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I N T R O D U C T I O N Illness granted me a set of experiences otherwise unobtainable . It liberated me from the routines which would have delivered me, unchallenged and unchanged, to discreet death. Illness casts you out, but it also cuts you free. I will never take conventional expectations seriously again, and the clear prospect of death only makes living more engaging. Inga Clendinnen, Tiger’s Eye Inga Clendinnen, historian of Aztec and Mayan cultures, turned to self-representation when she found herself disabled by liver disease. Her memoir, Tiger’s Eye (2000), relates an incident in which her nose began to bleed uncontrollably while guiding students through an analysis of Aztec bleeding practices (Clendinnen, Tiger’s Eye 5). Predictably, once the professor’s body began to act unpredictably, it became the center of attention, an object of analysis quite different (or perhaps not quite different enough) from the historical sources that were the subject of the course. One imagines that, as the boundaries between subject and object shifted, the matter being taught shifted, too, making historical data and professorial authority less untouchable. Unlike other texts, bodies are never static. Once they fail to assume their familiar shapes, they become something else: a source of embarrassment , a medical problem, a theoretical provocation, or an emotional provocation. A body that bleeds elicits reactions that go beyond objective reason: fear, disgust, pain, pleasure. Clendinnen argues that to feel pain, to lose control over one’s body, to hallucinate from chemical imbalance ‘‘is to suffer an existential crisis, not a medical one’’ (1). Her own sick body posed a problem for her class and for herself that was more than academic and, thus, likely more difficult to talk about. Tiger’s Eye reflects 1 INTRODUCTION this shift in discourse, but it also restores the boundary between the author ’s personal experience of illness and her work as a historian by quarantining the personal within its own binding, apart from Clendinnen’s better-known academic publications. The writers I am most interested in here, Chicana feminist writers for whom the personal is political, do not similarly quarantine their messy bodies. For this reason, theirs is some of the most provocative writing about identity today, redrawing the boundaries between the personal matter of bodies and the political dimensions of identity. For instance, Ana Castillo’s account of childbirth in a 1990 poem, ‘‘Since the Creation of My Son and My First Book,’’ dissects identity at multiple levels.1 Pregnancy is obviously an existential problem, one reflected in the poem’s shifting pronouns, but the problem is not contained within the body of the patient(s). In the context of contemporary medicine, the woman’s body becomes someone else’s object when she becomes a patient : ‘‘They tested us, tried to drug / us. They took blood from us, / stuck tubes in every orifice, put us / in isolation and watched us for five days’’ (Castillo, I Ask the Impossible 63). Hospitalization provides a new perspective on one’s body, isolating the body from its ‘‘natural’’ context, hooking it up to medical communications networks, measuring its inner pulsations, and injecting it with outside influences. This sort of experience redraws the boundaries around identity and makes new ‘‘data’’ meaningful. (Body temperature and heart rate, for instance, become visible and all-important, while race and sex, noted on the chart as relevant factors, become secondary.) After the birth, Castillo’s poem shifts for nine lines to the third person, as ‘‘I’’ and ‘‘we’’ become ‘‘his mother’’ with ‘‘swollen belly and painful breasts,’’ defined in relation to the fetus that is no longer a fetus but now a separate identity (64). Mother and baby part, with tissues severed and sewn up in new configurations. Motherhood shifted the writer onto a different axis—‘‘I spoke in plural like God in Genesis’’ (64)—changing the shape of her identity. By narrating the ‘‘creation’’ of her son and her first book in the same poem, Castillo explicitly shows how these autobiographical details are intertwined with her identity as an author. Being a mother certainly reshaped her writing practice, likely changing its hours, its content, and even its 1. Cherrı́e Moraga has also published an autobiographical account, Waiting in the Wings (1997), about childbirth and writing. Coincidentally, both Moraga and Castillo gave birth prematurely to sons. I discuss Waiting in the Wings at length in Chapter 3. 2 [3.142.250.114...

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