Writing the Self: Gloria Anzaldúa, Textual Form, and Feminist Epistemology

Personal experiences – revised and in other ways redrawn – become a lens with which to reread and rewrite the cultural stories into
which we are born.
- Gloria Anzaldúa, now let us shift....

Feminist writer and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa has been increasingly important for almost two decades; her work is
now systematically anthologized in composition, feminist, and critical race readers, reaching new audiences each
year. After the publication of This Bridge Called Our Back, co-edited with Cherrie Moraga in 1981, Anzaldúa’s
reach extended with her book Borderlands/La Frontera published in 1987. Since then, scholarship surrounding
Anzaldúa – as a theorist, a poet, a lesbian feminist, a Chicana, a mestiza – has consistently expanded in order to
more fully disseminate and make use of her ideas. Anzaldúa’s theory of borderland and mestiza identity as a fuller
and richer theory of difference, self, and culture has been broadly deployed across disciplines and in classrooms.
Now, in many classrooms across the country, students read excerpts or chapters from Anzaldúa’s text Borderlands.

Particularly within these anthologies and collections, Anzaldúa’s work functions primarily in essayist fashion.
Although readers of Anzaldúa’s work have much to learn about her particular experience of mestiza identity, her
work also shows that the act of writing itself assists individuals in coming to know and express the complexities of
identity. In the two chapters I will examine below, readers see Anzaldúa’s narrator explore the intersections and
intricacies of multiple aspects of her identity. It is this ability to explore and investigate – to think in writing – that
characterizes Anzaldúa’s writing in these chapters as essayistic. Conceptualizing these two chapters as essays allows
for several benefits: acknowledgement of the ways that narrator and voice are constructed, attention to how form is
crafted and purposeful, and awareness of how the inclusion and negotiation of multiple discourses drives the
knowledge possibilities of the text forward. [1]

An understanding of the essay can thus supplement our readings of these complex texts. In my essay below, I will
argue that essays exist as knowledge possibilities in addition to real, material texts composed and constructed by
writers. As Theodor Adorno noted in his influential piece “The Essay as Form,” the essay functions as “an arena of
intellectual experience” in which knowledges can be brought together, tested, and complicated (161). Feminist
writers from Wollstonecraft to Woolf, de Beauvoir to hooks, have often turned to both the category of experience
and the genre of the essay to explore ways of knowing grounded in a deep skepticism of received knowledge,
disciplinary divides, and false binaries. The essay as a genre then, and the fluid, hybrid forms Anzaldúa composes,
serve as key texts through which to consider feminist epistemologies. What ways of knowing do writers offer via
their texts? How can feminist knowledge strategies exceed traditional, often linear, argumentative or narrative
structures? And how do these texts thus offer possibilities for knowing ourselves, our identities, and our worlds
otherwise?

This article explores two chapters from Borderlands/La Frontera: the most frequently anthologized chapter, “How to
Tame a Wild Tongue,” and the seldom anthologized following chapter, “Tlilli, Tlapalli / The Path of the Red and
Black Ink.” The chapters are juxtaposed in order to elucidate Anzaldúa’s powerful contributions to gendered and
racialized identity theories and, moreover, to illustrate how theory and practice combine in her writing to offer a
specifically feminist epistemology. In essayistic fashion, I provide close readings of each chapter to exemplify the
affect of reading and negotiating the threads Anzaldúa weaves together. Tracing the non-linear essayism of
Anzaldúa’s chapters, my essay likewise picks up ideas, stories, and observations in order to put them into suggestive
conversation. In addition to providing a broad sense of her writing style, commitments, and thinking across multiple
chapters, I juxtapose Anzaldúa’s two chapters in order to compare the argumentative work of Chapter Five with the
more narrative, descriptive, embodied writing of Chapter Six. In each reading, I pay close attention to the hybrid
dynamic of the writing in order to illustrate how Anzaldúa’s text engenders powerful knowledge opportunities
through feminist writing practices.

