage, and can return to an

“original innocence” to cut off from structurally violent Euro-American humanism. She

follows the poststructuralist notion that subjectivity is discursively defined and performed

and deems Anglo-American narratives of dominance and colonization responsible for the

erasure, subjugation, and alienation of non-white gendered subjects. Sandoval point’s to

Haraway’s description of a fragmented language to describe a fragmented identity and

politics:

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“it is self consciously spliced, a chimera of English and Spanish, both

conqueror’s languages, But it is this chimeric monster, without claim to an

original before violation, that crafts the erotic, competent, potent identities

of women of color. Sister Outsider hints at the possibility of world

survival not because of her innocence, but because of her ability to live on

the boundaries, to write without the founding myth of original wholeness,

with its inescapable apocalypse of final return to a deathly

oneness…Stripped of identity, the bastard race teaches about the power of

the margins and the importance of a mother like Malinche. Women of

color have transformed her from the evil mother of masculinist fear into

the originally literate mother who teaches survival. (Haraway 175-176).

(Sandoval 170).

Here, Haraway associates a lack of “whole language” with a lack of identity,

undefined and broken by the legacies of slavery and colonization. It is important to

recognize how Haraway attributes the “bastard” race of classed and racialized people

with the ability to create an alternative origin narrative through the figure of Malinche.

This passage also demonstrates how Haraway idealizes the narrative of Malinche and

objectifies the narrative to fetishize mestiza subjectivity. By comparing the experiences

of various women of color by referring to “sister outsider” and “the bastard race”,

Haraway conflates the experiences of women of color under the assumption that they are

“broken” and need to recuperate a loss. Even though a figure such as Malinche may be

useful as a coded myth for survival, Haraway makes the assumption that survivalism is

the only goal of decolonial projects and thereby reduces the value of such figures. I also

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find it problematic that Sandoval embraces the cyborg as a mestiza figure, because an

indigenous identity is tied to a land, a space, a culture, and history that cyborgs do not

possess and is not a part of a reparative decolonial process. But cutting off a connection

to the land also undoes connections to capitalist production in a gendered space. Rather,

cyborg is a metaphor for alienation and displacement, a separateness from self, labor, and

others that not all communities can achieve. Haraway’s feminism is limited because her

goal of affinity does not resonate with the marginalized women of color she wants so

hard to be in solidarity with. Even though language is undoubtedly an important part of

colonial projects through schooling, disciplining, and assimilation, writing and narrative

cannot be reduced as the only means to create counter-narratives. Collectives such as the

Santa Cruz Feminist of Color Collective evade the traps of essentialist identity by

developing a “multidimensional” analysis that utilizes multiple methodologies such as

writing, dance, and theater in an effort to “embrace contradictions” explore the limits of

an expansive formulation (SC 24). This collective project is centered on decolonial

discourse to challenge and critique universalist “knowledge formation” and break from

binary logics. In contrast, Haraway’s socialist rhetoric is a limited, inauthentic attempt to

incorporate women through a language that is reductive and academic, not part of a

testimonio or a manifesto that includes these women in the thought process. Although

writing is an important political feminist project, Paula Moya criticizes Haraway for

appropriating women of color discourse and misreading the myth of Malinche to support

her post-humanist, postmodern formulation.

Paula Moya’s text Learning from Experience; Minority Identities, Multicultural

Struggles, is critical of Haraway’s reading of Malinche into her theory as a superficial

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and reductive attempt to absorb a subversive narration into her framework. Moya disrupts

Haraway’s claims of Malinche by pointing out how her reading reduces the feminist

political goals of women of color to survivalism and does not connect to the experiences

and needs of that community (Moya 70). Moya describes the realist position as a

continuous structuring of “reality,” that is ontologically perceived, materially

experienced, and shaped by dominant ideologies. This is reminiscent of Puar’s tracing of

power as traced through various subject positions and discursive positions. This position

is also wary of how identity is also in flux and defined through various discourses of

power, sexuality, nationality, culture, and identity. The way in which Moya brings out the

contradictions in Haraway’s formation shows how her attempt to abandon harmful

signification is instead reliant upon it and does not connect to the communities she claims

to be speaking to. Reverting to Cherrie Moraga’s reflective work on the cultural and

collective significance of La Malinche and other racialized and gendered binaries creates

a more meaningful discussion on the conditions of marginalized communities.

