1. Postmodernism, Realism,
and the Politics of Identity
Cherríe Moraga and Chicana Feminism
If we are interested in building a movement that will not constantly be subverted by internal differences, then we must build from the insideout, not the other way around. Coming to terms with the suffering of others has never meant looking away from our own.
Cherríe Moraga, This Bridge Called My Back
In her foreword to the second edition of This Bridge Called My Back, co-editor Cherríe Moraga admits to feeling discouraged about the prospects for a third world feminism. The three years intervening between the first and second editions of Bridge have confirmed her insight that “Third World feminism does not provide the kind of easy political framework that women of color” run to in droves. Time has strengthened her awareness that women of color are not a “ ‘natural’ affinity group” but are people who, across sometimes painful differences, “come together out of political necessity.” However, if Moraga has abandoned an easy optimism, she has not forsaken her dream of building a “broad-based U.S. women of color movement capable of spanning borders of nation and ethnicity.” Urging us to “look deeply” within ourselves, Moraga encourages us to come to terms with our own suffering in order to challenge and, if necessary, “change ourselves, even sometimes our most cherished block-hard convictions.” In calling for us to look within ourselves, Moraga demonstrates her comprehension that coalitions across difference require a thorough understanding of how we are different from
In another context, we see a quite contrary treatment of the concept of difference. Within the field of U.S. literary and cultural studies, the institutionalization of a discourse of postmodernism has spawned an approach to difference that ironically erases the distinctiveness and relationality of difference itself. Typically, postmodernist theorists either internalize difference so that the individual is herself seen as “fragmented” and “contradictory” (thus displacing attention from the distinctions that exist between different kinds of people), or they attempt to “subvert” difference by showing that “difference” is merely a discursive illusion (thus leaving no way to contend with the fact that people experience themselves as different from each other). In either case, postmodernists reinscribe, albeit unintentionally, a kind of universalizing sameness (we are all marginal now!) that their celebration of “difference” had tried so hard to avoid.
[1] For useful overviews of what theorists generally mean when they refer to “postmodern theory,” see Nicholson, esp. the introduction; Nicholson and Seidman, esp. the introduction; Rosaura Sánchez, “Postmodernism and Chicano Literature,” esp. 1–6. The term postmodernism, like many others, is contested, and not all critics who can be described as “postmodernist” under the definition I provide in the introduction to this book would identify themselves as such.
Under the hegemonic influence of postmodernism within U.S. literary and cultural studies, the feminist scholar concerned with engaging difference in the way Moraga suggests will be bound by certain theoretical and methodological constraints. She will be justifiably wary of using categories of analysis (such as “race” or “gender”) or invoking concepts (like “experience” or “identity”) that have been displaced or “deconstructed” by postmodernist theorists. If, as Judith Butler and Joan Scott claim in their introduction to Feminists Theorize the Political, concepts like “experience” and “identity” enact a “silent violence… as they have operated not merely to marginalize certain groups, but to erase and exclude them from the notion of ‘community’ altogether,” then any invocation of these “foundational” concepts will be seen as always already tainted with exclusionary and totalizing forms of power (xiv). In the current theoretical climate within U.S. literary and cultural studies, the feminist scholar who persists in using categories such as race or gender can be presumptively charged withFeminist scholars have begun to note the legislative effect of postmodernism on feminist theorizing. Linda Singer, for example, points to what she sees as an “impulse” within contemporary feminist discourse “to establish some privileged relationship with postmodern discourse which is intended to have regulative impact on the conduct of feminist theory and practice.”
Both from within and from outside feminist discourse, there reemerges with regularity these days a cautionary invective with respect to the appropriation of the language concepts and rhetoric—like that of the subject or personal identity—which has been placed in a problematized epistemic suspension by postmodern tactics of deconstruction. While such cautionary considerations are not without merit (and many, at least to my mind, are truly compelling), it is both presumptuous and preemptive to assume that such considerations must occupy some privileged position with respect to the development of feminist theory in the range and breadth of its concerns and approaches. (468)
Similarly, Linda Martín Alcoff notes that “the rising influence of postmodernism has had a noticeably debilitating effect on [the project of empowering women as knowledge producers], producing a flurry of critical attacks on unproblematized accounts of experience and on identity politics” (“Elimination of Experience” 4). Such critical attacks have served, in conventional theoretical wisdom, to delegitimize all accounts of experience and to undermine all forms of identity politics—unproblematized or not.
The problem posed by postmodernism is particularly acute for U.S. feminist scholars and activists of color, for whom “experience” and “identity” continue to be primary organizing principles around which they theorize and mobilize. Even women of color who readily acknowledge the nonessential nature of their political or theoretical commitments persist in referring to themselves as, for instance, “Chicana” or “black” feminists, and continue to join organizations, such as Mujeres Activas en Letras y Cambio Social (MALCS), that are organized around principles
Ironically, Moraga and other women of color are often called on in postmodernist feminist accounts of identity to delegitimize any theoretical project that attends to the linkages between identity (with its experiential and epistemic components) and social location (the particular nexus of gender, race, class, and sexuality in which a given individual exists in the world). Such projects are derided by postmodernist feminists as theoretically mistaken and dangerously “exclusionary”—particularly in relation to women of color themselves.
[2] In their introduction to Feminists Theorize the Political, Scott and Butler ask the following questions: “What are the points of convergence between a) poststructuralist criticisms of identity and b) recent theory by women of color that critically exposes the unified or coherent subject as a prerogative of white theory?”; “To what extent do the terms used to defend the universal subject encode fears about those cultural minorities excluded in and by the construction of that subject; to what extent is the outcry against the ‘postmodern’ a defense of culturally privileged epistemic positions that leave unexamined the excluded domains of homosexuality, race, and class?”; “What is the significance of the poststructuralist critique of binary logic for the theorization of the subaltern?”; and “How do universal theories of ‘patriarchy’ or phallogocentrism need to be rethought in order to avoid the consequences of a whitefeminist epistemological/cultural imperialism?” My point is that such questions enact an un-self-critical enlistment of the “woman of color,” the “subaltern,” and the “cultural minority” to serve as legitimators of the project entailed in “postmodern” or poststructuralist criticisms of identity.
Accordingly, I devote the first section of this chapter to an examination of the theoretical misappropriation of women of color—specifically the Chicana activist and theorist Cherríe Moraga—by the influential postmodernist theorists Judith Butler and Donna Haraway. I criticize these two theorists not only because they appropriate Moraga's words without attending to her theoretical insights, but also, and more important, because they employ her work at key moments in their arguments to legitimate their respective theoretical projects. In the second section, I articulate a postpositivist realist account of Chicana identity that goes beyond essentialism by theorizing the connections among social location, experience, cultural identity, and knowledge. By demonstrating the epistemic
When I speak of postpositivist realism in this book, I am referring to an epistemological position and political vision being articulated by a growing number of scholars in the United States and abroad who are developing an alternative to the reductionism and inadequacy of essentialist and postmodernist approaches to identity. Broadly speaking, to be a “realist” in a given domain is to believe in a “reality” that is, at least in part, causally independent of humans’ mental constructions of it. Thus, while humans’ (better or worse) understandings of their world may provide their only access to “reality,” their conceptual or linguistic constructions of the world do not constitute the totality of what can be considered “real.” Clearly then, when realists say that something is “real,” they do not mean that it is not socially constructed; rather, their point is that it is not only socially constructed. Moreover, while realists will readily acknowledge that ideologies have constitutive effects on the social world such that “the world” is what it is at least partially because of the way humans interact with and understand it, they will insist that reality is not exhausted by how any given individual or group perceives it ideologically. This is so for two reasons: first, because there are processes of the natural world which operate independently of the human mind, and which both shape and place a limit on humans’ ability to “construct” or “produce” the world. Second, because the sheer variety of conflicting ideologies extant in a global society such as ours precludes any one ideology from “producing” the entirety of the social world.
