Bodies in the Borderlands: Gloria Anzaldua's and David Wojnarowicz's Mobility Machines

Todd R. Ramlow
George Washington University In "Chicana tejana lesbian-feminist poet and fiction writer" Gloria Anzaldua's classic work of border(lands) theory, Borderlands/La Frontera, she remarks that "[t]he work of the mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended" (80).' Like Anzaldua's mestiza consciousness, disability studies and queer theory have been motivated by this critique of the binary discourses and social policies that condition subjectivity and structure society. But all these fields go further than mere critique. To use Anzaldua's words, one of the radical possibilities of mestiza consciousness, disability studies, and queer theory, is that all show "how duality is transcended," how we might create discourses that dismantle the disciplinary entanglements of racism, heteronormativity, and compulsory able-bodiedness.^ I take this critique of dualism as a starting point for a retum to Anzaldua's figure and politics of the "borderlands"; more specifically, I consider how these liminal spaces/states might produce a new consciousness that undermines the normative structure and coherence of both sides of the binary. 1 complicate Anzaldua's border theory by examining the work of artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz, whose own borderlands extend Anzaldua's to encompass the liminal spaces between dominant
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(white, class-privileged, heferonormafive) culfure and mainstream (white, class-privileged, lesbian, and gay) sexual minority cultures, among others. I bring Wojnarowicz and Anzaldtia fogether fhrough border theory, queer fheory, and disability studies for several reasons. First, they share an alliance in terms of sexuality and disability. Throughout Anzaldua's Borderlands/La Frontera and Wojnorowicz's Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration, both authors detail their lives on the sexual periphery and, as we shall see, both authors' experiences of sexual difference are tied fo larger notions of bodily difference that connect to the work of disability sfudies and activism. Second, their connection to disability is not merely one of metaphor or political coalition. When Anzaldua died of "diabetes related complications" on May f 5, 2004, she was certainly intimate with long-term illness, chronic pain, and disability, jusf as Wojnarowicz was before he died of AIDS related illnesses on July 22, 1992.^ Wojnarowicz, in particular, dealt expficitfy with disability in regards to HIV/AIDS throughout his visual arts and writings. In Close to the Knives Wojnarowicz details the disabilities brought on by AIDS in his descriptions of the death of his mentor and former lover Peter Hujar; this anticipates Wojnarowicz's own illness and disability, and the text ends with an increasingly disabled David haunted by Hujar's death. Third, despite, or perhaps because of, their vast differences of fife, identity, and embodiment, bringing Anzafdua and Wojnarowicz together through the conjunction of border theory, queer theory, and disability studies will enact and demonstrate the possibility of precisely the kinds of alliance across, through, and within the borderlands that Anzaldua calls for in Borderlands/La Frontera. A seemingly unlikely, certainly non-Latina/o, ally, Wojnarowicz's life in an abstracted borderlands fulfills Anzaldua's assertion that "[w]e have come to realize that we are not alone in our struggles nor separate nor autonomous but that wewhite black straight queer female maleare connected and interdependent" ("Forward" iv)."* The fife and work of Wojnarowicz amply demonstrates the sort of alliance building, or "bridging," called for in Anzaldua's text, as well as the two radical

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anthologies that bookend it.^ Through the use of border theory, queer theory, and disability studies 1 show how both artists/activists engage in an ongoing and mobile revisioning of subjectivity, consciousness, and embodiment through their experiences of the borderlands. Finally, I connect Anzaldua and Wojnarowicz to radical philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's figuration ofthe "war machine" and disability scholars David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder's work on prosthesis and subjectivity. The confluence of Anzaldua's border theory, Wojnarowicz's queer mobility, and the critical lens of disability studies rearticulates what I will call "prosthetic subjectivity." Prosthetic subjectivity is always multiple, always assembled, constituted intersubjectively, and always on the move; it is always already in and as the borderlands. Bordertands Today In 1987, upon the initial publication of Borderlands/La Frontera, the physical borderlands and the United States more generally were a very different place than they are today.^ At the time, more than seven years of Reaganite rule and the "war on drugs" (which mostly meant the war on poor, brown people within and outside US borders) certainly were foreclosing the borderlands. That geographic space was, however, still porous and the movement within the US, despite multiple institutional surveillance and disciplining, helped produce the mestiza consciousness elaborated by Anzaldua. Today, however, after nearly twenty years of US immigration policies, neoliberal economic transactions, and never-ending revisiting of politics based on the perception of drug trafficking (narco-politics), we can see how those borderlands have been the subject of state and citizen anxieties.^ The defining condition of border politics today is the maintenance of a violent distinction between "North" and "South," between "Us/US" and "Them." Since the 1990s, the US government's Operation Gatekeeper (1994), Operation Hold the Line (1995), Operation Rio Grande (1998), and Operation Safeguard (1999), have steadily increased