Writing as Counter to Traditions of Silence: Mestiza Identity in “How to Tame a Wild Tongue”
/
Gloria Anzaldúa’s writing is well known for challenging readers to push against the limits of what they know about
the physically and linguistically “bordered” world of Texas. Anzaldúa’s fifth chapter of Borderlands begins with the
metaphor of the narrator’s visit to the dentist, establishing the chapter’s central motif of “taming a wild tongue.” [2]
For the dentist, the narrator’s tongue is too unruly and disobedient. It keeps getting in the way and the dentist notes
that “something must be done” about it (53). Reflecting on this experience, the narrator notes that for those who
speak up against injustice, “Wild tongues can’t be tamed. They can only be cut out” (54). This opening metaphor
sets the stage for the analyses and arguments Anzaldúa constructs regarding the importance of language, linguistic
identity, and cultural identity. Although Anzaldúa often summons memories, stories, or short anecdotes like the one
above in order to illustrate her points through drawing on different types of knowledges, Chapter Five is primarily
characterized by its critical scrutiny of the borderlands that the narrator occupies. In this vein, the beginning
anecdote about the dentist is followed by a quote from artist Ray Gwyn Smith which, centered on the page, reads,
“Who is to say that robbing a people of its language is less violent than war?” Beginning with a personal narrative
and moving to an interrogative citation, Anzaldúa creates a hybrid structure which resonates with her exploration of
linguistic identity. This fast-paced textual layering continues in the next three paragraphs. In the first, the narrator
relates a childhood altercation with her Anglo teacher who admonished her for speaking Spanish at recess. In the
second paragraph, the narrator quotes her mother’s desire for her children to speak English without an accent, a
desire which coincided with the goals of the local schooling systems. Here, we are introduced to the mixing of
English and Spanish text within the dialogue spoken by the narrator’s mother: the mother’s first sentence is in
English, but is followed by two sentences which are completely in Spanish except for the last word “accent” which
is in scare-quotes due to its English insertion within a Spanish sentence. Finally, with the third paragraph Anzaldúa
ends the chapter’s first short section declaratively with three sentences reading:

Attacks on one’s form of expression with the intent to censor are a violation of the First
Amendment. El Anglo con cara de inocente nos arrancó la lengua. Wild tongues can’t be
tamed, they can only be cut out. (54 )

In addition to constructing a hybrid text that moves between different types of written expression, Anzaldúa’s piece
adds a level of hybrid complexity by simultaneously moving between multiple languages in order to make a strong,
polemical statement.

It is important to notice, however, that whereas in the second paragraph the Spanish was contained within the
mother’s dialogue – marking it as speech and as expression closely tied to identity and thus, in some ways, both
expected and innocuous – in the above quotation the Spanish text is asserted by the narrator and takes its place
alongside the English text. This shift is important as it marks the shift from Spanish as tied to an individual’s way of
speaking to a heightened reliance on Spanish to communicate the argument of the piece. The use of Spanish not only
assists the English text in making a point, but moves beyond what English is able to express to include other
dimensions and meanings more ably present in Spanish. Here, for example, the Spanish text allows the narrator to
shift both the tone of the paragraph from a legal diction to a more personal tone, while at the same time more
directly implicating those Anglos “with innocent faces” as those who attempt to censor language. This progression
in turn sets up the paragraph for the concluding sentence which circles back to the opening metaphor of the wild
tongue, here asserting that only violence can “cure” such wildness.

This hybrid style – marked by changes in types of writing and argument, as well as changes in language usage –
results in a text which weaves together multiple threads in order to approach a central idea. An example of this
hybridity occurs in Chapter Five’s next section, entitled “Overcoming the Tradition of Silence.” The structure of the
section consists of a range of writing I will explore below: an introductory epigraph in Spanish, a longer paragraph, a
shorter paragraph, a short poem written by Jewish writer Irena Klepfisz, and lastly, a very short paragraph of two
sentences. Each of these sections of writing is held apart from the following section by a space break; this usage
marks this section as unique from other sections in the chapter which utilize white space less consistently and more
sparingly. As critics such as Julie Jung have argued, space breaks are used purposefully to resist linear transitions
and thus, make readers “listen” better. [3]

The beginning epigraph in Spanish sets the tone of the section and introduces the tropes of dark, light, and shadows
as well as the feeling of being buried by silence. The use of the three line epigraph entirely in Spanish establishes an
alternative to English-only usage. In addition to specifically calling on women to enact a feminist confrontation to
the tradition of patriarchal silence, it also enacts a possible way to counter the “tradition” of silence through /
alternative and confrontational language usage. Moreover, the three line epigraph accelerates the amount of Spanish
in Spanish, however the trend of this paragraph is to introduce cultural sayings and phrases, which are then
translated or contextualized by the English text within the paragraph. Here, the English text serves the purposes and
meanings of the Spanish text: the two languages are integrated within sentences, the narrator moving back and forth
between the two as she establishes the litany of phrases used to denigrate women and their speech.

The following short paragraph – the third piece of text among the five which constitute the section – elaborates the
patriarchal nature of discourse through the narrator’s recollection of the first time she heard the feminine plural of
“we,” nosotras. This paragraph concretizes the idea that women can be culturally degraded and minimized through
language. Thus, the cultural experience of women is given specific weight by the narrator’s remembrance of being
struck by the use of nosotras. Via a turn to personal example, the personal evidence is then further sedimented as the
tone shifts to a more academic, claim-based argument: “We are robbed of our female being by the masculine plural.
Language is a male discourse” (54 ).

Juxtaposing this more argumentative discourse is the following poem, by Jewish writer Irena Klepfisz, which also
makes interesting use of white space:

And our tongues have become

dry the wilderness has dried
out our tongues and we have
forgotten speech.