Underlying the postpositivist realist epistemology is a conception of objectivity which avoids the aporias of essentialist and (ironically) postmodernist epistemologies by opposing error not to certainty but rather to objectivity as a theory-dependent, socially realizable goal. Because realists view experience (and the knowledge humans glean from that experience) as mediated from the start, they are able to avoid the sharp opposition which structures much of postmodern thought: that experience must either be self-evidently meaningful, or else it will be epistemically unreliable. By seeing experience as theory mediated, realists understand that it can be a source of real knowledge as well as of social mystification; by seeing experience as causally related to the (social and natural) world, realists provide a way to evaluate the reliability of the
[3] For a fuller discussion of what I mean by a postpositivist objectivity see the introduction to this volume. See also S. P. Mohanty, Literary Theory, esp. 184–93. For more on the postpositivist realist theory of identity, see Hames-García, “Dr. Gonzo's Carnival”; Mohanty, Literary Theory, esp. chap. 7; Moya and Hames-García, esp. the introduction. Other important essays written from a postpositivist realist theoretical perspective include Babbitt, “Identity”; Barad; Roman.
In the last section of the chapter, I provide my own realist reading of Moraga and show—by resituating her work within the cultural and historical conditions from which it emerged—that Moraga's elaboration of a “theory in the flesh” gestures toward a realist theory of identity. A realist reading of Moraga's work presents a strong case for how and why the theoretical insights of women of color are necessary for understanding fundamental aspects of U.S. society.
POSTMODERNIST CYBORGS
AND THE DENIAL OF SOCIAL LOCATION
In “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” Donna Haraway figures Chicanas as exemplary cyborgs and, as such, prototypical postmodern subjects. She identifies two paradigmatic “groups of texts” that she sees as constructing cyborg identities: “women of color and monstrous selves in feminist science fiction” (216). Although Haraway usually employs the generic term women of color, she accords Chicanas a privileged position within her framework. According to Haraway, the primary characteristic of the cyborg is that of a creature who transcends, confuses, or destroys boundaries. Chicanas, as the products of the intermixing of Spaniards, Indians, and Africans, cannot claim racial or cultural purity. Their neither/nor racial status, their unclear genealogical relationship to the history of oppression (as descendants of both colonizer and colonized), and their ambiguous national identity (as neither Mexican nor fully “American”) give Chicanas their signifying power within the terms of the cyborgian myth. To demonstrate that Haraway does, in fact, figure Chicanas as
Cyborg writing must not be about the Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing, before Man. (217)
Malinche was the mother here, not Eve before eating the forbidden fruit. Writing affirms Sister Outsider, not the Woman-before-the-Fall-into-Writing needed by the phallogocentric Family of Man. (218)
A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generates antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted… (222)
Cherríe Moraga in Loving in the War Years explores the themes of identity when one never possessed the original language, never told the original story, never resided in the harmony of legitimate heterosexuality in the garden of culture, and so cannot base identity on a myth or a fall from innocence and right to natural names, mother's or father's. (217)
Writing is preeminently the technology of cyborgs, etched surfaces of the late twentieth century. Cyborg politics is the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism. (218)
Figuratively and literally, language politics pervade the struggles of women of color, and stories about language have a special power in the rich contemporary writing by U.S. women of color…. Moraga's writing, her superb literacy, is presented in her poetry as the same kind of violation as Malinche's mastery of the conqueror's language—a violation, an illegitimate production, that allows survival. (217–18)
Haraway claims that “women of color” can be understood as a “cyborg identity, a potent subjectivity synthesized from fusions of outsider identities” (217). She bases her claim, in part, on her appropriation and misreading of the Mexicano/Chicano myth of Malinche—a misreading that allows her to celebrate the symbolic birth of a new “bastard” race and the death of the founding myth of original wholeness.
For example, retellings of the story of the indigenous woman Malinche, mother of the mestizo “bastard” race of the new world, master of languages, and mistress of Cortés, carry special meaning for Chicana constructions of
[4] The name “Sister Outsider” derives from Lorde's book of the same name. Haraway's easy substitution of the name “Sister Outsider” for that of “Malinche,” and her conflation of Chicana with Malinche with Sister Outsider signals her inattention to the differences (temporal, historical, and material) that exist between the three distinct constructions of identity.
La Malinche, also referred to as Doña Marina or Malintzín Tenepal, was the Indian woman who served as translator for Hernán Cortés during the decisive period of the fall of the Aztec empire. According to the memoirs of Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who participated in and chronicled the conquest of the Aztec empire, Malintzín was born the daughter of caciques (Aztec nobility) (85). After the death of her father, and while she was still a young girl, her mother and stepfather sold her into captivity, ostensibly to leave the succession to the position of cacique free for her younger half brother. According to Díaz, she was sold to Indians from Xicalango who then gave or sold her to the Indians of Tabasco (85).
After the battle of Cintla, which took place shortly after Cortés landed at Cozumel, Malintzín was given to Cortés by the Tabascan Indians along with nineteen other women as a part of the spoils of war. From the Tabascans she learned to speak Chontal Maya, and it was her bilingualism that made her invaluable to Cortés. Cortés was able to speak Spanish to the Spaniard Aguilar (who had spent several years as a slave to the Mayan Indians), who then spoke Chontal Maya to Doña Marina, who translated into Nahuatl for Moctezuma and his numerous vassals (Diaz 86–87). It was in this manner that Cortés effected the communication that was so critical to his conquest of Mexico.
Today, La Malinche lives on as a symbol of enormous cultural significance for Mexicanas and Chicanas. As the mother of Cortés's son, she is figured as the symbolic mother of mestizaje, the mixing of Spanish and Indian blood. As the “dark” mother, the “fucked one,” the “betrayer of her race,” she is the figure against which women of Mexican descent have had to define themselves.
[5] See Paz, “Sons of La Malinche.” In the process of describing her in his essay, Paz has served to confirm Malinche's position as the “Mexican Eve.”
As the whore of the virgin/whore dichotomy in a culture that reveres La Virgen, she has been despised and reviled.From the 1970s on, Mexicana and Chicana feminists have addressed the myth of Malinche, and several have attempted to recuperate and revalue her as a figure of empowering or empowered womanhood.
[6] Alarcón, in “Traddutora, traditora” and “Chicana's Feminist Literature,” provides a useful analysis of some of these attempts, as does Moraga in “A Long Line of Vendidas,” in Loving. See also Candelaria; del Castillo; Gonzales; Phillips.
