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When I write it feels like I’m carving bone. It feels like I’m creating my own face, my own heart. gloria e. anzaldúa, BORDERLANDS/LA FRONTERA At a very critical time in my life, in a graduate Women’s Studies classroom in Texas, I was introduced to Gloria Anzaldúa’s work. To say the least it was a life-changing encounter of epiphanic proportions. As the epigraph suggests, Anzaldúa made me want to reach into myself and create theory. Since then, throughout my emotional, spiritual, political, and theoretical growth, Anzaldúa’s writings have led the way. From articulating and validating my marginalized experiences to ensuring that I do not lose myself in oppositional stances, her words keep me afloat on a sea of in-betweenness—so much so that I have come to claim liminality as my reality. Coming from a dualistic political standpoint as a social activist in India , the contentious politics that I had come to live and breathe was an endless cyclical conundrum. It was also characterized by an unforgiving , reactionary mindset, which I carried with me into my U.S. Women of Colors class in graduate school. One of our assigned texts was This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color; listening to animated discussions among my peers made the book come alive. It kindled within me the yearning to “enter into the lives of others,” but I did not know how. And then Anzaldúa reached out to me with these words in “La Prieta”: We are the queer groups, the people that don’t belong anywhere, not in the dominant world nor completely within our own respective cultures . . . because we do not fit we are a threat. [However, our] different affinCHAPTER 26 Feels Like “Carving Bone”: (Re)Creating the Activist-Self, (Re)Articulating Transnational Journeys, while Sifting through Anzaldúan Thought kavitha koshy 198 Todas somos nos/otras ities are not opposed to each other. In El Mundo Zurdo I with my own affinities and my people with theirs can live together and transform the planet. (209, her italics) In this passage Anzaldúa refers to an inclusive “we.” By not alluding to any identity categories, she invited me, the reader, to join her in creating a place for all queers, a new place of belonging. What grabbed my attention was that she risked talking about a nonbinary politics amid a very polarized U.S. feminist movement of the 1980s, and with that she drew me into her theorizing. Besides, she was addressing all of us who had dared to transgress the lines drawn to separate us from one another . We the misfits finally had a common ground in “in-betweenness” or a shared uncertainty in liminality and the hopeful vision of El Mundo Zurdo to work toward. An Attempt at “Carving Bone” Born in India, I inherited and learned to live within a society stratified by gender, class, caste, and religion. Like those in most societies rooted in exclusionary, binary thinking, I grew up conscious of both who I was and who I was not. Hindu meant “not Muslim” and Christian meant “not Hindu.” Middle-class meant “not working class.” “White-collar” meant “not blue-collar.” “Brahmin” meant “not dalit.”1 Man meant “not woman,” and so on. In due course, unable to tolerate the injustice and poverty that I saw around me, I earned a social work degree and participated in two social movements in India: the indigenous people’s movement and the women’s movement. Because of my activism , I was sometimes deemed a leftist or a troublemaker. Herein lie my earliest memories of liminality: the liminal experience of the constant back and forth between a middle-class upbringing and work with people who were mostly dispossessed, displaced from their lands, denied their right to livelihood, often victims/survivors of abuse. Caught in the daily struggles that keep movements going, I was unaware that my politics was firmly entrenched in the distinct center/margin binary: on the left of the slash was the oppressor (usually the government, sometimes capitalist patriarchy) and on the right, the victim.2 The lines were drawn such that either you are with us/them or you are against us/them. Two simple choices existed between revolution and status quo. My naïve revolution was one in which those on the margins would replace those at the center. Power relations were merely to...

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