Formally, the shift to poetic language and form extends the narrator’s ability to move between shifting discourses
and types of writing. The use of white space within the poem accents the themes of language aridity and visually
invokes the forgetting of languages. This use of white space thus also provides a formal bridge to Anzaldúa’s use of
the space break. In this section as a whole, silence is invoked on the page through space break – patches of speech
and ideas are simultaneously held apart for contemplation even as they are joined under the section title
“Overcoming the Tradition of Silence.” In this way, each part of the section seems a step in breaking that tradition,
overcoming silence via its individual speech act. Yet things are not quite so simple, as the narrator points out in the
two sentence concluding paragraph of the section: “Even our own people, other Spanish speakers nos quieren poner
candados en la boca. They would hold us back with their bag of regles de academia” (54). Even as the narrator
seeks to build an illustrative and suggestive argument suggesting how silence might be overcome, the text seems
discontent with resolving too easily or sacrificing the complexity of the dynamics surrounding language use to
simplistic, or overly hopeful, lines of thought.

As I’ve shown in the analysis of this section, hybridity exists not only as the central content of the piece – the
inquiry and difficulty being explored – but appropriately becomes the concomitant form of the writing. In order to
discuss hybridity, it seems it is necessary to view and write the world through hybridity. And as the narrator of
Anzaldúa’s piece suggests, solutions, peoples, and interpretations are multiple; no easy alliances can be found in
such a population as “our own people” or “Spanish speakers.” Indeed, the rest of Chapter Five does much to
articulate the stratifications within populations which have been mis-viewed as singular or unified. Among the
differences Anzaldúa explores are the multiple languages Chicanos speak as well as the relationships between
Spanish speakers as they negotiate which language to speak to whom; the history of Spanish linguistic change in
response to other languages, populations, and geographical realities; the relationship between linguistic and ethnic
identity, the pressures of acculturation, and the accompanying emotions of shame and low self-esteem; and issues of
identification and hybrid mestiza consciousness. [4] Alongside these informative and argumentative sections,
Anzaldúa includes personal reflection and narration about her place within these cultural fissures and borders,
including a section devoted to the visceral memories that define the narrator as Chicana and the difficulty she
experienced relaying this identity to an often hostel and limiting Anglo world. Thus we see that Chapter Five works
largely to enlighten the reader through an assemblage of written expression, even as it ultimately relies upon
argumentative, declarative, and expository rhetoric to make its points.

A summary of the final pages of Chapter Five will illustrate the diverse and dialogic discourse strategies Anzaldúa
deploys in constructing a hybrid, essayistic text which summons multiple lines of thought and expression to erect /its
arguments. The final section of Chapter Five – Si la preguntas a mi mamá, "Qué eres?” – begins with a centered
(62). Fittingly, this last section explores the competing ways Chicanos have tried to establish a sense of identity –
national, racial, linguistic, spiritual, emotional – even as they "straddle the borderlands" both physically and in terms
of how they, and others, understand identity. Using the metaphors of both eagle and serpent as a way to illustrate
surpassing borders, Anzaldúa chronicles how the Chicano population identifies multiply – Mexican, mestizo, Raza,
tejano – each inflecting or accentuating a particular aspect of identity. Such identification is necessary to combat the
narrator’s feeling that “I have so internalized the borderland conflict that sometimes I feel like one cancels out the
other and we are zero, nothing, no one” (63).

The coining of the name “Chicano” therefore served as an important catalyst for distinguishing Chicanos as “a
distinct people”: “Now that we had a name, some of the fragmented pieces began to fall together – who we were,
what we were, how we had evolved. We began to get glimpses of what we might eventually become” (63). Anzaldúa
writes, “One day the inner struggle will cease and a true integration [will] take place” (63). Accordingly, this
paragraph continues in Spanish, posing questions and asserting the Chicano’s own identity struggles, thus fully
integrating Spanish and English in order to imagine such integration on the page. In the conclusion to Chapter Five,
Anzaldúa deploys fewer space breaks, resulting in a prose-style that builds momentum and ties together the multiple
narratives, examples, and claims made. [5] The conclusion thus establishes both a sense of unification and a sense of
alterity; Chicanos are held together by their differences and this realization and recognition of difference is crucial to
hybrid identity. What Anzaldúa has shown us through her text is just this: that the “fragmented pieces” of identity
and subject position can begin “to fall together” into persuasive argument via a hybrid textual form which makes
room for multiple ways of knowing and expressing the self.

Writer as Knower, Writer as Conjurer: Bodily Writing and Knowledge in “Tlilli, Tlapalli / The Path of the Red an
Black Ink”

In Chapter Six, however, Anzaldúa complicates the ways of understanding identity she has already established. If in
Chapter Five a sense of mestiza-hybridity serves as the primary trait of identity, in Chapter Six this sense radiates to
a specific aspect of the narrator’s identity – that of a writer, and a writer influenced significantly by her Indian
heritage and its culture. If Chapter Five primarily occupied a historical, cultural, and rhetorically argumentative
space, Chapter Six filters these perspectives through more personal, narrative, and reflexive writing. The diverse
formal structure mimics the chapter’s move toward a more personal and specific exploration of identity through its
increased use of non-English writing, often present in longer pieces of text (the longest is a three-paragraph, half-
page block of Spanish.) Here, the use of more Spanish builds on both the trust the narrator has established with the
reader in the prior chapters and the strategies that reader has developed for engaging both Spanish and English
written text, including dialects. As Chapter Six spirals in to examine the more particular individual identity of the
narrator, increased reliance on Spanish within the text enacts the writer’s communication and way of being a writer
in the world.