Such recuperations are generally problematic, inasmuch as attempts to absolve or empower the historical figure can result in reductive interpretations of what is a very complex situation. Cherríe Moraga's treatment of Malinche is neither naive nor reductive; she confronts the myth and examines its implications for the sexual and social situation of Chicanas today. In her essay “A Long Line of Vendidas,” she looks carefully at “this myth of the inherent unreliability of women, our natural propensity for treachery, which has been carved into the very bone of Mexican/Chicano collective psychology” (Loving 101), and addresses the continuing painful effects of the Malinche myth.The potential accusation of “traitor” or “vendida” is what hangs above the heads and beats in the hearts of most Chicanas seeking to develop our own autonomous sense of ourselves, particularly through sex and sexuality. Even if a Chicana knew no Mexican history, the concept of betraying one's race through sex and sexual politics is as common as corn. As cultural myths reflect the economics, mores, and social structures of a society, every Chicana suffers from their effects. (Loving 103)
Haraway's reading of the Malinche myth erases the complexity of the situation. She concludes her discussion of Malinche by claiming that “stripped of identity, the bastard race teaches about the power of the margins and the importance of a mother like Malinche. Women of color have transformed her from the evil mother of masculinist fear into the originally literate mother who teaches survival” (218–19). With this statement, Haraway conceals the painful legacy of the Malinche myth and overinvests the figure of Malinche with a questionable agency. Moreover, Haraway uncritically affirms a positionality (the margins) and a mode of existence (survival) that actual Chicanas have found to be rather less (instead of more) affirming. I do not mean to suggest that marginality and survival are not important and valuable. Certainly survival is valuable wherever the alternative is extinction. And, as I will argue, the experience and the theorizing of marginalized or oppressed people is important for arriving at a more objective understanding of the world. But I would suggest that neither marginality nor survival is a sufficient
Haraway's conflation of cyborgs with women of color raises serious theoretical and political issues, because she conceives the social identities of women of color in overly idealized terms. As previously noted, Haraway's conception of a cyborg is that of a creature who transcends or destroys boundaries. It is “the illegitimate offspring of militarism and patriarchal capitalism,” “a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self,” a being “committed to partiality, irony, intimacy and perversity,” who is “not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints” and who is “related [to other cyborgs] not by blood but by choice” (193, 205, 192, 196, emphasis added). The porosity and polysemy of the category “cyborg,” in effect, leaves no criteria to determine who might not be a cyborg. Furthermore, since Haraway sees a lack of any essential criterion for determining who is a woman of color, anyone can be a woman of color. Thus all cyborgs can be women of color and all women of color can be cyborgs. By sheer force of will (by “choice” as Haraway puts it) and by committing oneself (or refusing to commit oneself) to “permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints,” anyone can be either one or the other—or neither.
[7] Alcoff has suggested to me that Haraway might not intend to imply that “all cyborgs can be women of color”—that she means only that “women of color” is one particular kind of cyborg identity. If so, we are left with “women of color cyborgs” and “white women cyborgs” (and perhaps other kinds of male cyborgs, as well). In that case, of what use is the figure of the cyborg? Unless the figure of the cyborg can effectively dismantle “difference” (and the effect “difference” has on our experiences of the world), it is at best innocuous and at worst quite dangerous. We must acknowledge that a cyborg identity has the potential to become simply another veil to hide behind in order not to have to examine the differences that both constitute and challenge our self-conceptions.
The key theoretical problem here is Haraway's understanding of identity as a willful construction, as independent of the limiting effects of social location. Because she lacks an analysis of how the social categories that make up our social locations are causally relevant for the experiences we have, as well as of how those experiences inform our cultural identities, Haraway cannot conceive of a way to ground identities without essentializing them. Although she correctly ascertains that people are not uniformly determined by any one social category, she wrongly concludes that social categories (such as gender or race) can be irrelevant to the identities we choose. Haraway's refusal to grant women of color
From the perspective of cyborgs, freed of the need to ground politics in “our” privileged position of the oppression that incorporates all other dominations, the innocence of the merely violated, the ground of those closer to nature, we can see powerful possibilities…. With no available original dream of a common language or original symbiosis promising protection from hostile “masculine” separation, but written into the play of a text that has no finally privileged reading or salvation history, to recognize “oneself” as fully implicated in the world, frees us of the need to root politics in identification, vanguard parties, purity, and mothering. Stripped of identity, the bastard race teaches about the power of the margins and the importance of a mother like Malinche. Women of color have transformed her from the evil mother of masculinist fear into the originally literate mother who teaches survival. (219)
By freeing herself of the obligation to ground identity in social location, Haraway is able to arrogate the meaning of the term woman of color. With this misappropriation, Haraway authorizes herself to speak for actual women of color, to dismiss our own interpretations of our experiences of oppression, our “need to root politics in identification,” and even our identities. Furthermore, she employs several rhetorical strategies designed to undermine “identity” as a concept and “identity politics” as a practice. First, she (incorrectly) implies that players of identity politics necessarily claim the “privileged position of the oppression that incorporates all other dominations”; she then impoverishes the discussion by linking identity politics to naive forms of essentialism that base themselves in “vanguard parties, purity, and mothering.” The fact that most women of color (including Moraga) continue to organize and theorize on the basis of their identities as women of color—and that their identities as women of color are intimately tied to the social categories (race, gender, etc.) that make up their individual social locations—completely drops from sight in Haraway's representation of their work. It is worth noting that even within the terms of Haraway's cyborgian myth, the “bastard race” is not “stripped of identity” inasmuch as “bastard race” is itself a term of identification.
Although far more cursory, Judith Butler's treatment of Moraga's writings is also a highly questionable attempt to enlist women of color for a postmodernist agenda. In her early and highly influential book
The opening discussion in this chapter argues that this globalizing gesture [to find universally shared structures of oppression along an axis of sexual difference] has spawned a number of criticisms from women who claim that the category of “women” is normative and exclusionary and is invoked with the unmarked dimensions of class and racial privilege intact. In other words, the insistence upon the coherence and unity of the category of women has effectively refused the multiplicity of cultural, social and political intersections in which the concrete array of “women” are constructed. (14)
Butler's response to this critique is not to rethink her understanding of the category “women” but rather to radically undermine it as a valid political or analytical category. Underlying her logic are the assumptions that because the varieties of oppressions cannot be “summarily” ranked, they cannot be ranked at all; because epistemological projects have been totalizing and imperializing, they are always and necessarily so; and unless a given category (such as “women”) is transhistorical, trans-cultural, stable, and uncontestable, it is not a valid analytical and political category.
[8] In her more recent work, Butler has shifted her position slightly on the question of identity. Whereas in Gender Trouble she argued for a subversion of identity, in The Psychic Life of Power, she figures identities as unavoidable, if pernicious, facts of social existence. Although I would find it interesting to detail the points of convergence and divergence between Butler's reformulated thesis on identity and the realist theory of identity, I will not take the space to do it here. In this chapter, I focus on Gender Trouble because it is Butler's argument in this book that continues to influence current debates about identity.
It should be emphasized that the passage in Moraga that Butler cites provides no actual support for Butler's argument. To read Moraga the way Butler reads her is to ignore the italicized statement that immediately follows the caution against ranking oppressions, namely, “The danger lies in failing to acknowledge the specificity of the oppression,” as well as to ignore the statement that immediately follows that one, “The danger lies in attempting to deal with oppression purely from a theoretical base” (Bridge 52). When Moraga talks about ranking the oppressions in the context from which this sentence is extracted, she is referring to the necessity of theorizing the connections between (and not simply ranking) the different kinds of oppressions people suffer.
