Pink Sweet Peas

Anzaldua mentions going to a women's retreat in 1979 where she "was made (once again) to feel she was being labeled—tokenized as a 'third-world woman' and as an outsider, an exoticized other to the white feminists there" (p. 44).

Which reminded of the point I started to make last week (and then forgot what I was going to say) about my own experience with a women's "consciousness-raising" group around 1975. While the focus of that particular group was body awareness, what we soon discovered was that we were different in more ways than one. The first difference that arose was sexuality. Followed closely by socioeconomic class. And then race/ethnicity. In that order. By the end of the month (about 4 meetings) we weren't even speaking to one another, and the group broke up.

That experience mirrors Anzaldua's own…which in turn reflects the larger trend in "The Movement," aka the feminist movement, whose beginning in the US is generally marked by the publication of Betty Friedan's The Feminist Mystique and whose "face" in the 1970s was Gloria Steinem, founder of Ms. magazine. Notice: both Gloria and Betty were middle-class white women… a point not lost on all kinds of women, but first by lesbians, then working-class women, then etc. etc. (notice, the same order?) By the early 80s we were talking about "feminisms" plural, as women began to recognize that we can't all be lumped together, that maybe the "female experience" alone wasn't universal and uniform enough to create solidarity.

And so it goes with identity studies more generally, it seems to me. I was impressed to see that Anzaldua talked about "the multiplicity of her 'self' and her 'voice'", assuming as her avatar Shiva with different feet in different places (p.44). She maintains that a "mesitza rhetoric" allows her to "find all others in one's self; one's self in all others" (p. 44). The "new mestiza" has "a tolerance for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity" (pp. 44-45).

For sure, I agree with the idea that identity is multiple. But I would add that the same is true, to different degrees of course, of every one.(Does my memory fail me or doesn't Harraway also talk in these terms about "cyborgs"?)

I'm also uncomfortable with the mestiza metaphor for at least two reasons:
1. it suggests that identity is still a function of "blood quantum." (Remember talking about sweet peas to learn genetics in high school? What do you get when you cross a white sweet pea with a red one?.... pink sweet pea, a hybrid, a mestiza, a mixed blood…) Identity isn't genetic or "natural"; it's cultural and historical.

2. it draws from Hegelian logic: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Ironically, this kind of logic does NOT tolerate contradiction and ambiguity…

(I'll talk more about different logical systems, and how those differences will sometimes affect argument structure and interaction and decision-making in upcoming weeks.)

One more thing about the Anzaldua piece: I was blown away with the discursive features of this text: child-like graphics, work play (Nos/Otros how cool was that!!), metaphors, code-switching, etc … each and all implicitly "[denouncing] linguistic terrorism" (p. 45)

The Holliday IC resource book this week makes a similar point about identity—but points out that white people have culture too. Left unsaid or unrecognized, that fact leaves the impression that white ways are normative. At the same time, we don't want to fall into the contrastive trap, setting up a binary of white/black, us/them, insider/outsider, etc. (Anzaldua also mentions that she tries to verbalize and understand herself as a "non-binary identity").

Unfortunately that's what seems to be happening in my chapter on Detroit when I use Kochman to set up my theoretical framework for understanding differences governing personal disclosure. Funny, I knew this at the time but I just didn't know how to do it otherwise. While I tried to complicate that easy understanding later in the chapter (drawing from other disciplines) I should have done that upfront. There was just too much material, it seemed at the time. A similar problem comes up for the Storytime on the Reservation chapter: essentializing culture, or so it would seem. I wrote the Detroit chapter in 2000-2001 and the Storytime chapter in 2002 and the last I saw the manuscript was in 2003, when it started through the production process—and I haven't read it since, until last night. Now I'm able to read it as if it was someone else's—which is to say,with a much clearer eye.

Our readings over the next couple of weeks will focus on case studies—all of which have come out in the last few years—paying close attention to methodology and theoretical framings, though no one doing much with interdisciplinary approaches.