Paula Moya’s work is refreshing because her projects on literary criticism and

feminist theory revert to the experience those narratives and knowledge emerged from.

She describes her post positivist realist reading of identity as culturally constructed and

real that is grounded in history and locally described (86). This reading is evocative of

Puar’s reading of intersectionality that traces identity with the development of

multicultural, queer, and nationalistic epistemologies occurring through an ongoing

process. This framework is useful to analyze and critique Chicana subject formation as

precursor for creating alternative feminist epistemologies and practices to posit that

structurally oppressed peoples have an epistemic privilege, or unique knowledge of how

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race, gender, class, and sexuality “operate to maintain the matrices of power” (Moya 38).

Creating knowledge out of personal experiences and encounters is essential practice for

women of color feminists to organize in opposition to hegemonic discourses and systems

of power. This is because power is not amorphous, but rather structural, and using these

various theoretical tools for further feminist theory that can guide future analyses and

political practices. In essence, this emphasizes the necessity for feminist projects such as

reading groups and collectivist writing as means to bring forth subjugated narratives and

epistemologies into broader conversations on education and social justice.

In Norma Alarcon’s essay “The Theoretical Subject(s) of This Bridge Called my

Back and Anglo-American Feminism,” she explores the politics of identity and subjectivity,

through the project of giving voice to historically marginalized women of color in the

anthology of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings By Radical Women of Color. This text

is largely cited by Anglo and Third World feminists for bringing a “shift in feminist

consciousness” (289) and was intended to create an alternative discursive space. Alarcon

argues that the editors of Bridge were forthright in publishing an anthology that is a space

for alternative epistemologies that distinguishes female knowledge. The editors sought to

break from western masculinist epistemology that privileges man’s ideas and experience as

a source of “knowledge, morals, and history,” as a necessary step towards developing and

enriching feminist epistemologies (290). Yet, the theoretical subjective positioning within

Bridge is outside this counter-narrative and instead “includes racial and cultural divisions

and conflicts” (291) that politically situates the psychic and material violence women of

color experience. It is important to understand how Bridge is distinguished by giving

linguistic status to queer, lesbian, immigrant, and radical women of color, unlike how

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Anglo-American feminists claim their linguistic status. Bridge is critical of breaking the

silence about the experiences of historically marginalized and oppressed women to become

new subjects of knowledge. Alarcon argues that even though such voices develop gender

consciousness, she is cautious of how such consciousness stems from an epistemological

differential, where the subject and object relation is defined in relation to white women.

Such an epistemological position empties the meaning of “women of color” by positioning

women subject only in relation to male weakens the possibility of articulating and

identifying outside the gender binary. Therein lies the paradox inherent in a gendered

subject of knowledge, making it difficult to transgress gender and racial boundaries. Yet the

act of “consciousness raising” assumes it would define feminism for itself but is reinforced

through a binary of “self/other” that over conflates its usefulness as a political framework.

This boundary alone does provide a politics for women of color to build their own political

project and articulate an epistemology from which to envision a feminist future.

Bridge’s triumph is in registering multiple nodes of subjectivity for the purpose of

a multi-cultural feminist solidarity and consciousness, but Alarcon argues that capturing

multi-voiced subjectivities is as not enough. I posit that recognizing such subjectivities is

not an end, but similar to Haraway, these voices need to be become globally connected

within a larger feminist project. This type of consciousness provides focused and specific

objectives and political demands, where a body of a feminist in the U.S. recognizes their

relative privilege and maintains a politics of accountability as benefiting from global

projects of neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism. Bridge still holds its respective place

within the academy with an urgency for women of color to collectively organize through

their multifaceted epistemologies and rich histories.