[9] See “A Long Line of Vendidas,” in which Moraga talks about the necessity of theorizing the “simultaneity of oppression,” by which she means taking “race, ethnicity and class into account in determining where women are at sexually,” and in which she clearly acknowledges that some people “suffer more” than others (Loving 128).
More specifically, she is referring to the situation in which militant women of color with feminist convictions often find themselves. Militant men of color claim their first loyalty on the basis of race and disparage their involvement with feminism, which is, the men insist, a “white women” thing. Meanwhile, their white feminist sisters claim their first loyalty on the basis of gender, urging women of color to see the way in which they are being exploited by their own fathers, husbands, and brothers.[10] For a more developed explanation of this phenomenon, see the section “Who Are My People” in Anzaldúa's essay “La Prieta.” Anzaldúa writes of those who insist on viewing the different parts of her in isolation: “They would chop me up into little fragments and tag each piece with a label.” She then goes on to affirm her oneness, “Only your labels split me” (Bridge 205). Rather than giving way to fragmentation, she insists upon holding it all together: “The mixture of bloods and affinities, rather than confusing or unbalancing me, has forced me to achieve a kind of equilibrium…. I walk the tightrope with ease and grace. I span abysses… I walk the rope—an acrobat in equipoise, expert at the Balancing Act” (209).
When Moraga writes that the “danger lies in ranking the oppressions,” she is warning against the reductive theoretical tendency (whether it be Marxist, feminist, or cultural nationalist) to posit one kind of oppression as primary for all time and in all places. She is not advocating an admission of defeat in the project of trying to figure out how the varieties of oppressions suffered by the woman of color intersect with, or are determined by, each other.Common to both Haraway's and Butler's accounts of identity is the assumption of a postmodern “subject” of feminism whose identity is unstable, shifting, and contradictory: “she” can claim no grounded tie to any aspect of “her” identit(ies) because “her” anti-imperialist, shifting, and contradictory politics have no epistemic basis in experience. Ironically,
[11] As long as our world is hierarchically organized along relations of domination, categories such as “us” and “them,” or “oppressed” and “oppressor” will retain their explanatory function. This is not because any one group belongs, in an essential way, to a particular category, but rather because the terms describe positions within prevailing social and economic relations.
Distinctions dissolve as all beings (human, plant, animal, and machine) are granted citizenship in the radically fragmented, unstable society of the postmodern world. “Difference” is magically subverted, and we find out that we really are all the same after all!The key theoretical issue turns on Haraway's and Butler's disavowals of the link between identity (with its experiential and epistemic components) and social location (the particular nexus of gender, race, class, and sexuality in which a given individual exists in the world). Haraway and Butler err in the assumption that because there is no one-to-one correspondence between social location and identity or knowledge, there is simply no connection between social location and identity or knowledge. I agree that in theory boundaries are infinitely permeable and power may be amorphous. The difficulty is that people do not live in an entirely abstract or discursive realm. They live as biologically and temporally limited, as well as socially situated, human beings. Furthermore, although the “postmodern” moment does represent a time of rapid social, political, economic, and discursive shifts, it does not represent a radical break with systems, structures, and meanings of the past. Power is not amorphous since oppression is systematic and structural. A politics of discourse that does not provide for some sort of bodily or concrete action outside the realm of the academic text will forever be inadequate to change the difficult “reality” of our lives. Only by acknowledging the specificity and “simultaneity of oppression,” and the fact that some people are more oppressed than others, can we begin to understand the systems and structures that perpetuate oppression and thereby place ourselves in a position to contest and change them (Moraga, Loving 128).
[12] For a compatible critique of how Butler and Haraway use women of color to justify their postmodernist theoretical projects, see Homans.
Until we do so, Cherríe Moraga, together with other women of color, will find herself leaving from Guatemala only to arrive at Guatepeor.
[13] The Spanish-language proverb “Salir de Guatemala para entrar en Guatepeor” plays with the word fragment “mala” in “Guatemala” to suggest the dilemma of a person caught between a bad (mala) and a worse (peor) situation. The proverb roughly approximates the English-language proverb “To go from the frying pan into the fire.”
She will find herself caught in the dilemma of being reduced to her Chicana lesbian body or having to deny her social location (for which her body is a compelling metaphor) as the principal place from which she derives her insights. Moraga's dilemma appears as a contradiction to the theorist who recognizes a choice only between essentialist and postmodernist accounts of identity and knowledge. On the one hand, Moraga is articulating a “theory in the flesh,” derived from “the physical realities of [women of color's] lives—[their] skin color, the land or concrete [they] grew up on, [their] sexual longings” (Bridge 23); on the other hand, she reminds us that “sex and race do not define a person's politics” (Last Generation 149). How can a theory be derived from the “physical realities of [women of color's] lives” if “sex and race do not define a person's politics”? When we examine this paradox from a realist perspective, the contradiction is dissolved. Theory, knowledge, and understanding can be linked to “our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings” without being uniformly determined by them. Rather, those “physical realities of our lives” will profoundly inform the contours and the context of both our theories and our knowledge.[14] At the risk of stating what should be obvious, this is as true for the white hetero-sexual politically conservative antifeminist as it is for the radical feminist lesbian of color. And yet, it is primarily women who address gender issues, and primarily people of color who address racial issues (both inside the academy and out). The unspoken assumption is that only women have gender and only people of color are racialized beings. This assumption reflects itself in the work of many male academics who only talk about gender when they are referring to women, and in the work of many white academics who only talk about race when they are referring to people of color. A manifestation of this phenomenon can be found in Butler's book Bodies That Matter, where she only theorizes race in the two chapters in which she discusses artistic productions by or about people of color.
The effects that the “physical realities of our lives” have on us, then, are what need to be addressed—not dismissed or dispersed—by theorists of social identity.TOWARD A REALIST THEORY OF CHICANA IDENTITY
In this section I draw on Satya Mohanty's important book, Literary Theory and the Claims of History, to articulate a postpositivist realist
[15] For one poststructuralist critique of essentialism that does not quite escape the postmodernist tendency I am critiquing, see Fuss.
The mistake lies in assuming that our options for theorizing identities are inscribed within the postmodernism/essentialism binary—that we are either completely fixed and unitary or completely unstable and fragmented selves. The advantage of a realist theory of identity is that it allows for an acknowledgment of how the social categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality function in individual lives without reducing individuals to those social determinants.I begin by clarifying my claims and defining some terms. Epistemic privilege, as I use it in this book, refers to a special advantage with respect to possessing or acquiring knowledge about how fundamental aspects of our society (such as race, class, gender, and sexuality) operate to sustain matrices of power. Although I will claim that oppressed groups may have epistemic privilege, I am not implying that social locations have epistemic or political meanings in a self-evident way. The simple fact of having been born a person of color in the United States or of having suffered the effects of heterosexism or of economic deprivation does not, in and of itself, give someone a better understanding or knowledge of the structure of our society. The key to claiming epistemic privilege for people who have been oppressed in a particular way stems from an acknowledgment that they have experiences—experiences that people who are not oppressed in the same way usually lack—that can provide them with information we all need to understand how hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality operate to uphold existing regimes of power in our society. Thus what is being claimed is not any a priori link between social location or identity and knowledge, but a link that is historically variable and mediated through the interpretation of experience.