Part of the work of Chapter Six is thus to provide a range of metaphors and descriptions for understanding what it
means to write and what it means to be a writer. These descriptions range across a spectrum of positions for the
writer, beginning with situating the writer as a worker, a crafter of language: “Picking out images from my soul’s
eye, fishing for the right words to recreate the images. Words are blades of grass pushing past the obstacles,
sprouting on the page...” (71). The verbs used here highlight the range of writing activities, from the more
purposeful “picking out,” to the tentative “fishing,” to the spontaneous “sprouting.” Anzaldúa seems to embrace the
multiplicity of writing and its processes, writing:

Being a writer feels very much like being a Chicana, or being queer – a lot of squiring,
coming up against all sorts of walls. Or its opposite: nothing defined or definite, a boundless,
floating state of limbo where I kick my heels, brood, percolate, hibernate and wait for
something to happen. (72)

Anzaldúa characterizes writing as both waiting and crafting to multiply the ways that we think about writing. Indeed,
her passage works to define one perception of writing followed immediately by “its opposite.” Often writing
involves struggle – defined or sensed – “coming up against all sorts of walls.” She writes: “That’s what writing is for
me, an endless cycle of making it worse, making it better, but always making meaning out of the experience,
/
whatever it may be” (73). Writing is not only a way of doing or of communicating, but a way of oscillating between
way of writing/knowing, or its opposite, can be reified into binary opposition. Meaning making oscillates between
the muddy terrain of worse and better, and, as we will see in the next section, subject and object, writer and text.

Chapter Six thus illustrates the ways that writing necessitates multiple relationships. One of these relationships is
that between feeling and knowing, between the conscious and the unconscious. Anzaldúa points to the image as a
key intermediary: “An 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” (69).
The latter sentence seems to express the ability of the image to tap into and capture something about an idea or
emotion which may not be as readily expressed in words. These images and words can then be woven together:
“This almost finished product seems an assemblage, a montage, a beaded work with several leitmotifs and with a
central core, now appearing, now disappearing in a crazy dance” (66). Anzaldúa writes:

If I can get the bone structure right, then putting flesh on it proceeds without too many
hitches. The problem is that the bones often do not exist prior to the flesh, but are shaped
after a vague and broad shadow of its form is discerned or uncovered during beginning,
middle and final stages of writing...The whole thing has had a mind of its own, escaping me
and insisting on putting together the pieces of its own puzzle with minimal direction from my
will...Though it is a flawed thing – a clumsy, complex, groping, blind thing – for me it is
alive, infused with spirit. I talk to it; it talks to me. (67)

The sense of negotiation in writing acts as the primary metaphor for this description, yet it is worth noticing how
little control the narrator feels she has over the piece. The piece is unwieldy since the form – the bones – cannot exist
prior to, or as distinct from, the “flesh.” Instead the writing process itself – the stages she refers to – allow the form
to emerge from a “vague and broad shadow” to something more distinct and meaningful. This movement between
the bones and the flesh – between, less gracefully, form and content – simulates the movement between writer
creating a dialogue with the world around her. As Anzaldúa concludes, when writing, “I am playing with my Self, I
am playing with the world’s soul, I am the dialogue between my Self and el espíritu del mundo. I change myself, I
change the world” (70).

Arguments Otherwise: Thinking Through Feminist Epistemologies with Anzaldúa

A primary way that writers change the world around them is through the interaction of their written texts with
readers. As theorists such as Louise Rosenblatt have noted, meaning making is a process enacted between readers
and texts, and thus by extension – writers. Anzaldúa writes, “My ‘stories’ are acts encapsulated in time, ‘enacted’
every time they are spoken aloud or read silently. I like to think of them as performances and not as inert and ‘dead’
objects (as the aesthetics of Western culture think of art works)” (67). [6] Here, Anzaldúa extends her written text
beyond a static object, beyond a static meaning to be ascertained, to the broader concept of an “act.” This definition
is significant in the way it allows Anzaldúa to imagine the relationship with her reader and for the way it allows her
to characterize the experience of reading as less linearly driven. [7] Encapsulating texts, readers, and writers into a
performance space suggests a more complex system of relationships then merely “writer writes” and “reader reads.”