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This inability to formulate women of color as both the object and subject of

feminist theorizing is raised through Haraway’s superficial reading of linguistic

epistemology. To merely credit women of color for using western means of expression,

such as writing, to share their experiences does not recognize other various means women

of color use to articulate of form their identity or resist patriarchal oppression. The

emphasis is thereby on the collective nature of discourse and dialogue, which demands

that feminist theorizing becomes as much a project of listening as well as sharing. This

act of sharing and dialoguing also assumes a certain politics of unity, not ascribing a clear

political project of how Anglo-American women can be in solidarity with women of

color. Therefore, the question of what does it mean to assume a position of a multi-voice

subject can be examined as a critical point of becoming.

The piece “Building on “the Edge of Each Other’s Battles”: A Feminist of Color

Multidimensional Lens” written by the Santa Cruz Feminist of Color Collective also

articulates a layered subjectivity to locate collective political, artistic, and academic

projects and conference as essential for feminist community building and theorization.

This collective expands intersectionality as previously defined by Kimberle Crenshaw to

move beyond essentialist identity formation towards a conjointly gathered identity with

the goal of building political solidarity (A Feminist of Color Multidimensional Lens 29-

30). They also embrace their politicized “cyborg-goddess” hybridity by recognizing and

embracing their critical and privileged position as women of color within U.S. academic

institutions to utilize technologies and spaces to form critical networks for writing and

sharing (36). This multidimensional lens is important because it does not reduce feminist

identity formation in a collective voice that emphasizes how women of color feminist

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theory is not only available to women with access to theory, but rather occurs through

various artistic, collective, political, and intellectual practices. “process of identity

formation, assertion of intellectual political projects, and creating alternative

methodological practices” (23). As the collective describes, “the who and why of women

of color feminisms inform the how” (32) and this extends into creating a larger vision for

a feminist future, which embraces various forms of communication and production. For

the Santa Cruz collective, identity formation through its various interstices is a crucial

part of epistemological development through alternative modes and spaces. This

distinction is central to their defining their political project, actively defying binary

subjectivity and modes of thinking to create an alternative network of resistance. This

piece highlights the importance of Gloria Anzaldua’s borderlands theory as part of their

project to create an “alternative epistemological space” that “refuses Eurocentrism’s

individualism and dichotomous hierarchies”(50). The collective seeks to reclaim the

queer spaces of resistance that have been erased and invisible by European modernity. By

maintaining a collective rather than individual identity, the collective also seeks to draw

from a multiplicity of identities and voices, weaving together the intimate experiences

and social relations that are what Maria Lugones calls the “intimate everyday resistant

interactions to the colonial difference” (50). This community identity becomes the mode

to politically organize and build alternative accountability processes that strive to create

knowledge and justice. The collective draws from the legacies of women of color

feminisms that resisted patriarchy and capitalism to move their own political project

forward.

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The process of deconstructing racial hierarchies is also a central component of

creating an anti-hegemonic discourse. The collective crucially identifies how their work

functions to dismantle racial hierarchies by drawing from histories and legacies of

colonization, slavery, and domination. Reclaiming modes of knowledge production is the

collective’s mode of reclaiming subjective power, where knowledge is grounded in

personal experience and functions as a key methodology for feminist solidarity and

practice. This is necessary for completing the project of what Cherrie Moraga categorizes

as “knowledge of the flesh” where marginalized bodies, as sites of collision from various

discursive forces, reclaim subjective status. For the collective, the multiplicity and

political networking of voices and experiences that create the new forms of embodied

knowledge is essential for organizing research clusters, arts collectives, and

transformative justice collectives. Reclaiming the production of knowledge and feminist

subjectivity is identified as the intellectual labor necessary for radical feminist struggle.

Even though Haraway’s intention to “breakup of versions of Euro-American feminist

humanism in their devastating assumptions of master narratives deeply indebted to

racism and colonialism,”(Sandoval 160) is unsuccessful, her work highlights the

importance of creating new and imaginative epistemologies that are both futuristic and

bound by history.