Experience here refers to the fact of personally observing, encountering, or undergoing a particular event or situation. By this definition, experience is admittedly subjective. Experiences are not wholly external events; they do not just happen. Experiences happen to us, and it is our theoretically mediated interpretation of an event that makes it an “experience.” The meanings we give our experiences are inescapably conditioned
The first claim of a postpositivist realist theory of identity is that the different social categories (such as gender, race, class, and sexuality) that together constitute an individual's social location are causally related to the experiences she will have. Thus a person who is racially coded as “white” in our society will usually face situations and have experiences that are significantly different from those of a person who is racially coded as “black.”
[16] This can happen even if both individuals in the example are born into an African American community and consider themselves “black.” It should be clear that I am not talking about race as a biological category. I am talking about people who, for one reason for another, appear to others as “white” or “black.” As I will demonstrate in my discussion of Moraga's work, this is an important distinction for theorizing the link between experience and cultural identity for people with real, but not visible, biological or cultural connections to minority communities.
Similarly, a person who is racially coded as “black” and who has ample financial resources at her disposal will usually face situations and have experiences that are significantly different from those of a person who is racially coded as “black” and lacks those resources. The examples can proliferate and become increasingly complex, but the basic point is this: the experiences a person is likely to have will be largely determined by her social location in a given society. In order to appreciate the structural causality of the experiences of any given individual, we must take into account the mutual interaction of all the relevant social categories that constitute her social location and situate them within the particular social, cultural, and historical matrix in which she exists.The second basic claim of a postpositivist realist theory of identity is that an individual's experiences will influence, but not entirely determine, the formation of her cultural identity. Thus, while I am suggesting that members of a group may have similar experiences as a result of their (voluntary or involuntary) membership in that group, I am not suggesting that they all come to the same conclusions about those experiences.
[17] It is not even necessary that they recognize themselves as members of that group. For example, a dark-skinned migrant from Puerto Rico who refuses identification with African Americans may nevertheless suffer racist experiences arising from the history of black/white race relations within the United States due to mainland U.S. citizens’ inability to distinguish between the two distinct cultural groups.
Because the theories through which humans interpret their experiences vary fromThe third claim of a postpositivist realist theory of identity is that there is an epistemic component to identity that allows for the possibility of error and of accuracy in interpreting the things that happen to us. It is a feature of theoretically mediated experience that one person's understanding of the same situation may undergo revision over the course of time, thus rendering her subsequent interpretations of that situation more or less accurate. I have as an example my own experience of the fact that the other women in my freshman dorm at Yale treated me differently than they treated each other. My initial interpretation of the situation led me to conclude that they just did not like me—the individual, the particular package of hopes, dreams, habits, and mannerisms that I was. Never having had much trouble making friends, I found this experience both troubling and humbling. As a “Spanish” girl from New Mexico, I did not consider race or racism as social realities relevant to me. I might have wondered (but I did not) why I ended up spending my first semester at Yale with the other brown-skinned, Spanish-surnamed woman in my residential college. It was only after I moved to Texas, where prejudice against Mexicans is much more overt, that I realized that regardless of how I saw myself, other people saw me as “Mexican.” Reflecting back, I came to understand that while I had not seen the other women in my dorm as being particularly different from me, the reverse was not the case. Simultaneous with that understanding came the suspicion that my claim to a Spanish identity might be both factually and ideologically
[18] For an explanation of the historical origins of the myth that Spanish-surnamed residents of New Mexico are direct descendants of Spanish conquistadores, see Acuña, esp. 55–60; J. R. Chávez, esp. 85–106; González, esp. 78–83.
In Texas, then, I became belatedly and unceremoniously Mexican American. All this to illustrate the point that identities both condition and are conditioned by the kinds of interpretations people give to the experiences they have. As Mohanty says, “identities are ways of making sense of our experiences.” They are “theoretical constructions that enable us to read the world in specific ways” (Literary Theory 216).The fourth claim of a postpositivist realist theory of identity is that some identities, because they can more adequately account for the social categories constituting an individual's social location, have greater epistemic value than some others that the same individual might claim. If, as in the case of my Spanish identity, I am forced to ignore certain salient aspects of my social location in order to maintain my self-conception, we can fairly conclude that my identity is epistemically distorted. While my Spanish identity may have a measure of epistemic validity (mine is a Spanish surname; I undoubtedly have some “Spanish blood”), we can consider it less valid than an alternative identity that takes into consideration the ignored social aspects (my “Indian blood”; my Mexican cultural heritage) together with all the other social categories that are causally relevant for the experiences I might have. Identities have more or less epistemic validity to the extent that they “refer” outward to the world, that they accurately describe and explain the complex interactions between the multiple determinants of an individual's social location.
[19] Identities can be evaluated, according to Mohanty, “using the same complex epistemic criteria we use to evaluate ‘theories.’ ” He explains, “Since different experiences and identities refer to different aspects of one world, one complex causal structure that we call ‘social reality,’ the realist theory of identity implies that we can evaluate them comparatively by considering how adequately they explain this structure” (Literary Theory 230–31).
According to the realist theory of identity, identities are not self-evident, unchanging, and uncontestable, nor are they absolutely fragmented, contradictory, and unstable. Rather, identities are subject to multiple determinations and to a continual process of verification that takes place over the course of an individual's life through her interaction with the society she lives in. It is in this process of verification that identities can be (and often are) contested and that they can (and often do) change.I want to consider now the possibility that my identity as a “Chicana” can grant me a knowledge about the world that is “truer” and more “objective” than an alternative identity I might claim as a “Mexican
[20] For excellent discussions about the difficulties involved in homogenizing “His-panics,” as well as choosing a label by which to identify them, see Oboler, esp. chaps. 2, 4; Gracia, esp. chap. 1. For an argument in favor of the term Hispanic, see Gracia, esp. chap. 3. In that chapter, Gracia provides a fairly compelling historical argument in favor of a “Hispanic” identity. He asserts that the ethnic group with which we identify should be comprised of “the inhabitants of the countries of the Iberian peninsula after 1492 and what were to become the colonies of those countries after the encounter between Iberia and America took place, and by the descendants of these people who live in other countries (e.g. the United States) but preserve some link to those people” (48). I maintain, in contrast, that such an ethnic grouping is generally too large and heterogeneous to be analytically or politically useful for either the cultural critic or the activist. The category of “Hispanic” may indeed be useful for Gracia's purpose, which is to identify the group of people from whom “Hispanic philosophy” has emerged. But people's lived identities do not necessarily correspond to philosophical categories or intellectual traditions. Much more salient for a person's identity is her historical sense (which is generally more localized than Gracia would allow), her experience of being racialized and gendered within the society she grew up in, her cultural practices involving music and food, her socioeconomic status, and the values she holds. For a more sustained critique of Gracia's argument, see Moya, “Why I Am Not Hispanic.”