Such a system of interpretation – multi-faceted, overlapping, collaborative – guides the way Anzaldúa problematizes
traditional binaries which have shaped the interpretation of art:

In the ethno-poetics and performance of the shaman, my people, the Indians, did not split the
artistic from the functional, the sacred from the secular, art from everyday life...The ability of
story (prose and poetry) to transform the storyteller and the listener into something or
someone else is shamanistic. (66)

Here Anzaldúa differentiates her cultural perspective from writers of “Western” traditions that tend to divide – art
from practice, form from content, male from female. For Anzaldúa, the reader is not strictly divided from writer.
Although texts navigate and shape the relationship between reader and writer, the reader and the writer are not held
apart at separate poles with the text moving in only one direction. Instead, both the storyteller and listener – and by
Anzaldúa’s example, writer and reader – are “transform[ed]...into something or someone else.” Here both reading
and writing are processes that rest on change – the transformation of perspectives, ideas, understandings. /
Just as the written text does not move in a singular, linear direction from writer to reader, Anzaldúa’s writing moves
between and among times and spaces. Such movement is made possible by the essay’s ability to transcend strict
narrative logic and spatio-temporal expectations. As critic Diana Fowlkes writes, “Anzaldúa demonstrates the
usefulness of recognizing simultaneity of many borders and then consciously mingling their effects, rather than
allowing them to render her divided within herself and thus immobile” (118). In so doing Anzaldúa is careful not to
minimize or obscure differences; instead she moves between categories and borders, using the metaphor of herself as
a crossroads. Through such intermingling, Anzaldúa participates in a long tradition of essay-writing technique. Yet
her use of multiple narratives, types of writing that exceed the traditional voice of an essay narrator (such as lists,
poems, colloquialisms, etc.), and most particularly the hybrid form her essay engenders push the boundaries of what
may be normally recognized as an essay. Fowlkes names this style of writing “complex identity narration...involving
an interlacing of autobiographical narrative with historical, political, philosophical, cultural, linguistic, spiritual, and
psychological analyses and syntheses” (108-9). Anzaldúa describes her writing as “autohistoria... a term I use to
describe the genre of writing about one’s personal and collective history using fictive elements, a sort of fictionalized
autobiography or memoir; an autohistoria – teoría is a personal essay that theorizes” (“now let us shift,” 578).
Although many of these discourses have historically been deployed by essayists since Montaigne, Anzaldúa’s
particular assemblage of different types of language and discourse in her essay-chapters makes visible the range of
possible essay writing. Most importantly, Anzaldúa figures this writing as a knowledge possibility grounded in
theorizing the personal and deploying it not only as singular reality, but instead as a framing and narrating tool.

Thus, in addition to exploring the spectrum of writing and expression the essay form engenders, part of the work of
Borderlands seems to be to balance more argument-driven chapters (such as Chapter Five) with alternate structures
and styles of argumentation. As Anzaldúa writes, “Let us hope that the left hand, that of darkness, of femaleness, of
‘primitiveness,’ can divert the indifferent, right-handed, ‘rational’ suicidal drive that, unchecked, could blow us into
acid rain in a fraction of a millisecond” (69). Through acknowledging and countering binaries like these, Anzaldúa
polemically poses “challenges to dominant models of knowledge formation,” especially those which privilege
“singular subjectivity” and rely on “the Cartesian and positivist scientific models” (Fowlkes, 111). Moving beyond
binaries of subject and object and their concomitant beliefs regarding objectively ascertained knowledge of the
world via the scientific method, Anzaldúa’s writing suggests multiple ways to access, describe, and understand the
world around us. If Chapter Five works to articulate “a form of subjectivity ...[that is] flexible, [and] complexly
defined” as Fowlkes suggests, I contend that it is Chapter Six, and its juxtaposition to Chapter Five, that presents
feminist alternatives to both knowing and representing reality (108).

For example, although Chapter Six begins similarly to Chapter Five – using a series of short paragraphs which lead
with a narrative anecdote and an epigraph – the “argument” of Chapter Six is much more tentative, exploratory, and
seemingly grasping as it seeks to articulate what it means to be a writer and what it means to tell stories. [8] Apparent
in the motif of the popular Mexican story of an appearing and disappearing phantom dog, this transitory and
speculative approach comes to stand at the end of Chapter’s Six introductory section through the repetition of the
phrase “It must have been then”: “It must have been then that I decided to put stories on paper. It must have been
then that working with images and writing became connected to night” (65). This repetition uses recollection as a
type of heuristic to try to figure out when the narrator learned to both write stories and to associate stories with the
night. Yet although repetition often serves to ground an assertion more forcefully, the repetition of the speculative
“must have been” (as compared to the simpler and more direct “was”) serves instead to highlight the tentative nature
of this conclusion. Compared to Chapter Five – a chapter erected to move from exploration of hybrid linguistic and
ethnic identity to argumentative legitimation of such identity – Chapter Six continues in an explorative vein, using
the motif of groping as a central epistemology of the piece. Instead of presenting an argument about the left hand “of
darkness” and “of femaleness” as alternatives to right-handed, rationalist ways of knowing, the method of Chapter
Six is to describe this darkness metaphorically.