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INS and military patrolling of the US/Mexico border from Brownsville/Matamoros to San Ysidro/Tijuana.^ This focused attention to policing the borderlands has been given spectacular visual representation in the military fences erected literally on the border, and in the case of the San Ysidro/Tijuana fence, built, tellingly, of armor plating cast off from the first Persian Gulf War. This upswing in Homeland Security surveillance has done little to alter illegal immigration patterns, however, despite the fact that crossing northward has become increasingly deadly.^ The drive of the US government to "secure" this border, and its repeated failures to do so, make Anzaldua's border theory and mestiza consciousness, and Wojnarowicz's extensions of the same, more urgent than ever and might help us find, or re-imagine, alternatives to ineffective institutional violence in the US/Mexico borderlands. Both Anzaldua and Wojnarowicz see observation and witnessing as a key to challenging and transforming the experience of oppression within the borderlands, and the tyranny of binaries and dualism. Images, imagery, and vision play a central part in their textual worlds.'" They bear witness to the social, psychological, and physical effects of exclusion, binarism, and violence. Anzaldua and Wojnarowicz are engaged in what Norma Alarcon has called a "re-vision[ing]" that might "topple the traditional patriarchal mythology" and structures of power (182). Of course, Anzaldua and Wojnarowicz topple not only patriarchy, but also heteronormativity, compulsory able-bodiedness, and institutional racism (mutually constitutive discourses and institutions). Both are aware of the double bind of the gaze and the dangers of looking, the danger that the looking back might be tumed into the objectifying gaze of dominant power. Anzaldua remarks that there is "[sjeeing and being seen. Subject and object, I and she. The glance can freeze us in place; it can 'possess' us. It can erect a barrier against the world. But in a glance also lies awareness, knowledge" {Borderlands 42). These "contradictory aspects" of seeing are settled for Anzaldua in the difference she asserts between viewing and witnessing: "The 'witness' is a participant in the enactment of the work in a ritual, and not a member of the

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privileged classes" (Borderlands 68). The witness is acted upon by power and sees that power acting in similar ways upon others, which is the basis for strategic alliance or bridging in/of the borderlands. Similarly, for Wojnarowicz witnessing and disclosure are the tools that will dismantle binarism and its ordering of society. Close to the Knives is Wojnarowicz's account of his life and of the effects of AIDS on him, his friends, his subculture(s), and the nation at large. It also serves as rumination on Self/Other politics and government in an age of AIDS. On the politics of his art and writing Wojnarowicz remarks, "I'm not so much interested in creating literature as I am in trying to convey the pressure of what I've witnessed or experienced" (In the Shadow of the American Dream 235). He further states: "Each public disclosure of a private reality becomes something of a magnet that can attract others with a similar frame of reference; thus each public disclosure of a fragment of private reality serves as a dismantling tool against the illusion of ONE-TRIBE NATION; it lifts the curtains for a brief peek and reveals the probable existence of literally millions of tribes" (Close 121). Wojnarowicz's eye/I witnessing describes the limits and violence of binarism, the structure upon which the authority and consciousness of the dominant is imagined and maintained; What he uncovers is multiplicity, both individual and collective, and the possibility of connection and alliance. Both Anzaldua and Wojnarowicz craft images of life in the borderlands and envision modes of being outside of Self/Other dichotomies. These images have real resistant power, power that is produced along with the exercise of dominant bio-power that would subjugate individuals and groups. As Michel Foucault has shown us, "[wjhere there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power" (95). Wojnarowicz asserts that public disclosure may function as a "dismantling tool" against hetero-, ethno-, and bodily normativity." Anzaldua remarks similarly, "[a]n image is a bridge between evoked emotion and conscious knowledge; words are the cables that hold up the bridge. Images are more direct, more immediate than words, and closer to the unconscious" (Borderlands 69). Images for both writers are the