A Chicana, according to the usage of women who identify that way, is a politically aware woman of Mexican heritage who is at least partially descended from the indigenous people of Mesoamerica and who was born and/or raised in the United States. What distinguishes a Chicana from a Mexican American, a Hispanic, or an American of Mexican descent is not her ancestry or her cultural upbringing. Rather it is her political awareness; her recognition of her disadvantaged position in a hierarchically organized society arranged according to categories of class, race, gender, and sexuality; and her propensity to engage in political struggle aimed at subverting and changing those structures.[21] Historically, the term Chicano was a pejorative name applied to lower class Mexican Americans. Like the term black, it was consciously appropriated and revalued by (primarily) students during the 1960s. According to the Plan de Santa Barbara (see note 24) the term specifically implies a politics of resistance to Anglo-American domination.
The fifth claim of a postpositivist realist theory of identity is that our ability to understand fundamental aspects of our world will depend on our ability to acknowledge and understand the social, political, economic, and epistemic consequences of our own social location. If we can agree that our one social world is, as Mohanty asserts, “constitutively defined by relations of domination” (Literary Theory 232), then we can begin to see how my cultural identity as a Chicana, which takes into account an acknowledgment and understanding of those relations, may be more epistemically valid than an alternative identity I might claim as a Mexican American, a Hispanic, or an American. While a description of myself as a Mexican American is not technically incorrect, it implies a structural equivalence with other ethnic Americans (Italian Americans, German Americans, African Americans, etc.) that erases the differential social, political, and economic relations that obtain for different groups. This erasure is even more marked in the cultural identity of the Hispanic or American (of Mexican descent), whose self-conception often depends on the idea that she is a member of one more assimilable ethnic group in what is simply a nation of immigrants.
[22] An example of the assimilationist “Hispanic” is Linda Chávez. In her book, Out of the Barrio, Chávez suggests that Hispanics, like “previous” white ethnic groups, are rapidly assimilating into the mainstream of U.S. culture and society (2). Not only does she play fast and loose with sociological and historical evidence, but her thesis cannot account for the social category of race. She does not mention race as being causally relevant for the experiences of Hispanics, and she repeatedly refers to “non-Hispanic whites,” a grammatical formulation which assumes that all Hispanics are white. She accounts for Puerto Ricans and Dominicans by considering them as “dysfunctional” “exceptions” to the white-Hispanic rule (139–59).
Factors of race, gender, and class get obscured in these identities, while a normative heterosexuality is simply presumed. We find that, to maintain her identity, the Hispanic or American (of Mexican descent) may have to repress or misinterpret her own or others’ experiences of oppression. Moreover, she will most likely view her material situation (her “success” or “failure”) as entirely a result of her individual merit and dismiss structural relations of domination as irrelevant to her personal situation. Thus my claim that social locations have epistemic consequences is not the same as claiming that a particular kind of knowledge inheres in a particular social location. An individual's understanding of herself and the world will be mediated, more or less accurately, through her cultural identity.The sixth and final claim of a postpositivist realist theory of identity is
In the case of social phenomena like sexism and racism, whose distorted representation benefits the powerful and the established groups and institutions, an attempt at an objective explanation is necessarily continuous with oppositional political struggles. Objective knowledge of such social phenomena is in fact often dependent on the theoretical knowledge that activism creates. For without these alternative constructions and accounts our capacity to interpret and understand the dominant ideologies and institutions is limited to those created or sanctioned by these very ideologies and institutions. (Literary Theory 213)
The “alternative constructions and accounts” generated through oppositional struggle provide new ways of looking at our world that always complicate and often challenge dominant conceptions of what is “right,” “true,” and “beautiful.” They call to account the distorted representations of peoples, ideas, and practices whose subjugation is fundamental to the colonial, neocolonial, imperialist, or capitalist project. Further-more, because the well-being (and sometimes even survival) of the groups or individuals who engage in oppositional struggle depends on their ability to refute or dismantle dominant ideologies and institutions, their vision is usually more critical, their efforts more diligent, and their arguments more comprehensive than those of individuals or groups whose well-being is predicated on the maintenance of the status quo. Oppressed groups and individuals have a stake in knowing “what it would take to change [our world, and in]… identifying the central relations of power and privilege that sustain it and make the world what it is” (Mohanty, Literary Theory 214). This is why “granting the possibility of epistemic privilege to the oppressed might be more than a sentimental gesture; in many cases in fact it is the only way to push us toward greater social objectivity” (232–33). Thus a realist theory of identity demands oppositional struggle as a necessary (although not sufficient) step toward the achievement of an epistemically privileged position.
A realist theory of identity, in contrast to a postmodernist one, thus insists that we acknowledge and interrogate the consequences—social, political, economic, and epistemic—of social location. To do this, we must first acknowledge the reality of those social categories (race, class, gender, and sexuality) that together make up an individual's social location. We do not need to see these categories as uncontestable or absolutely fixed to acknowledge their ontological status. We do, however,
“THEORY IN THE FLESH”:
CHERRíE MORAGA'S REALIST FEMINISM
Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, in her essay “Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La frontera, ” captures the exasperation and frustration of many Chicana/o academics who have been witness to the way Anzaldúa's work has been used and abused in the service of a postmodern celebration-cum-deconstruction of “difference.” Yarbro-Bejarano's concern is that post-modernists have appropriated Anzaldúa's powerful image of the “border” and her theory of “mestiza consciousness” without attending to the social, cultural, and historical conditions that produced her thought. Yarbro-Bejarano critiques “the isolation of this text from its conceptual community and the pitfalls in universalizing the theory of mestiza or border consciousness, which the text painstakingly grounds in specific historical and cultural experiences” (7). Taking Yarbro-Bejarano's cue, my goal is twofold: to resituate Moraga's work within the conceptual community from which it emerges by regrounding it in her specific historical and cultural experiences; and to demonstrate that Moraga's theoretical frame-work is consistent with a realist theory of identity.
Partly as an outgrowth of ongoing struggles (from 1845) of resistance to American domination, and partly in conjunction with civil rights and other left liberation movements taking place during the 1960s, the Chicano movement, as a distinct historical and political phenomenon, was born. Some of the most visible manifestations of the Chicano movement were the New Mexico-based La Alianza Federal de Mercedes, led by Reies López Tijerina; the California-based United Farm Workers’ (UFW) movement, headed by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta; the university-based Chicano Student Youth Movement; the Colorado-based Crusade for Justice, led by Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzáles; and, later, the La Raza Unida party, headed in Colorado by Gonzáles and in South Texas by José ángel Gutiérrez.
[23] For histories of the Chicano movement, see Acuña; García, “Development of Chicana Feminist Discourse”; Gutiérrez; López; Muñoz; Ruíz.
Within a larger framework of resistance to Anglo-American hegemony, the groups that formed the Chicano movement employed distinct strategies and worked toward different goals. La Alianza and the UFW were primarily class- or labor-based movements working toward the economic improvement of the communities they represented. La Raza Unida emphasized electoral politics and working within existing democratic structures and institutions. The Chicano Student Youth Movement focused on Chicanos’ lack of access to education and the problems associated with racial and cultural discrimination. Participants in the youth movement worked to establish Chicano studies programs within existing institutions of higher education and to increase cultural consciousness and pride.
[24] The Plan de Santa Barbara, written in the spring of 1969 at a California statewide conference in Santa Barbara, launched MECHA (Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán) and is probably the definitive position paper of the Chicano Student Youth Movement. It appears as an appendix in Muñoz, 191–202.