Weaving in my own epistemic knowledge, I recently concluded a Chicana

feminist reading circle with Audre Lorde’s essay “Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women

Redefining Difference,” where other Chicana and Latina identified women join to discuss

and reflect on Lorde’s interventionist rhetoric. We took two hours reading this article

because women in the group continuously wanted to share how the conditions of

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oppression Lorde describes, resonates with their own feeling of frustration, hurt, and

rage. The process of coming together to share experiences and knowledge is productive

for us to develop our own identities, create our own space and practice to reflect, heal,

and learn how to access more information on feminist theories and issues. It became our

task to ask what is our feminist struggle today? and question how can we use an

intersectional analysis and framework to be in solidarity with women organizing against

police violence in Ferguson or East Los Angeles. We moved from reading texts from

Chicana Feminist Thought: The Basic Historical Writings to reflect on how the feminist

project within our own communities has shifted and reflect on the work that still needs to

be done. What these writings demonstrate and produce is a community of knowledge

where women can respond and share experiences of sexism and racism in a safe space

they may not find in the classroom. These conversations also reveal the need to create

counterpublics, spaces of knowledge to develop deeper analyses of racial and gender

ideologies that dominate our daily lives. It is also worth noting that the reading group

formed as a strategic intervention into the community space, to further build feminist

knowledge and practice, and invite community organizers to join and develop a

productive feminist analysis. Even through the process of writing this essay, nothing was

as affirming as hearing the voices and experience of other women whom were all going

through their own processes and contributing to build our understanding of feminist

thought. Together, we created our own affective power by sharing experiences to heal

and deepen our own understanding of varied oppressions and even transitioned to expand

ownership and leadership of the group to continue to build solidarity.

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Robyn Wiegman’s stunning essay “Feminism’s Apocalyptic Futures” takes into

account some problematic temporalities within my own feminist formulations. I agree

that feminism is not linear, and although historical legacies and struggles inform and

guide current feminist organizing and discursive practices, I am however wary of the

need to put the past in the conversation with a future. Or rather a ‘feminist futurity’ does

not need to be limited or only responsive to a past feminist ideology, identity, or political

subject formation. Wiegman seeks to unravel feminisms “contradictory trajectories” that

are bound by “the memory of identity’s ability in the 1960s to rigorously challenge state-

based practices of exclusion and the theoretical difficulty of identity categories to sustain

a heterogeneous understanding of social power and subjective identification today” (806).

This memory is still relevant and important to identify a history of struggle, but it is also

temporally limited in a narrative of progress. Wiegman also points out how cultural

feminism was challenged by the popularity of poststructuralist thought in the academy

alienates identity based activists and academics. I agree with Wiegman that these

conflicts require thoughtful consideration when considering the future of feminist studies

in the academy, but I am also interested in the projects that detract and find longevity

outside those temporal and epistemological frameworks. For example, Paloma Martinez-

Cruz’s text Women and Knowledge in Mesoamerica calls attention to Mexico’s

indigenous spiritual and cultural practices in order to break from European epistemology.

The following passage brings forth the problems of temporality Wiegman raises, by

arguing that these practices inform and can not only be spoken about in the ‘past tense’

but within the current context of transnational capitalism:

“By exploring the implications of globalization in the highlands of

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Oaxaca, it becomes clear that Western modernity has little tolerance for

traditional communities that adapt to meet the extingencies of the global

marketplace. For Mesoamerican women, globalization and indigeneity

present specific problems. Feminist scholars have observed that Indian

women who are locally and nationally disenfranchised can gain access to

greater autonomy in transnational settings. Maria Sabina and Agustina

Martinez are two examples of women who share Mazatec shamanism with

the twenty first century. If such women do not adapt their abilities to meet

transnational possibilities, then shamanism will remain frozen behind the

glass pane of a museum diorama, forever administering the same medicine

to the same patient suffering from the same eternal malady. However, the

mushroom ritual does not languish behind a hermetically sealed divide- it

interacts with today’s world, with all of its ethical challenges and

complexities.” (Martinez- Cruz 119).”

