On Tuesday, we discussed Kai Cheng Thom’s Fierce Femmes and Notorious Liars, and unfortunately didn’t have a chance to get to Anzaldua’s texts and Rich’s essay in as much depth as I would have liked. We’ll be continuing to talk about them in our work for today, though, as well as next week, as they connect to the book by Audre Lorde that we’ll be starting to discuss on Tuesday.
I’d like us to continue to think a bit about the question we ended Tuesday’s discussion about: Anzaldua and Rich as queer feminist theorists. When I asked if you viewed them as literary figures or theorists, we had a mixed response, with some folks saying that you saw them as both. I agree with that assessment, and that’s part of why I assigned them and Roxanne Gay for today’s reading. As Halberstam points out, it’s important to see theory as something more than formal structure and academic language. And particularly for feminism, something that considers itself to at least attempt to be egalitarian and socially just, we must look for theories in non-academic spaces from people who may not have had access to higher education. (There’s a few great collections about that that I would recommend – Feminism Without Borders by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, which is itself a fairly academic text but which argues that feminism should be global and decolonized, and Colonize This!: Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism edited by Daisy Hernandez, a collection of essays that came out fairly recently.) Sarah Ahmed’s piece is the one that stands as the odd-person-out in this bunch, as her work is probably the most identifiable as “traditional” theory in the group. However her ideas feel contemporary enough to me that they mesh with Gay’s work and complement the more political aspects of Anzaldua’s writing in interesting ways.
For our discussion board posts today, I’d like us to reflect on this combination of writers based on the following questions:
Anzaldua and Rich, and Gay and Ahmed, are queer feminist theorists writing in different time periods. Where do we see differences and similarities in their rhetoric? How are the two groups approaching discussions of gender differently? How are they approaching what we might define as feminist ideals differently? How is queerness (defined broadly – think back to some of our conversations early this semester) exhibited differently in their texts? Given the trajectory of these queer feminist thinkers, can you think of any contemporary figures – either writers or influencers or other well-known people – who you think we could consider the “next generation,” so to speak? Explain your thinking. Use examples from our readings to support your claims, and provide images, links, quotes, or other evidence of the contemporary figures you’re bringing up. (And don’t be afraid to think outside the box here – your contemporary figure can be a celebrity, athlete, etc. – they don’t have to be an author, although authors are welcome. 🙂 )
We’ll talk more about this in class on Tuesday as we discuss the first half Lorde’s autobiography, Zami: A New Spelling of my Name. We’ll also be watching a bit of the film Pariah (2011) in class if we have time.
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