The Chicano movement in general and the Chicano Student Youth Movement in particular fostered the development of a cultural nationalist discourse that emphasized the importance of the family in the project of cultural survival. The sociologist Alma García explains, “Historically, as well as during the 1960s and 1970s, the Chicano family represented a source of cultural and political resistance to the various types of discrimination experienced in American society. At the cultural level, the Chicano movement emphasized the need to safeguard the value of family loyalty. At the political level, the Chicano movement used the family as a strategic organizational tool for protest activities” (“Development of Chicana Feminist Discourse” 219). The Chicano nationalist emphasis on the importance of family loyalty assigned Chicanas a subordinate and circumscribed role within the movement. They were often relegated to traditional female roles and denied decision-making power. Moreover, although Chicanas were active at every stage and at every level of the Chicano movement, their participation was rarely acknowledged or recorded.
The cultural nationalist emphasis on cultural survival in an Anglo-dominated society further instituted strict controls on the sexual autonomy of Chicanas. Chicanas who dated or married white men were often criticized as vendidas and malinchistas responsible for perpetuating the legacy of rape handed down to the Chicano community from the conquest of Mexico. This same standard did not apply to males, whose relations with white women were often seen as rectifying an unjust legacy of
[25] For more information on how both heterosexual and lesbian Chicanas fared within the Chicano movement, see García, Chicana Feminist Thought, esp. the introduction; García, “Development of Chicana Feminist Discourse”; Gutiérrez; López; Moraga, Loving, esp. 105–11; Saldívar-Hull, esp. 29–34; Trujillo.
Chicano cultural nationalism found its most eloquent expression within the Chicano Student Youth Movement, and it is from within that segment of the movement that what is frequently recognized as Chicana feminism emerged.
[26] This is not to say that Chicanas outside the university were not asserting themselves and coming to consciousness about their disadvantaged positions—just that the most consistently documented and published expressions of Chicana feminism have emerged from within the academy. For documentation of this claim, see García, “Development of Chicana Feminist Discourse”; Gutiérrez; López; Pesquera and Segura.
The Chicana feminist response to the kind of treatment they received from their Chicano brothers was to point out the contradictions inherent in maintaining one form of oppression in the service of abolishing another. Those who were explicit about their feminist convictions found themselves charged with “selling out” to white women's liberation. They were urged by their compañeros to drop their “divisive ideology” and to attend to the “primary” oppression facing all Chicanos—that is, racism. Chicanos often viewed an analysis of sexism within the Chicano movement or community as a threat not only to the movement, but to the culture itself.Some Chicana feminists, disillusioned with Chicano cultural nationalism, began to work within white women's liberation movements in the 1970s. Long-term coalitions never developed, largely because most white women could not or would not recognize the class and race biases inherent in the structures of their own organizations. Furthermore, white feminists often replicated, in another realm, the same kind of privileging of one kind of oppression over another that had frustrated Chicanas in relation to movement Chicanos. Insisting on the primacy of gender oppression, most white feminist organizations disregarded or diminished the class- and race-based oppression suffered by most Chicanas. This resulted, in the 1980s, in Chicana feminists, together with feminists of
Moraga presents an interesting case because she did not participate in the Chicano movement but has been at the forefront of the Chicana feminist response to both Chicano cultural nationalism and Anglo-American feminism.
[27] Moraga explains, “During the late 60s and early 70s, I was not an active part of la causa. I never managed to get myself to walk in the marches in East Los Angeles (I merely watched from the sidelines); I never went to one meeting of MECHA on campus. No soy tonta. I would have been murdered in El Movimiento—light-skinned, unable to speak Spanish well enough to hang; miserably attracted to women and fighting it; and constantly questioning all authority, including men's. I felt I did not belong there. Maybe I had really come to believe that ‘Chicanos’ were ‘different,’ not ‘like us,’ as my mother would say. But I fully knew that there was a part of me that was a part of that movement, but it seemed that part would have to go unexpressed until the time I could be a Chicano and the woman I had to be, too” (Loving 113).
Her position in the forefront can be explained both by the strength of her writings and by the fact that she was initially published and distributed through white feminist presses. Moraga is an important figure for Chicana feminists in the academy today because she is one of two Chicanas (the other being Gloria Anzaldúa) whose work is more than occasionally taken up outside the field of Chicana/o studies. As such, she is one of the few Chicanas called on to “represent” Chicanas in women's studies and feminist theory courses throughout the United States. How she is read, then, is crucial for how we understand the position of Chicanas in U.S. society.Moraga's third world feminist political project takes as its starting point the transformation of the experience of women of color. This transformation can be accomplished, Moraga argues, only when women of color understand how their experiences are shaped by the relations of domination within which they live. Thus, while Moraga does not take the acquisition of knowledge as her goal, she sees the acquisition of knowledge—about women of color and their place in the world—as fundamental to her theoretical project. To that end, Moraga does not advocate turning away from, but toward, the bodies of women of color to develop what she calls a “theory in the flesh.”
[28] That I regard Cherríe Moraga as a “theorist” may surprise some academics who associate that honorific with a long list of publications from well-established university presses. Saldívar-Hull has argued, however, that “because [Chicana feminists’] work has been ignored by the men and women in charge of cultural modes of production, we must be innovative in our search. Hegemony has so constructed the ideas of method and theory that often we cannot recognize anything that is different from what the dominant discourse constructs. As a consequence, we have to look in nontraditional places for our theories: in the prefaces to anthologies, in the interstices of autobiographies, in our cultural artifacts (the cuentos), and, if we are fortunate enough to have access to a good library, in the essays published in marginalized journals not widely distributed by the dominant institutions” (46). Moraga's preface to Bridge as well as other of her essays that I discuss are precisely such sites of Chicana theory.
Moraga's theoretical project, which is consonant with her interest in
I began to see that, in fact, [Loving in the War Years] is very much a love story about my family because they made me the lover I am. And also the belief in political change is similar because it can't be theoretical. It's got to be from your heart. They all seem related to me, and I feel that what happened since Bridge came out is that I got closer to my own dilemma and struggle—being both Chicana and lesbian. I really feel that all along that's been the heart of the book. I could see that this book was about trying to make some sense of what is supposed to be a contradiction, but you know it ain't cause it lives in your body. (“Interview” 129)
Condensed in this short passage are five concepts central to Moraga's theoretical approach: (1) the family as the primary instrument of socialization (“my family… made me the lover I am”); (2) the need for theory to be grounded in emotional investment (“political change… can't be theoretical. It's got to be from your heart”); (3) the link between social location and experience (Moraga represents being Chicana and lesbian in her society as a “dilemma”); (4) the body as a source of knowledge (“you know it ain't cause it lives in your body”); and (5) the centrality of struggle to the formation of her political consciousness. Both in this interview and throughout her writings, Moraga makes clear that it was through her struggles—to deny her chicanidad and then to reclaim it; to repress her lesbianism and then to express it; to escape sexism and heterosexism within a Chicano/a cultural context and then to combat racism and classism within an Anglo-American feminist movement—that she comes to understand the necessity for a nonessentialist feminist theory that can explain the political and theoretical salience of social location.
