Encarnacion: Illness and Body Politics in Chicana Feminist Literature

Acknowledgments

A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S This project has roused in me tremendous passion for my subject, and I begin with my gratitude to Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherrı́e Moraga, Ana Castillo, Maya González, and Diane Gamboa for so vividly capturing the permeability of our bodies and our identities. I have found in their work models for responding ethically and imaginatively to the worlds and beings with which we are intertwined. I am indebted to all of the critics and theorists who have influenced my response to this material (you can find them named in my bibliography). In particular, I’d like to thank Tace Hedrick, who has been an intellectual sounding board for nearly a decade. I’d like to thank AnaLouise Keating for talking, reading, writing, and sharing some of Anzaldúa’s unpublished writings with me. And I’d like to thank Katie King for believing in this book. Encarnación was formed from years of conversation with my personal community of friends and fellow scholars. I fondly recall the discussions —with Lucy Corin, Narin Hassan, Steve Germic, Karyn Sproles, Annette Federico, Mark Facknitz, and others—that initially sparked the idea for this project in the English faculty research group at James Madison University. The writing of this book owes much to my dear friends and former colleagues in Dallas—especially Rajani Sudan, Stacy Alaimo, Jeannie Hamming, Dennis Foster, Nina Schwartz, Rick Bozorth, Beth Newman, Bruce Levy, and Elizabeth Russ—who read chapters so thoughtfully and asked all the important questions. I’m grateful to Southern Methodist University for providing me with the resources to visit archives throughout the Southwest and Mexico as well as a leave of absence to finish most of the writing. To my new life in Chicago: I thank my colleagues at Loyola University for welcoming me and helping me ix ACKNOWLEDGMENTS to celebrate Encarnación, and I thank the Office of Research Services, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Department of English at Loyola for helping with the cost of reproducing the images I analyze. Thanks to Gillian Nelson Bauer for helping with the final stages of proofreading. And thank you, Helen Tartar, Eric Newman, and all of the editorial staff at Fordham, for making this project a book. The research for this project spawned a number of presentations and articles. An early version of Chapter 2 was published in Aztlán: ‘‘Gloria Anzaldúa’s Mestiza Pain: Mexican Sacrifice, Chicana Embodiment, and Feminist Politics’’ (Aztlán 30.2 [Fall 2005]: 5–31). Two other essays emerged from this work: ‘‘From Race/Sex/Etc. to Glucose, Feeding Tube, and Mourning: The Shifting Matter of Chicana Feminism’’ appeared in Material Feminisms (ed. Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman; Indiana University Press in 2007), and ‘‘Vulnerable Subjects: Motherhood and/as Disability in Nancy Mairs and Cherrı́e Moraga’’ in Disability and Mothering (ed. Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and Jan Cellio, forthcoming from Demeter Press). Encarnación has also roused in me a more expansive understanding of my own self, which is intertwined most intimately with my husband, Stuart Wick, my sister, Kathleen Bost, my parents, Mary Anne and Jon Bost, and my late grandmother Marian Cassidy—who all influenced this project at every level. I honor all of the yoga instructors and the midwives who sharpened my understanding of embodiment. And, finally, I dedicate this book to Samuel Oliver Bost Wick, whose birth toward the end of this project confirmed every word I’d written about sensation, permeability, and caregiving and who changed my self forever. x E N C A R N A C I Ó N ...