This passage also demonstrates a temporal problem within western feminism to

temporally freeze and restrict the subject. The ritual is not made an object of history, but

is instead rightly brought into an interaction with present and future feminisms,

predicting indigenous practices expansive spiritual and medical influence. Here, the past

is also shaped and informed by the constant needs to respond and adapt to the conditions

of late capitalism. In order for such practices to thrive, they must connect and respond to

the larger world they are part, contrary to an isolation that would mark their extinction.

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Hence, feminist struggles are defined by the needs and desires of people in the

present, which if we temporally destabilize, are always in flux, in a process of becoming.

The metaphor of the cyborg is useful because it visualizes this process of constant

formation and break, but if a subject cannot have a past, it also cannot have a future.

Instead, I look for “futurity” in the social and political imagination, gathering from utopic

desires of socialist feminism, but also conscious of structural limitations. The libidinal

economy of feminist politics is structurally antagonistic, and no simple incorporation of

narrative or history will destabilize that structure. Instead, recognizing erasure and

incorporation as part of the process to contain and co-opt these energies is important

alongside identifying intensities of control and formation taking place. Futurity is the

process and a productive feminism is immersed in conflict and antagonisms that seek to

bind and control.

In conclusion, the legacies of interventionist practices into white hegemonic

feminism still guide and inform current feminist epistemological and political practice.

Moya’s post-positivist realist framework aspires to give epistemological value to the

experiences of oppressed persons, in which case, women of color have a unique

knowledge of the structural violence of white capitalist patriarchy. Collective feminist

identities and projects are wise to embrace technologies and continue to break down the

colonialist divisions and disciplining of gender and sexuality, to continue to create

alternative and resistant spaces. Locating the body as the source of knowledge, and

following Cherrie Moraga’s project of “theory in the flesh” is an important political and

theoretical project that challenges the hegemonic ontology that functions to discipline and

control. Working out of this break is a promising position to break from liberal politics of

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post-racial equality, which does not call into question the structurally unequal

experiences of racialized and gendered bodies. The project of “consciousness raising” is

not enough for women of color feminists to continue to challenge hegemonic spaces and

forming alternative epistemologies is necessary to resist dominant frameworks and build

a feminist future. Adaptation for survival, to maintain rituals and practices, to build

solidarity is important to build and resist the conditions of modernity. This is a matter of

access and limitation that exceeds temporal boundaries to reignite and influence a

collective imagination. Recuperative historical projects continue to revitalize feminist

organizing with new passion, engagement and energy, as feminists see themselves in

appreciative solidarity with previous generations of struggle. By incorporating new

technologies such as group texts, Facebook, and Instagram, we are connecting with

younger generations of future activists, creating communities for support and inspiration.

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Works Cited

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American Feminism,”. Calderón, Héctor, and José D. Saldívar. Criticism in the

Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature, Culture, and Ideology. Durham: Duke

University Press, 1991.

"Building on The Edge of Each Other's Battles-: a Feminist of Color Multidimensional

Lens." Hypatia Edwardsville Indiana University Press. 29.1 (2014): 23-40.

Galindo, D L, and María D. Gonzales. Speaking Chicana: Voice, Power, and Identity.

Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999.

Haraway, Donna J. "A Cyborg Manifesto." Cultural Studies Reader. (1999).

Martinez-Cruz, Paloma. Women and Knowledge in Mesoamerica: From East L.a. to

Anahuac. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2011.

Moya, Paula M. L. Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural

Struggles. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Puar, Jasbir K. "'I Would Rather Be a Cyborg Than a Goddess': Becoming-Intersectional

in Assemblage Theory." Philosophia: a Journal of Continental Feminism. 2.1 (2012): 49-

66.

Wiegman, Robyn. "Feminism's Apocalyptic Futures." New Literary History: a Journal of

Theory and Interpretation. 31.4 (2000): 805-25.

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