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bridges and tools that can bring knowledge of the workings of power, the constitution of current orders, and the possibility of resistance to the foreground. The images and imagery of Anzaldua and Wojnarowicz embody, deploy, and multiply "mobile and transitory points of resistance" (Foucault 96) that are produced out of their variable experiences within the borderlands, but also by their mobility within dominant structures of power. This mobility is central to their resistance, as they perpetually elude surveillance and show off for it, as they negotiate power and its induction on multiple levels, in multiple spaces, and as they demonstrate the breadth of their multiple bridges/alliances. We find this mobility figured literally in Wojnarowicz's incessant traveling of the "canyon" streets of New York, the alien landscapes of suburban New Jersey, and the arid expanses of the American southwest. More abstractly this mobility is seen in Anzaldua's traveling in and out of colonial histories, American ideologies. Latino/a cultural traditions, and in her slipping in and out of multiple tongues and multiple registers of intelligibility. For Anzaldua and Wojnarowicz the images in their work and their mobility are practices of freedom, of bridging and making connections in the creation of new social and political orders. Wojnarowicz's diaries make clear this alliance of freedom and mobility: "I absolutely have never been able to put myself in a position where I deny chance and other ways of movement, whether over distances and landscapes or in lovemaking. It's the settling down that is so difficult; choosing one form excludes all others, the only answer is not choosing at all but merely moving under one's own will" (In the Shadow 104). This notion of movement as freedom from binarism, and access to transformations and multiplicity, is echoed by Anzaldua: Every increment of consciousness, every step forward is a travesia, a crossing. I am again an alien in new territory. And again, and again. But if 1 escape conscious awareness, escape 'knowing,' I won't be moving. Knowledge makes me more aware, it makes me more conscious. 'Knowing' is painful because after 'it' happens I can't stay in the same place and be comfortable. I am no longer the same person I was before. (Borderlands 48)

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This increase of consciousness and knowing is then also a process of individual and collective becoming, and through Anzaldua, Wojnarowicz, Deleuze and Guattari, and the critical lens of disability studies, we can understand how subjectivity becomes multiple. Crip-Queer-Mestiza/o Throughout Borderlands/La Frontera and Close to the Knives: . A Memoir of Disintegration we find Anzaldua and Wojnarowicz forging alliances across seemingly monolithic and mutually exclusionary fields/markers of difference. These connections and re-alignments are made possible by the direct experience and broader implications of life in/as the borderlands. For Anzaldua, the borderlands are in one respect a physical space manifested in the hyphen between a number of political and cultural binaries: US-Mexico, Tejas-Texas, Aztlan-the American Southwest/ Northern Mexico. Similarly, it is in the hyphen among simultaneous markers of identity, like crip-queer-zwe^^/za/o, that we may begin to see the bridging work of the borderlands and how it enables a conception of subjectivity that moves outside of strict binarism. In the borderlands the mestiza consciousness is bom out of exclusion, out ofthe inaccessibility of both sides ofthe border to queers of all sorts. "We are a synergy of two cultures with various degrees of Mexicanness or Angloness. I have so internalized the borderland conflict that sometimes I feel like one cancels out the other and we are zero, nothing, no one" {Borderlands 63). The borderlands are, of course, policed on "this side" by la migra, the INS, and an ever increasing deployment of military resources and surveillance. Del otro lado is policed by a dominant cultural logic intolerant of physical and sexual differences. As Anzaldua asserts: "1 abhor my culture's ways, how it cripples its women, eomo burras, our strengths used against us, lowly burras bearing humility with dignity. . . . I abhor how my culture makes maeho caricatures of its men" {Borderlands 21-22). These normalizing discourses are not, of course, unique to either side of this binary;

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they are ordering principles that structure both. Parochialism, patriotism, and patriarchy make up a trinity of exclusion and exploitation. In between these exclusions are the borderlands, a physical and abstract space conditioned by the policing of bodily and sexual difference. Anzaldua's tentative assertion of the "canceling" effect of a dually constitu.ted/excluded borderlands subject, or being "zero, nothing, no one," is rejected throughout the rest of her text, and this dual consciousness precedes her assertion of a more radical multiple subjectivity bom out of the borderlands. The mestiza consciousness is that which is produced and delimited by both sides of the binary, but never totalized by either. It is always both "here" and "there," del este lado y del otro lado. Anzaldua's Latina women figuratively are "crippled" by sexism and patriarchy, and the mestizo, consciousness is intimately shaped by the experience of physical and sexual differences. The mestizaje are all those variously embodied individuals who share a common marking as "other," who are kicked out, disavowed, and disallowed. This shared experience establishes the conditions for connectivity and alliance. ''Los atravesados live here: the squinteyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulatto, the half-breed, the half-dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the 'normal'" (Borderlands 3). Similarly, disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has noted, in the context of historical and ongoing dominant "management" of disabled bodies, how "those bodies deemed inferior become spectacles of otherness while the unmarked are sheltered in the neutral space of normalcy" (Extraordinary 8). The borderlands are no such "neutral space." Its inhabitants are simultaneously outside and in between the various spaces of "normalcy," they are the "taxonomical [and] ideological products" that shore-up the limits of embodiment and secure the "superiority" ofthe normate (Garland-Thomson 8).'^ The mestiza consciousness of the borderlands condenses and allies "the squinteyed, the perverse, the queer, the mongrel, and the half-breed" of Anzaldua, to "the cripple, the quadroon, the queer, the outsider [and] the whore" of Garland-Thomson (8). Disability studies broadens an understanding of border theory by allowing us to see