Thus, as Anzaldúa searches among metaphors to describe the writing process and the ways the writer is defined by
acts of writing, the struggle of writing is embodied by both the violence of the imagery and through the process of
searching for metaphors and descriptions. That is, Anzaldúa exhibits the difficulty inherent in writing through not
making an easy correlation between writing and “what it is like” – no one metaphor can accurately describe or
suggest what it means to be a writer. Instead, the process of accumulating and shifting the many aspects of what
writing is like for the narrator allows the act of writing to gain complexity and a visceral quality. The images the
/
narrator turns to – the “pulling of flesh,” “teetering on the edge” of an abyss, the squeezing of her own throat
sacrifice” and a “live animal resisting” to suggest the struggle that writing necessitates and that fishing “for the right
words” demands.

The first full paragraph of Chapter Six’s final section, “Something to do with the Dark,” is particularly striking in
terms of the images Anzaldúa deploys to convey not only the act of writing, but her existence as a writer. It reads:

The toad comes out of its hiding place inside the lobes of my brain. It’s going to happen
again. The ghost of the toad that betrayed me – I hold it in my hand. The toad is sipping the
strength from my veins, it is sucking my pale heart. I am a dried serpent skin, wind scuttling
me across the hard ground, pieces of me scattered over the countryside. And there in the dark
I meet the crippled spider crawling in the gutter, the day-old newspaper fluttering in the dirty
rain water. (72)

A number of powerful, bodily images emerge in this passage. The first is the image of the toad, an entity in its own
right which both uses the writer as conduit or host and somehow betrays the writer. Perhaps it is not the same toad
which betrays, however, since the narrator here uses the phrase “ghost of the toad that betrayed me,” suggesting
through the imagery of the ghost that a previous toad was the one that enacted the betrayal. In terms of writing, this
spectral toad may be a previous idea, communication, or piece that did not develop or exist as the writer intended,
thus resulting in betrayal. Through betrayals such as these, or through the process of having her life-blood sucked,
the writer transforms into an empty shell (dried serpent skin) and an injured entity (crippled spider) devoid of
meaningful content (day-old newspaper). Incapable of self-directed movement, the “wind scuttles” the writer’s
sullied body through the dark, any words that are left now bleeding into one another in the “dirty rain water.”

The images in this passage are in dialogue with familiar perceptions of writing, although not in simplistic ways.
Here, writing consists of letting an idea – a toad, in this case, which lives “inside the lobes” of the brain – out.
Although in this rendition the process is only marginally controllable – thus the narrator’s somewhat fearful
recognition that “It’s going to happen again” – part of this account rests on the notion that something inside the
writer exists prior to the writing and that this “something” is what is transmitted onto the page. [9] Yet the toad cannot
exist fully without the writer; it changes and strengthens itself through a parasitic “sipping” of strength from the
writer’s veins and heart. It is intimately connected, even dependent upon, the writer’s material, bodily being. And in
turn, the writer is transformed by the process of writing, momentarily spent and figured as a host of
“pieces...scattered over the countryside.”

This process of transformation dovetails with Anzaldúa’s assertion that “in reconstructing the traumas behind the
images, I make “sense” of them, and once they have “meaning” they are changed, transformed” (70). Yet the ways
Anzaldúa provides to “make sense” of things also provides a challenge to how many readers imagine sense-making
to work. Oscillating between what might be described as linear rationality or argumentation and what can be
recognized as feminist or non-Cartesian driven epistemologies, Anzaldúa makes use of multiple knowledges and
ways to write across experience.

Critic Megan Simpson describes such work with her term “language-oriented feminist epistemology.” Simpson is
particularly helpful in summarizing the differing investments of feminist epistemologists. Simpson carefully
differentiates her approach of language-oriented feminist epistemology from feminist standpoint epistemology
which, by her reading, relies too heavily on a powerful/powerless dichotomy as the basis for claiming that feminists
have a distinct (and superior) vantage point toward knowledge based on their experiences as women. By contrast,
language-oriented feminist epistemologists are skeptical of such binaries due to their acknowledgment that
knowledge is linguistically shaped; certain powers are maintained not by material conditions themselves, but by the
linguistic rendering of gender resulting in many shifting locations and relationships. [10] Thus, language-oriented
feminist epistemology uses language as the primary tool through which structures of knowledge and knowledge
production can be investigated and questioned.

In her book-length exploration of several language-poets, Simpson notes the ways that language use characterized as
hybrid or innovative is tied to commitments to complicating gender inequalities and constructions. Anzaldúa’s
writing throughout Borderlands works intimately to problematize staid epistemologies through its hybrid sensibility
marked by the accumulation and juxtaposition of different discourses. Like the writers Simpson considers, Anzaldúa
/
uses
 modes of inquiry which... involve a feminist inquiry into authority. Always indeterminate,
open, resisting closure, this writing performs interpretive, expressive, dialogic acts that
require both reader and writer to participate in the ‘untraceable wandering / the meaning of
knowing’ – the reader and writer are engaged with language and with one another. Thus both
assume dynamic roles as participants in the making of meaning. (Simpson 11) [11]

