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In the fall of 1993, during my first semester as a master of arts student in Hispanic literature at New Mexico State University, one of my professors recommended I read Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza by Gloria Anzaldúa.1 The book got my attention in more than one way with its amalgam of poetry, political statements, intimate diary entries of resentment, essays of mythological interpretation, and colloquial word games. I talked to my professor about the inaccuracy of some data referring to pre-Columbian religion. He observed that in my reading I was only looking for mistakes and that I did not get the point. “What’s the point?” I asked. “Identity,” he said, without knowing that he was opening the way to several questions that in the future would be the core of my intellectual preoccupations. Since then, this concept has become unavoidable , mysterious, and somehow a multipurpose instrument. After years of discussions and reconsiderations, this hybrid text became one of my keystones as I learned about hegemonic identity politics in both racial and gender realms.2 That is, Borderlands expanded my understanding of why dominant culture establishes the ways identities are expected to be, restricting the legitimacy of practices that are not prescribed in the models already adopted by society. Challenging definitions of sex and ethnicity has been the most important lesson I have received from Anzaldúa. This challenge is rooted in the discomfort that identity norms generate in queer people. This discomfort leads to a radical intervention into normativity, precisely the one that rules those notions considered liberating against colonialism but that become oppressive for dissident sexualities. Being queer is a starting point to undermine those identity definitions. Based on this premise, I offer a critical reflection on Anzaldúa’s arguments concerning hegeCHAPTER 10 Gloria Anzaldúa and the Meaning of Queer héctor domínguez-ruvalcaba Gloria Anzaldúa and the Meaning of Queer 81 monic notions of identity. I revisit the concepts of queer and identity, exploring how they transformed my personal, intellectual, and professional positions as an academic in the fields of gender studies of Mexican literature and culture and U.S.-Mexico border issues. Finally, I reflect on the future directions I believe we must use following Anzaldúa’s groundbreaking contributions to queer theory and its intersection with race, ethnicity, nationality, globalization, gender, and sexuality. My first encounter with Anzaldúa became the catalyst of an academic project exploring my own subjectivity. Knowledge cannot be performed without reflecting on oneself; my subjectivity, like hers, has been produced by overlapping, contradictory identity features. Anzaldúa conveys a complex racial and sex-gender definition: woman, Chicana, mestiza, and lesbian. Being immigrant, gay, mestizo, and bilingual, I found myself positioned in a symbolic and real border where, as in Anzaldúa, the uniqueness of this sum of marginalities determined a queer point of view. This juxtaposed identity is suggested in the title Borderlands/La Frontera , which rests on a slash that I read not as a graphic representation of bilingualism and hybridization but as a wound: the metaphor of subject fragmentation where the text itself is also constructed.3 To inquire into the paradoxes produced in these overlapping identities implies an archeology of the fragmented subject. My work on the formation of masculinity and homophobia in Mexican culture is, in this way, an archeology of my own subjectivity, or what Anzaldúa calls “autohistoria-teoría”: writing not only about abstract ideas but also bringing the personal history into the history of the community (Interviews/Entrevistas 242). When Anzaldúa focuses on a human landscape to depict her view of the borderland, I feel myself in the procession: “The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados live here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the ‘normal’” (Borderlands/La Frontera 25). It was not easy to find myself reflected in the Border. Becoming its inhabitant rather than a detached observer required not only that I complete the readings proposed by the professor who introduced me to Borderlands /La Frontera but also that I question my own subjectivity. I was a migrant and not a visitor in this country. My encounter with the United Stated involved a new life project rather than a tourist’s curiosity and...

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