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that these cast-offs are brought together, despite their differences (or perhaps because of them), by the common experience of oppression and their literal and metaphorical abjection from the "neutral" spaces of normalcy and the body politic, fndeed, might not the freak shows and institutions to which disabled people were "confined" for much of modem history, sitting outside of the edges of towns, be a similar if not exactly correlative liminal space as Anzaldua's borderlands? Might these spaces also be connected to closeted living? Here is one example of how we might find in the borderlands a multiple subjectivity and assert the connected cripqueer-mestiza/o consciousness. For Anzaldua, this "outsider" or "in between" status is not a delimitation. Cr\p-queer-mestiza/o subjectivity is not defined by lack or a normatively understood and metaphorized disability. Rather, it produces an alternative type of power that challenges the prestige of the normate and that aligns neatly with Foucault's notion of resistance as produced through the regulatory exercise of bio-power. Anzaldua explains that "there is a magic aspect in abnormality and so-called deformity. Maimed, mad, and sexually different people were believed to possess supernatural powers by primal cultures' magico-religious thinking" (Borderlands 19). The experiences in and consciousness of being the borderlands creates what Anzaldua names ''lafacultad": "the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities"; through the rejection and critique of those realities an interruption of dualistic structures and systems of normativity occurs (Borderlands 38). "La Faculatad" is a way of seeing that refines Anzaldua's witnessing; it is a mode unique to those who have experienced abjection from the normafe and is connected to the borderland inhabitants Anzaldua detailed earlier: "Those who are pounced on the most have it the strongestthe females, the homosexuals of all races, the darkskinned, fhe outcast, the persecuted, the marginalized, the foreign" (Borderlands 38). Wojnarowicz's Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration furthers and complicates Anzaldua's notions of the borderlands and cx\p-quQQX-mestiza/o subjectivity, as well as the connections she forges between the cripple, the queer, and the mojado. In Close to the Knives, the section titled "In the Shadow of

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the American Dream: Soon This Will All Be Picturesque Ruins" chronicles Wojnarowicz's physical journeying through the southwestern , United States, his own crip-queer-mestizo consciousness, and his life in the borderlands. These borderlands are, as the section title announces, literally "in the shadow of the American Dream," outside of a normative national fantasy of community and identity. Wojnarowicz echoes Anzaldua, who at the end of Borderlands/La Frontera exhorts a dominant Anglo culture to "[a]dmit that Mexico is your double, that she exists in the shadow of this country" (86). For both Anzaldtia and Wojnarowicz, Mexico functions less as a physical entity and more as an abstract principle of sexual, physical, and cultural otherness abjected from a normate America. Once again, we can see the desire to keep these entities separate, to maintain distinction and stave off contagion in the military fencing stretching across the US-Mexico border today. Throughout Wojnarowicz's travels, the same outcasts and queers who occupy Anzaldua's la frontera populate his shadowy borderlands. Driving through the American southwest, Wojnarowicz draws our attention to the many Navajo men. Native American families, and Chicano teenagers who live in these borderlands, and whose lives are seemingly invisible to the normate culture that surrounds them. For these mestizaje, poverty and human misery are the spoils of their Otherness, and they are as close to and far from the normate as the "real world" is from the inside of one's car. Imagining the normate subject's response to scenes of abjection, Wojnarowicz asserts the norm's refusal to see the misery it causes, or to recognize its own role in that abjection.
Owning a vehicle, you could drive by and with the pressure of your foot on the accelerator and with your eyes on the road you could pass it quickly. . . . The images of poverty would lift and float and recede quickly like the gray shades of memory so that these images were in the past before you came upon them. {Close 31)

Wojnarowicz, of course, cannot make such a reflisal, because he has himself experienced the violence and scorn of the normate. Elsewhere Wojnarowicz identifies with a Native American

