Dis/locating the Margins: Gloria Anzaldúa and Dynamic Feminist Learning

It is confusing to be a feminist student. Deconstruction is de rigueur; reconstruction less so. Awareness rises while answers recede. We feminist students seek out learning experiences that disrupt, empower, and make us feminist students not only by what we learn, but also by how we learn, by the pedagogy in which we engage. Certainly there are many debates over the theory and practice of feminist pedagogy and by extension feminist learning. As a recent recipient of a BA degree in women, gender, and sexuality studies, I wish to contribute to this conversation by commenting on feminist pedagogy from a student’s perspective. Principally, I wish to speak to the process of feminist learning as a student influenced by the writing of Chicana feminist scholar Gloria Anzaldúa, specifically her narration of the dynamics of marginalization in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.¹ My interpretation of Borderlands/La Frontera transforms Anzaldúa’s discussion of Chicana feminist identity formation into a framework through which to interpret my undergraduate experiences and studies of feminist pedagogy and to direct my future feminist learning both in and out of the classroom. On a personal level, expanding the theoretical and practical applications of Anzaldúa’s work to feminist learning makes meaning of my confusion as a feminist student, developing a structure in which to ground the frequent instability of those experiences.

More broadly, this analysis seeks to further feminist pedagogy’s preparedness for the increasing diversity of feminist students and classrooms. Classrooms today bring together students of multiple, sometimes shifting, sometimes hidden racial and ethnic identifications, socioeconomic situations, linguistic backgrounds, learning needs, genders, and sexual orientations. I am a multi-ethnic, multi-class blend of so many influences and goals that no one category of feminist pedagogy—Second Wave cultural, liberal, radical, socialist; Third Wave; black, critical race, Chicana, indigenous, postcolonial; lesbian, queer; masculinity-focused; global; postmodern; ecofeminist; disability feminist, or any other—could ever speak universally to my needs as a feminist learner. Since the early 1990s, numerous scholars have asserted the importance of developing an integrated feminist pedagogy, a set of teaching techniques that simultaneously addresses the educational needs of diverse student populations by engaging with intersectional over additive theorizing.² In part, such calls result from the perception of feminist pedagogy as a series of separable categories, a literature divided unto itself rather than a body of scholarship already deep in dialogue. Borrowing Anzaldúa’s image, I attend to ideas that have crossed the “unnatural boundary” between categories of feminist pedagogy and whose transit thereby points to those borders’ falseness (25). Texts across categories emphasize processes of socialization, acknowledge students’ intellectual and material needs, and engage with personalizing our understanding of inclusion and exclusion.³ While identity markers help us to understand the positionality of author, text, teacher, and student, and cannot be completely overthrown in a world still stratified by those constructs, a model of separable categories limits the ability of teachers and students to uncover deeper commonalities, drawing upon a fuller range of feminist pedagogical study to forge pedagogy practicable within diversity.

In this analysis, I begin by highlighting the potential of marginalization as one such unifying concept common to the many approaches to feminist instruction and central to my experiences as a feminist student. Having established the meaning and potential of marginalization, I next expand Anzaldúa’s analysis of marginalization into a theory of feminist learning that enables the simultaneous support and critique of marginalized experiences, celebrating margins while increasing their instability. Finally, I detail seven developmental stages and related activities in which feminist students and teachers can engage to promote the simultaneous support and critique of marginalization in daily learning. This analysis shares a feminist student’s perspective on the potential for feminist pedagogy to be aligned around a new axis, relying not on identity categories but drawing upon shared concerns with inclusion and exclusion, the intersection of knowledge with power and hierarchy, and the importance of fluidity and plurality in maintaining the rigor of feminist learning experiences. This analysis draws on Anzaldúa’s Borderlands...