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2. Pain: Gloria Anzaldua's Challenge to "Women's Health"
- Fordham University Press
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2 P A I N : G L O R I A A N Z A L D Ú A ’ S C H A L L E N G E T O ‘‘ W O M E N ’ S H E A L T H ’’ My whole life was nothing but pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Anzaldúa, Interviews/Entrevistas 34 To talk about the work of Gloria Anzaldúa is to cross borders, not just national borders but also the lines between biography and criticism, body and theory. Her recent death troubled these borders more radically as her passing and her suffering from diabetes shifted to the center of discussions about her. The passionate mourning that has followed shows how her lifework, and her life, still bleed into the words of those who have incorporated her ideas and the strength of her rebellion. Inés Herna ́ndez-Ávila describes her grief as a gradual embodiment of Anzaldúa’s absence: ‘‘My body is reluctantly registering in every cell that you are physically no longer with us’’ (qtd. in Gonzales and Rodriguez). At http://gloria.chicanas.com, an online altar of memorials, Alicia Gaspar de Alba writes: ‘‘Her passing is extremely personal and painful to me (as it is, I’m sure to many of us), and feels like a loss of a higher part of myself.’’ Elana Dykewoman’s offering also captures this dispersal and incorporation of the author: ‘‘She is everywhere in the many borderlands we inhabit’’ (‘‘Rest in Peace Gloria’’). True to her proposition that the border is an ‘‘open wound’’ (Anzaldúa, Borderlands 3), critical applications of Anzaldúa transgress the boundaries of her texts and of her individual body. At the beginning of Borderlands (her first single-authored text), she opened her body to her readers, ‘‘staking fence rods in my flesh’’ (2) to express viscerally the pain of living with barbed-wire fences. As with the back trouble that caused Cherrı́e Moraga ‘‘constant pain’’ when using ‘‘the muscle that controls the movement of my fingers and 77 ANZALDÚA’S CHALLENGE TO “WOMEN’S HEALTH” hands while typing’’ (Moraga, Loving in the War Years v), this first generation of ‘‘out’’ Chicana lesbian writers laid down their own backs for political work like This Bridge Called My Back (1981)—a modern-day human sacrifice that literally embodies ‘‘cultural collision’’ (Anzaldúa, Borderlands 78), ‘‘rupture with . . . oppressive traditions’’ (82), and the open-armed stretching of mestiza feminism (79, 88). My premise about Anzaldúa is that her writings on pain and illness reveal an expansive body, that her diabetes reinforced her thinking about the open and shifting conciencia of mestiza feminism.1 In her 2002 essay, ‘‘now let us shift,’’ for instance, Anzaldúa proposed a revolution in the way we think about identity, and this particular redefinition followed her acceptance of the effects of diabetes on her own self: ‘‘you’ve chosen to compose a new history and self. . . . Your ailing body is no longer a hindrance but an asset, witnessing pain, speaking to you, demanding touch. Es tu cuerpo que busca conocimiento; along with dreams your body’s the royal road to consciousness’’ (Anzaldúa, ‘‘now let us shift’’ 558–59). Anzaldúa’s ‘‘ailing body’’ opened new avenues of consciousness and new ideas for ways of being in the world. The risk in this assertion is its apparent endorsement of diabetes as a medium of perception . This risk is greater now that diabetes has led to Anzaldúa’s death. I want to make very clear, then, that I am not celebrating pain or illness. Though I am interested in hagiography as a genre, Encarnación is not itself a hagiography of a lost martyr. Rather, I want to show how the pain that framed much of Anzaldúa’s experience also framed her ideas. In order to understand her work, I argue, we must take seriously the perspective offered by pain and the avenues of thought down which it led her. Her attitude toward pain, in my analysis, emerges from the Mexican cultural frameworks that underlie her writing and is directed toward particular Chicana and feminist political ends. 1. Though discussions of pain often separate physical and mental pain, I would argue that pain always has cultural, psychological, and corporeal dimensions that mutually define one another. As Anzaldúa writes in ‘‘now let us shift,’’ ‘‘Though your head and heart decry the mind/body dichotomy, the conflict in your...