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teenager who had disrupted the morning rush hour in an unnamed southwest city by turning into oncoming traffic and running down a white college student. While he doesn't necessarily condone such murderous violence, Wojnarowicz empathizes with the Native American boy's reaction to the institutionally validated murderous violence routinely perpetrated against cripples, queers, and mestiza/os: "1 wondered why any of these things, like the kid. in his camaro, are a surprise. Why weren't more of us doing this?" (Close 32) Accordingly, the borderlands for Wojnarowicz extend beyond geographical limits of the southwest and into America's metropolitan centers and suburbs. Outside of and in between the "neutral spaces of normalcy," the borderlands are everywhere. "Last night 1 felt unbelievably sad and sometimes it happens that way: a sensation comes out across the landscape, into the cities and further into the window ofthe car as I'm coasting the labyrinths of the canyon streets" (Close 39). That sensation is the effect of exclusion and isolation; it is the feel ofthe borderlands come to the big city. Throughout the passages detailing his life as a teenage hustler in Times Square and adult artist multiply disabled by AIDS, Wojnarowicz repeatedly recalls the "canyon like" streets of New York, and the dominant culture's exclusion, often violently, of difference. In both the Manhattan of his teen and adult years, and the suburban New Jersey of his childhood memories, Wojnarowicz experiences the same exclusion and making invisible of difference that he witnesses in the southwest. I grew up in a tiny universe of hell called the suburbs and experieticed the Universe of the Neatly Clipped Lawn. This is a place where anything and everything can and does take placeand events such as torture, starvation, humiliation, physical and psychic violence can take place uncontested by others, as long as it doesn't stray across the boundaries and borders as formed by the deed-holder inhabiting the house on the neatly clipped lawn. If the violence is contained within the borders of the lawn and does not mess up the real estate in any way that would cause the surrounding properties devaluation, anything is possible and everything is permissible. (Close 151-152)

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These are Wojnarowicz's crip-queer-mestizaje, the inhabitants of these metropolitan and suburban Borderlands: the "fable of deafmutes" (Close 7) in a "horn and hard-hat" bar (Close 7), the crickbacked junkie prostitute, the queer Chicano teenage boy, the "oneeyed man" (Close 9) trolling a river front warehouse for sex, the mentally and cognitively disabled homeless in soup kitchens; the author himself, as a malnourished, teenage Times Square hustler with bleeding gums and victim of normatively contained familial violence, also inhabits this borderland. For Wojnarowicz life in these Borderlands becomes emblematized in the experience of people with AIDS, and in the relationship between these queers and outcasts to a normate America: [T]he tv has been turned to some show about the cost of AIDS and I'm watching a group of people die on camera because they can't
afford the drugs that might extend their tives and some fella in the health-care system in texas is being interviewedI can't even remember what he looks like because I reached through the television screen and ripped his face in halfhe's saying, "If I had a dollar to spend on health care I'd rather spend it on a baby or an innocent person with some illness or defect not of their own responsibility; not some person with AIDS." {Close 105)

Despite, or perhaps because of, opportunistic diseases and politicians, and the physical and psychological disintegration of AIDS, life in these Borderlands produces a consciousness and power akin to Anzaldua's la facultad. Wojnarowicz remarks that "[wjith the appearance of AIDS and the sense of mortality I now find everything revealing itself to me" (Close 108). As with Anzaldua's la facultad, Wojnarowicz launches a critique and rejection of the heteronormative fantasy of a compulsorily ablebodied nation and describes the work of a multiply transformative consciousness. For both Anzaldua and Wojnarowicz the borderlands produce a cnp-qwQtx-mestiza/o subjectivity that demands we reject the limitations of dualism and connect to others across fields of difference, rather than being immobilized by the fantasy of normate physical and national unity. Both activists/artists