The spectrum of writing styles, discourses, and modes of inquiry and expression Anzaldúa employs thus open up a
spectrum of possibilities for what types of knowledge are possible. Moreover, such hybrid writing and feminist
epistemologies create a more highly engaged relationship between reader and writer. As theorist Eve Wiederhold
suggests,

innovative style poses a challenge to comprehensive, coherent articulations of what writing is

or should be...Asking readers to attend to the “the text” and the cultural strategies that direct
how texts should be read effectively unsettles an entire structure that informs conventional
understandings of how writing bears upon knowledge, reality, meaning, and communication.
(110)

The range of knowledge possibilities is most visible in the noticeable style shift between chapters, Chapter Six
providing alternate ways of making arguments, describing reality and experience, and forging connections between
reader and writer. In many ways, then, reading Chapter Six allows us to re-see the more familiar Chapter Five and
question how each chapter works differently. Reading in this way we can notice both the clear juxtaposition of how
writing can embody different epistemological projects, as well as the ways that both chapters rely on the essayistic
movement and hybrid composition necessitated by the subject of hybrid identity.

Like Simpson, Wiederhold advocates a reading process that opens up the rhetorical relationship between reader and
writer, allowing readers to “see double,” a position which “maneuvers the reader away from the obligation to either
‘stay in control’ or ‘make sense’ according to immediately recognizable standards” (118). Such a reading practice
opens up a feminist space where, when reading in dialogue with Anzaldúa, “the point is not to ‘get to the point,’ but
to attend to the relationship between politics and form, to always ‘keep an eye on’ the ways form informs meaning,
and to notice when and how interpretive acts adhere to social norms that regulate writing and reading” (118). Such
reading practices foreground the multiple axes of meaning making and the ways that form persists integrally across
those axes. Paying attention to Anzaldúa’s hybrid embodiments of writing, for example, would allow readers to
“attend to the simultaneous beauty and weighty obstruction of form itself; the ways organizing categories that help
sort through and make sense of the mystery of composing also establish conceptual boundaries that regulate and
constrain” (120).

A particular strength of Anzaldúa’s work, then, is the way in which “form” and “content” necessitate one another –
bleeding into and shaping one another – thus clearly subverting this long problematic binary. More than an object
lesson in hybrid form, Anzaldúa’s essays make visible the generic and linguistic boundaries that shape our acts of
reading and composing and in turn shape our perceptions of the world around us, including our identity positions. As
Anzaldúa assesses her own work, “I see a hybridization of metaphor, different species of ideas popping up here,
popping up there, full of variations and seeming contradictions” (66). It is these very “different species of ideas”
rendered through “popping up” here and there throughout the hybrid form of her essay that provides such rich
ground for investigating the ways that, as Adorno suggests, the essay fulfills an intellectual and epistemological
promise. The epistemological promise for Anzaldúa – and those who value her work – exists in the range of
knowledge practices and relationships she makes visible, questions, and complicates. Moving across linguistic
boundaries and subverting binary structures that have long plagued feminism – male/female, rational/non-rational,
subject/object – Anzaldúa widens the scope of available feminist discourses and epistemologies we use to better
understand and represent ourselves and our identities as gendered and racialized beings. Rhetorical and
metaphorical, narrative-based and argumentative, critical and embodied, these feminist knowledges challenge us to
expand our practices of feminist reading and writing. By changing ourselves we then might, as Anzaldúa hopes,
change the world.

Works Cited
/
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987.

—-. “now let us shift...the path of conocimiento...inner work, public acts.” this bridge we call home: radical visions
for transformation. Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating, eds. New York: Routledge, 2002, 540-78.

—- and AnaLouise Keating, eds. this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation. New York:
Routledge, 2002.

Fowlkes, Diane L. “Moving from Feminist Identity Politics to Coalition Politics Through a Feminist Materialist
Standpoint of Intersubjectivity in Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.” Hypatia 12:2
(Spring 1997), 105-24.

Franke, David. “Writing into Unmapped Territory: The Practice of Lateral Citation.” In Phelps and Emig, Feminine
Principles and Women’s Experience in American Composition and Rhetoric. Pittsburgh: U Pitt P, 1995.

Howe, Susan. Singularities. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP and UP of New England, 1990.

Keating, AnaLouise, ed. Entre Mundos / Among Worlds: New Perspectives on Gloria Anzaldúa. New York: Palgrave
MacMillan, 2005,109-120.

Jung, Julie. Revisionary Rhetoric, Feminist Pedagogy, and Multigenre Texts. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2005.

Moraga, Cherríe, Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of
Color.Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981.

Phelps, Louise Wetherbee and Janet Emig, eds. Feminine Principles and Women’s Experience in American
Composition and Rhetoric. Pittsburgh: U Pitt P, 1995.

Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, the Text, the Poem: the Transactional Theory of the Literary Work .Carbondale:
Southern Illinois UP, 1994.

Simpson, Megan. Poetic Epistemologies: Gender and Knowing in Women's Language-Oriented Writing.Albany:
SUNY, 2000.

