This is our last week before spring break. And our last week of “scheduled” content. I like to take the last several weeks of the semester to focus on different topics of interest to you all. I have a ton of information and places we could go, but I’d like you to include in your discussion post some things you would like to study. I will see if I can weave them in.
Before I talk about this week’s assignment, I wanted to note a few things about last week’s. You all did a great job with the materials. I hope you thought about the reading if you watch Ketanji Brown Jacksons’ confirmation hearings. I also hope the confirmation made it clear that oppression does not mean that you CAN’T prosper, but it means that it will be very difficult with many barriers blocking your way.
I wanted to also make a note that I think is very important. Some of you highlighted it in your writing, but some did not. I think it is highly important to note that the Combahee Collective was a queer one. Queerness provides models for deconstructing capitalism and other oppressive structures. The nuclear family reinforces capitalist ideals in that it creates roles that people play, divisions of labor, and competition of one family against another in the individualistic climb to amass power and wealth. Queer communities move from the individual to the collective – and this is a way to dismantle systems. If we engage in mutual aid and support of one another, rather than competition, we are calling into question many binary systems. Please note that queer does not necessarily (though it can) refer to sexuality, as there are many people who are LGBT who uphold binaries.
This week . . .
This week, we continue investigating identity politics. This time, with a chapter, “The Power of Identity Politics,” from Alicia Garza’s 2020 book The Purpose of Power: How We Come Together When We Fall Apart. Garza, one of the founders of #Black Lives Matter and organizer of Black Futures Lab, explores how identity politics has been used and misused in the 40+ years since Combahee. You will also read Aleichia Williams’s creative prose piece “Too Latina To Be Black, Too Black To Be Latina” in which she interrogates her own identity and others’ reactions to it, thereby enacting identity politics.
Not assigned, but encouraged, is Gloria Anzaldúa, “La Conciencia de la Mestiza/Towards a New Consciousness” (1987). I usually assign this piece along with Combahee, but this semester I have tried to assign less reading. In “La Conciencia de la Mestiza/Towards a New Consciousness,” Gloria Anzaldúa builds on the concept of la raza cosmica as articulated by Mexican philosopher José Vasconcelos. In this article, Anzaldúa emphasizes the existence of Chicana women in a space she calls the Borderlands—she calls these women the new mestiza. She explains that these mestiza women are the product of constant cultural exchanges and recognize their position in life as one of multiple identities converging in one mestiza woman. Throughout the essay, Anzaldúa switches between using English and Spanish to emphasize the Borderlands that mestiza women inhabit. She challenges the constant attack of white, patriarchal ideals attacking Mexican and Chicana culture. Anzaldúa explains that mestizas learn to embrace cultural ambiguity and develop ambivalence to the world around them. She claims they can only be removed from ambiguity through “an intense, and often painful, emotional event which inverts or resolves the ambivalence.” Throughout the essay, she calls for an intersectional form of feminism that recognizes the struggles of indigenous women as well as other women of color. She also criticizes white feminists for lumping all men together as oppressors without recognizing the ways people of color and queer men fall outside of hegemonic ideals.
Due this week:
Discussion Post 11 and Reading Reflection 10 are due Wednesday, April 13 by 11:59 PM.
Comments on at least three classmates’ Discussion11 Posts are due Friday, April 15 by 11:59 PM.