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challenge us to rethink dominant ideals of singular, unitary, autonomous identity; in doing so they offer a revisioning of subjectivity that might produce a resistant politics of multiplicity. Prosthetic Subjectivity In its logic of collaboration and alliance this crip-queermestiza/o consciousness embodies what I would term a prosthetic subjectivity: a revisioning of subjectivity that fulfills Anzaldua's and Wojnarowicz's multiplicity. This conception of subjectivity as multiplicity is part ofthe process that Nellie Wong describes as the "desire to become pluralistic" (178). As Anzaldua asserts ofher "new [crip-queer-] mestiza" subject: "She has a plural personality, she operates in a pluralistic modenothing is thrust out, the good the bad and the ugly, nothing rejected, nothing abandoned. Not only does she sustain contradictions, she turns the ambivalence into something else" {Borderlands 79). That "something else" might be figured as prosthetic subjectivity. The prosthesis here, however, is not in accordance with ableist medical or cultural logic that seeks to cover-up/erase the fact of physical difference and disability or give the illusion of normative able-bodiedness. As Mitchell and Snyder have observed: "In a literal sense a prosthesis seeks to accomplish an illusion. A body deemed lacking, unflinctional, or inappropriately functional needs compensations, and prosthesis helps to effect this end" (6)."* Prosthetics, then, usually pave over the differences ofthe disabled body, and assuage anxieties over challenges to the normative body and subject. The prosthetic subjectivity of Anzaldua and Wojnarowicz, on the other hand, draws attention to its own incompleteness and difference. In their occupying of the borderlands, their relationships to both sides of the border, and their critique of normativity, Anzaldua and Wojnarowicz demonstrate this rule and the "natural" incompleteness of all identity. Recently, Judith Butler has given in depth consideration to the incomplete or non-autonomous status of identity and subjectivity: "In a sense, to be a body is to be given over to others even as a body is, emphatically, 'one's own,' that over which we must claim

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rights of autonomy" (Butler 20).'^ To be a subject is to already be constituted as that subject for ati Other, what Butler terms being (as) "beside oneself," so that identity is never singular, unified, or self-autonomous but always already intersubjective and multiply interconnected. Following Butler, and as demonstrated by Anzaldua and Wojnarowicz, rather than determining subjectivity on a lack that must be "overcome" or given the illusion of wholeness, this incompleteness, or prosthetic subjectivity, is productive in itself; it creates multiply connected identities and communities. As Anzaldtia remarks, this new vision of subjectivity is also always already intersubjective; furthermore it will stagnate and decline if these connections are not maintained and renewed indefinitely: "it will decline unless we attach it to new growth or append new growth to it" {This Bridge We Call Home 2). In Narrative Prosthesis, Mitchell and Snyder expand traditional understandings of prosthesis. Their work accords with Anzaldtia's and Wojnarowicz's prosthetic subjectivity, which seeks to create more connected and inclusive communities. In their "Preface," Mitchell and Snyder posit that disability studies and activism should focus not just on ''autonomy for disabled people," as in the "independent living movement," which is of vital social and political import, but should also recognize and elaborate on the "interdependency of disability living." By way of example they "emphasize the prosthetic nature of [their] collaborative projects" (xii). Furthermore, Mitchell and Snyder assert that their own work and figure of "narrative prosthesis" is an "effort to make the prosthesis show, to flaunt its imperfect supplementation as an illusion" (8). Here, prosthesis does not concern lack and the illusion of "wholeness," but rather becomes a tactic of collaboration that is embodied and enacted in "flaunting," in rejecting the illusion of bodily norms. Mitchell and Snyder's formulation of prosthesis constitutes a revisioning and witnessing very much aligned with the imagery and specularity of Anzaldua and Wojnarowicz. Like these activists/artists, Mitchell and Snyder's own prosthetic projects and subjectivities create the possibility for multiple connections and alliances across, within, and beyond the normative confinements ofthe borderlands.

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In Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari offer a reconfiguration of desire, subjectivity, and embodiment that might help clarify this notion of prosthetic subjectivity.'^ Deleuze and Guattari oppose an understanding of desire and subjectivity constituted on an originary lack and insufficiency, which by extension is reproduced in the normative ordering of society.'^ Rather, Deleuze and Guattari cast subjectivity as machinic assemblages, and desire as productive of new and different relationships and social arrangements. Their rejection of the originary fantasy of a lost unity or bodily completeness echoes the prosthetic formulations elaborated above. We no longer believe in the myth of the existence of fragments that, like pieces of an antique statue, are merely waiting for the last one to be turned up, so that they may all be glued back together to create a unity that is precisely the same as the original unity. We no longer believe in a primordial totality that once existed, or in a final totality that awaits us at some future date. {Anti-Oedipus 42) In place of this Oedipalization and casting of identity as conditioned by a lost "original unity," Deleuze and Guattari assert subjectivity as "machines" and "assemblages" composed of multiple and variously embodied parts that interchange and create new relationships, alliances, and communities: "Everything is a machine. . . . There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together" {Anti-Oedipus 2). What Deleuze and Guattari call "desiring-machines" or "assemblages," in their expanding and creating of new relationships among other machines, connects to Mitchell and Snyder's understanding ofthe "prosthetic nature" of "collaborative projects." And we might think of the hyphens between Anzaldua and Wojnarowicz's mestizacrip-queer consciousness and their prosthetic subjectivity as instituting precisely one of these "desiring-machines." In its forging of new connections, prosthetic subjectivity is always on the move; it institutes a mobility machine that incessantly crosses in and out of the borderlands in the creation of provisional alliances and more inclusive communities. For Anzaldua, los atravesados are in constant motion; they are always

