-
Mestiza Metaphysics
- State University of New York Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Mestiza Metaphysics Mikko Tuhkanen According to Thomas Kuhn, paradigm shifts occur when a resistant element, an “anomaly,” in the scientific field exerts what might be called a disorienting gravitational pull on the current constellation of assumptions about the world (Kuhn 52–65). The anomaly acts as an irritant, an incitement to reconceptualizations, that may ultimately reorganize how the scientific field understands itself and its objects of articulation. The experiences recounted in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981), edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Cherríe Moraga, reflected such an anomaly in feminist critique, which, as the collection’s writers argued, had been organized around the unmarked category of (paradigmatic) whiteness. Pointing to what they felt as a “sense of malfunction” in feminist thought, the contributors to the volume forced the consideration of issues that had seemed “non-existent or trivial” from previously available perspectives (Kuhn 92, 103). As Chandra Talpade Mohanty writes, questions of race and ethnicity, pushed onto the feminist agenda by This Bridge and other mujeres-de-color texts, have consequently necessitated “a fundamental reconceptualization of our categories of analysis” (181). Anzaldúa’s subsequent work in the late 1980s and 1990s successfully continued and expanded this critique in a way that brought queer theory more immediately into its orbit. Anzaldúa remains one of the best-known thinkers of U.S. culture and its transnational contexts to insist that “sexuality is intersectional, not extraneous to other modes of difference” (Eng with Halberstam and Muñoz 1). Whether or not she is explicitly cited in individual texts, her work has been instrumental in sensitizing self-identified 259 260 MIKKO TUHKANEN queer thought to questions of postcoloniality, empire, globalization, racial formations, migrations, diasporas, and borders.1 With this widening, queer thinkers have sought perspectives that would enable them to address concerns left unattended by the critical frameworks previously available to them. The frequent references to and anthologization of Anzaldúa’s texts in queer and other fields may suggest that our thinking has once and for all benefited from the Anzaldúan turn, that within the past two decades we have witnessed the “arrival” of her work. As postcolonial theory has pointed out, however, the full consequences of the world’s reorganizations through truly radical departures and arrivals may be such that they require a continuous, belated accounting, a labor impelled by a persistent sense of disjointedness and dislocation, of an incompletely executed movement. Suggesting queer’s continuously missed encounter with Anzaldúa, this essay charts some of the ways in which her work subsists as something of an anomaly in queer thinking. While her intersectional approach may have been integrated into the syllabi of most undergraduate introductions to feminist and LGBT studies offered in the humanities, what remain uncharted are the paradigmatic differences between her work and some of the other texts comprising our reading lists. This tension can be mapped along a number of axes, such as the divergent functions and histories of queer vs. lesbian feminist projects, scholarship vs. creative writing, the ivory tower vs. el barrio. In this essay, I locate the source of this tension in the philosophies that ground and orient our epistemologies. I argue that the misalignment of queer and Anzaldúa is the result of disparate philosophical systems: Anzaldúa’s thinking owns a perspective that is paradigmatically incompatible with that which informs the most effectively institutionalized strands of queer theory. In many ways, my effort to reclaim Anzaldúa’s significance complements Linda Garber’s and Annamarie Jagose’s (Queer) important work of tracing queer theory to lesbian feminism as well as lesbian and gay identity politics. I suggest that, despite its self-proclaimed theoretical hybridity, 1980s and 1990s queer theory identified itself with a particular history of philosophy as it sought institutional recognition and stability. Philosophically speaking , the grounding difference of Anzaldúa’s thinking from queer theory’s most prevalent forms can be located in her deployment of metaphysics and ontology, fields largely exiled from contemporary social sciences and the humanities (see Grosz, Nick, Time; Haslanger; Oksala). As Elizabeth Grosz and others argue, the rejection of metaphysics, frequently legitimized by simplistic readings of Jacques Derrida’s early work, has become consolidated as the starting point for practically all contemporary feminist philosophy. [34.226.141.207] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 12:26 GMT) 261 MESTIZA METAPHYSICS I analogously suggest that the self-evident manner in which the thought of being has been...