After Words: Feminist Praxis as a Bridge Between Theory and Practice

In This Bridge We Call Home, AnaLouise Keating explains that her collaborative work with Gloria Anzaldúa is a call to new expressions of coalition predicated on a spiritual activism that "begins with the personal yet moves outward, acknowledging our radical interconnectedness" (2002, 18). Our efforts in this cluster have been to demonstrate our own interconnectedness and to invite still more connections across academic and nonacademic borders. During our panel presentation on "Moving Locations" at the June 2003 National Women's Studies Association conference, we identified the connection between spirituality and activism. The audience there was hungry for more conversation on this topic. We have attempted to incorporate spirituality as an energy that moves through the pen to the pages of our work to reflect our visions of social justice. In keeping with the values of feminist praxis demonstrated and advocated in our articles, we decided to contribute an "After Words" to our collaboration. These After Words are a third-space expression of integrated practice—the bridgework between theory and practice as well as between hearts, minds, bodies, and souls—in the pursuit of meaning. We offer readers a glimpse into the two years of work that produced the now neatly contained articles in our cluster, as well as the messiness of our lives just beyond the page as that which also informed our efforts and our be-longings throughout this project.

Anzaldúa states that for nepantleras, "to bridge is an act of will, an act of love, an attempt toward compassion and reconciliation, and a promise to be present with the pain of others" on our shared journeys (2002, 4). These reflections reveal the transformative potentials and promises of our work and the hopeful futures we long for. Acknowledging our cosmic connection, we dedicate these reflections to Gloria Anzaldúa who continues to inspire each of us.

You stop in the middle of the field and, under your breath, ask the spirits—animals, plants, y tus muertos—to help you string together a bridge of words. What follows is your attempt to give back to nature, los espiritus, and others a gift wrested from the events in your life, a bridge home to the self.

(Anzaldúa 2002, 540)

AIMEE: A patch of gray is what I have to show. The physical marks on our bodies inscribe formative moments of our locations in motion. Like the crevices in the face of the moon, the high tide line of seaweed and driftwood, like the Grand Canyon, these traces reveal critical junctures that cannot go un-remarked. Moments when time and space collide with an unbearable force. This patch of gray in the cowlick above my forehead is the mark I carry. It writes my love and loss. As my partner stayed in Iowa to contemplate leaving, my days rolled past in California, at Sheena's side. As I released the former, I held even more tightly to the latter, consolidating a sense of my-self as I contemplated what it might mean to lose the two women whom, outside of my immediate family, I held most dearly. Who would I be-come in their absence? The day this question arrived I gazed absently into my own reflection, running a brush through the thick tangle of my hair. Tugging backward, the brush revealed the arrival of this patch of gray, shocking in its thorough and unabashed displacement of the brown that had always been there. The moment of departure, when she to whom you so thoroughly belong is potentially taken from you, marks the moment when time and space collide with this unbearable force that cannot go un-remarked. The soul reaches outward, beyond itself, yearning. In the contemplation of this moment, we are brought to this truth: there is no Individual. Only be longing.

The work of spiritual activism and the contract of holistic alliances...