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slipping back and forth across any number of borders, physical and abstract. As she remarks about the experience of her own cripqueer-me^fea consciousness: "It's an interesting path, one that continually slips in and out ofthe white, the Catholic, the Mexican, the indigenous, the instinct. In and out of my head" {Borderlands 19). Ultimately, this consciousness's continual movement among multiple cultures and communities creates the possibility of an end to duality: "At some point, on our way to a new consciousness, we will have to leave the opposite bank, the split between the two mortal combatants somehow healed so that we are on both shores at once" {Borderlands 79). Similarly, prosthetic subjectivity revisions identity as mobile, interconnected, and dedicated to dismantling the illusions of unity and normativity: "Transformations occur in this in-between space, an unstable, unpredictable, precarious, always-in-transition space lacking clear boundaries" {This Bridge We Call Home 1). For Wojnarowicz this mobility machine is more immediately destructive. During his journeys Wojnarowicz comes to believe that the first step towards moving beyond the violence of dualism is the destruction of the social order that perpetuates it. Increasingly disabled by AIDS, he imagines a prosthetic version of himself: I'm the robotic kid lost from the blind-eye of government and wandering the edges of a computerized landscape; all civilization is turning like one huge gear in my forehead. I'm seeing my hands and feet grow thousands of miles long and millions of years old and I'm experiencing the exertion it takes to move these programmed limbs. I'm the robotic kid, the human motor-works, and surveying the scene before me 1 wonder: What can these feet level? What can these feet pound and flatten? What can these hands raise? {Close 63) But destruction is only part of Wojnarowicz's imagining of a fully prostheticized revision of himself; he also dreams of a new order, a transformed way of being "beside oneself," and with, for, and as Others: "What can these hands raise?" In their bringing together of the "maimed, mad, and sexually different," ofthe cripple, the queer, and the mojado, in the physical and abstract space of the borderlands, Anzaldua and Wojnarowicz

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describe a crip-queer-mestiza/o conscioustiess that asserts the prosthetic nature of all subjectivity. They thereby provide the possibility for tiew social and political coalitions del este lado, del otro lado, and everywhere in between.
Notes 1. Anzaldua is described this way in the author's note to Borderlands/La Frontera. 2. For a discussion ofthe notion of "compulsory able-bodiedness," see McRuer. 3. The full text of Anzaldua's obituary can be found at: <http://www.queeringdiabetes.org/substance/gloria_anzaldua.htm>. 4. Anzaldua is perhaps more pointed in Borderlands/La Frontera, when she asserts that "we need to allow whites to be our allies" (85). 5. See Anzaldua's "(Un)natural Bridges, (Un)safe Spaces," her preface to This Bridge We Call Home and Moraga's "Refugees of a World on Fire," her foreword to the second edition of This Bridge Called My Back. 6. Or perhaps more properly, in 1981, with the initial publication of This Bridge Called My Back. 1. In addition to the govemmental missions to "secure" the borderlands listed below, non-governmentally appointed citizen groups (really, vigilante militias, regardless of their claims to be non-violent) have recently arisen to "maintain" the US/Mexico border in response to what they see as the failures of Homeland Security to protect the interests and lives of Americans. The largest of these citizen-groups is the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, whose goals and purpose, in unsurprisingly fiery and "patriotic" rhetoric can be found at <http://www.minutemanhq.com/hq/aboutus.php>. 8. Recently, Downing has summarized the problems and trajectory of US/INS politics and problems on the US/Mexico border since the 1990s. And for a trenchant parody of US and Califomia border politics, see Arau's film. 9. "The Border Patrol's apprehensions between Oct. 1, 2003, and Sept. 30, 2004, in the Tucson sector totaled 491,771, or 1,347 per day, but the population of undocumented immigrants 'has been growing robustly during most ofthe period of 'concentrated border enforcement,' according to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. The crossing has not become impossible, just more expensive and dangerous. Since 2000, more than 750 migrants have been found dead in the Arizona desert, according to county medical examiners. And from January 1995 through May 2004, more than 2,600 people have died along the whole border roughly one death per day, 10 times the rate before operations" (Downing B1+). 10. The "gaze" of Anzaldua and Wojnarowicz has nothing to do with the dominant gaze of patriarchal imperialism, the erotic gaze of heteronormativity, or the patronizing gaze of ableism as described by Pratt, Mulvey, GarlandThomson ("Politics of Staring"), or Clare. Furthermore, the critical witnessing and visual critique of Wojnarowicz can be seen most directly in his plastic arts; see Cameron, etal.