Wiederhold, Eve. “What do you Learn from What you See? Gloria Anzaldúa and Double-Vision in the Teaching of
Writing.” in Entre Mundos / Among Worlds: New Perspectives on Gloria Anzaldúa. Keating, AnaLouise, ed. New
York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005,109-120.

1. Reading Anzaldúa’s chapters as essays acknowledges the most significant way that her work has been
anthologized and thus the material way her work is presented to many audiences. Moreover, reading Anzaldúa’s
work as essays allows her writing to be read within the trajectory of essay writing over the last several centuries.
Since her topic centers on identity – a central topic of many essays across time – the essay as a form provides the
theoretical lens which allows readers to understand the narrating voice as connected to, yet distinct from, Anzaldúa
the person. Thus, although essays in general often occupy the landscape of first-person narration and non-fictional
content, the essay tradition also recognizes that a particular essay written at a particular moment may reflect some
aspect of its author and her ideas but is always contingent on that specific place and time. In other words, the essay
allows for – and in some ways expects – that the essayist may later change her mind or change her writing (the
expression of her current state of mind.) The essay as a critical lens for reading and understanding a piece of work
thus complicates a one to one relationship between author and narrator despite the intimacy of the two roles.

2. Throughout this article, I refer to the speaking persona or “I” within essays as a narrator in order to avoid the easy
slippage – especially in creative non-fiction, memoir, or autohistoria writing – between author and the many
narrators that author may deploy in writing, which, through their construction, do not map fully and easily onto the
author.

3. Jung, in her recent text Revisionary Rhetoric, Feminist Pedagogy, and Multigenre Texts identifies the use of space
/
breaks as a key feature of multigenre texts, arguing that “breaks – signified by white space on the printed page –
already multivocal text (33). Jung’s assertion that the use of space breaks demands that readers use an increased and
different attention is helpful and is the case, I argue, with Anzaldúa’s multigenre and hybridly linguistic text.
However, I would also argue that holding the reader’s attention is not the only effect of such formal features as space
breaks, as I show below in reading the space breaks as representative of the patriarchal silences the narrator seeks to
overcome. Moreover, I would contend that the use of space breaks is not the only disruptive element of Anzaldúa’s
texts and would point readers to the key examples of first, Anzaldúa’s mixing of multiple versions of Spanish and
Spanish dialects alongside English and, second, her fierce, confrontational tone which can often be perceived as
hostile by some readers.

4. Mestiza consciousness is perhaps the most familiar of Anzaldúa’s theoretical terms in circulation. Anzaldúa
defines a particular goal of mestiza consciousness as “to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her
prisoner and to show in the flesh and through images in her work how duality is transcended” (Borderlands 102).

5. The notable exception here is the space break which cordons off the final, complex, and powerful paragraph that
positions the mestiza as the figure that will endure and adapt, while the dominant “norteamericano culture” will
struggle to survive. Due to the limits of this particular article, I do not provide a reading of this conclusion; I
encourage readers, however, to engage this significant passage, particularly its tone of both quiet patience and
committed ferocity.

6. In addition to complicating and subverting hierarchies of gender, race, and language usage in Borderlands / la
Frontera, Anzaldúa also tackles aesthetic hierarchies erected between East and West, high and low cultures and
cultural objects, rationally-derived knowledge and other ways of knowing.

7. This complication of linearity extends to Anzaldúa’s use of footnotes. Although scholars such as David Franke
have explored “lateral citation” practices used particularly by feminist writers, I would argue that Anzaldúa’s citation
practices work not only laterally – to weave connections – but also non-linearly and privately, to ask readers to
approach citation practices within essay writing with a meta-level awareness of the uses of those citation practices.
For example, Anzaldúa’s blending of both the traditional academic approach to sources exists alongside personal
reflections regarding when she encountered sources and what they prompted for her as a reader. Moreover, since in
some instances Spanish phrases are translated in the footnotes (such as Chapter Six’s note seven) more often than
not the non-Spanish speaking reader will turn to a citation hoping for assistance only to have this desire thwarted by
a citation which resists translation (such as Chapter Six’s note six.) For more on lateral citation, feminist citation
practices, and a description of vertical citation practices that Anzaldúa clearly complicates, see Franke’s piece
“Writing into Unmapped Territory: The Practice of Lateral Citation” in Phelps and Emig, 1995.

8. The order of the narrative anecdote and epigraph are, however, in reverse order in Chapter Six as they have
appeared in Chapter Five.

9. In other places, Anzaldúa complicates the direction of this interaction, suggesting that she can control what is
inside of her by beginning with “words, images, and body sensations and animat[ing] them to impress them on my
consciousness, thereby making changes in my belief system and reprogramming my consciousness” (70). At other
times, she summons stories and emotions, asking to channel and convey them.

10. See especially Chapter 1, “Language-Oriented Feminist Epistemology” for a laying out of these terms and
ideological differences.

11. Simpson here is quoting poet Susan Howe and two lines from her text Singularities (25).