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11. Elsewhere in Close to the Knives, Wojnarowicz similarly remarks that "[t]o place an object or piece of writing that contains what is invisible because of legislation or social taboo into an environment outside myself makes me feel not so alone" (156). 12. Indeed, in this dialectical relationship of power and resistance, Anzaldua and Wojnarowicz embody and perform what Foucault called "perpetual spirals of power and pleasure" (45). 13. The "normate" is a neologism coined by Garland-Thomson to designate the modal, normatively embodied subject of privilege, which is also meant to designate the idealistic and ideological "nature" of the bodily/subjective norm, as well as its fully contingent construction. "Normate, then, is the constmcted identity of those who, by way of the bodily configurations and cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority and wield the power it grants them. . . . One testimony to the power of the normate subject position is that people often try to fit its description in the same way that Cinderella's stepsisters attempted to squeeze their feet into her glass slipper" {Extraordinary Bodies 8). 14. Similarly, David Wills has argued, "far from signifying a deficiency, the prostheticized body is the rule, not the exception" (quoted in Mitchell and Snyder 7). 15. See especially, chapter one, "Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy." 16. For Deleuze and Guattari's most elaborate discussions of "machines" and "assemblages," see "Part 1: The Desiring-Machines," in Anti-Oedipus, and "1227: Treatise on Nomadology:The War Machine," in A Thousand Plateaus. 17. Anzaldua details how this is a structuring principle of society: "Most societies try to get rid of their deviants. Most cultures have burned and beaten their homosexuals and others who deviate from the sexual common. The queer are the mirror reflecting the heterosexual tribe's fear: being different, being other and therefore lesser, therefore subhuman, in-human, non-human" {Borderlands 18). Works Cited Alarcon, Norma. "Chicana's Feminist Literature: A Re-Vision Through Malintzin/or Malintzin: Putting Flesh Back on the Object." Moraga and Anzaldua 182-90. Anzaldua, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1987. . Foreword to the Second Edition. Moraga and Anzaldua np. . "(Un)natural Bridges, (Un)safe Spaces." Preface. This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation. Ed. Gloria Anzaldua and Analouise Keating. New York: Routledge, 2002. 1-5. Anzaldiia, Gloria, and Analouise Keating, eds. This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation. New York: Routledge, 2002. Arau, Sergio, dir. A Day Without a Mexican. Televisa Cine, 2004.

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Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004. Cameron, Dan, John Carlin, C. Carr, and Mysoon Rizk. Fever: The Art of David Wojnarowicz. Ed. Amy Scholder. New York: Rizzoli, 1998. Clare, Eli. "Gawking, Gaping, Staring." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 9.\-2 (2003): 251-6]. Cohen, Jeffrey J., and Todd R. Ramlow. "Pink Vectors of Deleuze: Queer Theory and Inhumanism." Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 11/12 (2005-2006). <http://www.rhizomes.net/issuel 1/cohenramlow. html>. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983. . A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Vol. 2. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987. Downing, Renee. "Border Control? What We See Here Is Anything But." The Washington Post-1 May 2005: B1+. Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction. Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. . "The Politics of Staring: Visual Rhetorics of Disability in Popular Photography." Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Ed. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. New York: MLA, 2002. 56-75. McRuer, Robert. "Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence." Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities. Ed. Sharon L. Snyder, Brenda Jo Brueggemann, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson. New York: MLA, 2002. 88-99. Mitchell, David T. and Sharon L. Snyder. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000. Moraga, Cherri'e. "Refugees of a World on Fire." Foreword to the Second Edition. Moraga and Anzaldua np. Moraga, Cherrie, and Gloria Anzaldua, eds. This Bridge Called My BackWritings by Radical Women of Color. 2nd ed. New York: Kitchen Table: Women of Color P, 1983. Mulvey, Laura. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Wojnarowicz, David. Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration. New York: Vintage, 1991. . In the Shadow ofthe American Dream: The Diaries of David Wojnarowicz. Ed. Amy Scholder. New York: Grove P, 1999. Wong, Nellie. "In Search ofthe Self As Hero: Confetti of Voices on New Year's Night: A Letter to Myself" Moraga and Anzaldua 177-81.