According to Moraga, a “theory in the flesh means one where the physical realities of our lives—our skin color, the land or concrete we
As we have seen, Moraga's refusal to assume a self-evident or one-to-one correspondence between social location and knowledge opens her work to co-optation by postmodernist feminist critiques of identity. But what postmodernist interpretations of Moraga's writings fail to take into account is her emphasis on bodies and her insistence on the necessity of theorizing from the “flesh and blood experiences of the woman of color” (Bridge 23). In her own articulation of a theory in the flesh, Moraga emphasizes the materiality of the body by conceptualizing “flesh” as the site on or within which the woman of color experiences the painful material effects of living in her particular social location (Bridge xviii). Her focus on women of color's vulnerability to pain starkly emphasizes the way they experience themselves as embodied beings. Over the course of their lives, women of color face situations and have experiences that arise as a result of how other people misrecognize them. Others routinely react to women of color with preconceived ideas about the meanings their bodies convey. These misrecognitions can be amusing; often they are painful. Moreover, the way others misrecognize women of color can affect the kind of jobs they will “qualify” for, or where they might be able to live. The material effects these misrecognitions have are why post-modernist theories of identity that do not account for the causal connection between social location and experience have no real liberatory potential for women of color or other multiply oppressed individuals.
Moraga's personal example illustrates that a woman of color's response to her socially disadvantaged position is not uniform and can change over time. Moraga's initial prereflective and visceral response to being Chicana and lesbian was to deny her chicanidad and repress her lesbianism.
[29] The fact of Moraga's “whiteness” is central to an accurate mapping of her social location and crucial to an understanding of the formation of her cultural identity. The fact that her “whiteness” has been systematically overlooked by postmodernist readings of Moraga's work is symptomatic of the failure of postmodernist theories of identity to take account of the complex interactions among the multiple determinants of human identity.
As a young girl, Moraga shared her mother's concern that she be in a position to transcend the barriers faced by individuals in U.S. society who are situated as “poor, uneducated, and Chicana.” The best way she and her mother could see for Moraga to accomplish this goal was for her to leave behind her Mexican cultural heritage—the presumed “cause” of her poverty and powerlessness. Their unstated goal was for Moraga to become “anglocized,” a condition that, they assumed, would give her access to power and privilege. In the conceptual universe within which they were working, Moraga's white skin, her Anglo surname, and her education would be her tickets to the promised land.
Moraga's “anglocization” was at first encouraged by her growing awareness of her lesbian sexuality. The product of a strict Mexican and Catholic upbringing, Moraga concluded at the age of twelve that her strong emotional attachments to women, which she had started to identify as sexual, must be “impure” and “sinful” (Loving 119). Her response to this conclusion was to beat a terrified retreat into the region of religion, thus abandoning the body that was beginning to betray her biological femaleness. In the article she wrote with Amber Hollibaugh, “What We're Rollin Around in Bed With,” Moraga reveals her alarm at the changes her body went through during puberty: “I didn't really think of myself as female, or male. I thought of myself as this hybrid or something. I just kinda thought of myself as this free agent until I got tits. Then I thought, ‘oh, oh, some problem has occurred here…’ ” (60). Moraga's growing awareness of her own biological femaleness, and the inability to act that she associated with that femaleness, caused her to feel “crucially and critically alone and powerless” (Loving 120). This awareness,
[30] The Spanish verb chingar is stronger than the English verb “to fuck.” A highly gendered word, it carries within it connotations of the English verb “to rape.” Thus, chingón refers to the (active) male rapist/fucker and chingada refers to the (passive) female who is raped/fucked.
For years Moraga lived in a state of what she describes as “an absent inarticulate terror” (Loving 121). Her feelings for women, which she had tried so hard to suppress, did not fully reawaken until she became sexually active with men. Even then, Moraga could not face her lesbianism. She explains, “The sheer prospect of being a lesbian was too great to bear, fully believing that giving into such desires would find me shot-up with bullets or drugs in a gutter somewhere” (Loving 122). She began to be revisited by “feelings of outsiderhood”; she saw herself as “half-animal/half-human, hairy-rumped and cloven-hoofed, como el diablo” (Loving 124). It took a series of breakdowns before Moraga could begin the process of learning to live with her sexual desire for women. In that process, she became further alienated from her Chicana/o community. Because Moraga experienced her sexuality as contrary to the social mores of a Chicana/o community, it was that particular community she needed to leave in order to, in the words of Anzaldúa, “come out as the person [she] really was” (Loving 116). Moraga explains, “I became anglocized because I thought it was the only option available to me toward gaining autonomy as a person without being sexually stigmatized… I instinctively made choices which I thought would allow me greater freedom of movement in the future” (Loving 99).
Given the urgency of her need to come to terms with her sexual identity, Moraga became, as if by default, “white.” As the light-skinned daughter of a dark-skinned Mexican-origin woman, Moraga had a choice, of sorts, as to which “race” she would identify with. According to the logic of what the anthropologist Marvin Harris calls hypodescent, Moraga is Mexican, and therefore nonwhite (56). The empirical fact that there is no “Mexican” race, that “Mexican” denotes a nationality and not a race, and that some Mexicans are phenotypically “white” seems to have little bearing on the ethnic/racial classification of Mexican-origin people in the United States. Practically speaking, the “racial” classification
Moraga's identification as “white” was at least partially motivated by two underlying assumptions at work in the conceptual universe from which she emerged. The first assumption is that homosexuality belongs, in an essential way, to white people. Moraga explains that homosexuality is seen by many Chicana/os as “his [the white man's] disease with which he sinisterly infects Third World people, men and women alike” (Loving 114). The second assumption, which follows from the first, is that a woman cannot be a Chicana and a lesbian at the same time. These two assumptions, combined with the fact that Moraga was still clinging to the privilege (here figured as “freedom of movement”) that the color of her skin might afford her, precluded any understanding of what it meant for her to be a Chicana lesbian. As long as Moraga avoided examining how the various social categories that constituted her social location intersected with, and were determined by, each other, she could conceive of her sexuality in isolation from her race. Moraga had not yet acknowledged how her Chicano “family… made [her] the lover [she is]” (Loving 129).
Moraga's eventual coming to terms with her Chicana identity was facilitated by her experience of marginalization within the women's movement.
[31] Although I use the term women's movement in the singular, I am aware that the various feminisms are diverse and multidimensional. If I am vague, it is because Moraga does not specify which feminist group(s) she involved herself with. Throughout most of her writings, Moraga equates the “women's movement” or “feminism” with an unspecified and predominantly middle-class white women's movement. She does, at one point, specifically critique “Radical Feminism” (Loving 125–30).
However “white” she might have felt in relation to a Chicano community, she felt a sense of cultural dislocation when other women of color were not present in the feminist organizations in which she was active. However accepting of lesbianism the feminist movement tried to be, it did not deal adequately with the ways in which race and class have shaped women's sexuality.[32] See Hollibaugh and Moraga. In this conversation, Moraga and Hollibaugh address the failure of feminist theory and rhetoric to deal adequately with women's lived experiences of sexuality. They accuse the feminist movement of desexualizing women's sexuality by confusing sexuality with sexual oppression. They suggest that the refusal to acknowledge butch/femme roles in lesbian relationships, and the failure to understand how those sexual identities influence and condition sexual behavior, have led to (1) a delegitimization of sexual desire and (2) bad theory. They contend that a woman's sexual identity, which is necessarily influenced by her race and class background, can tell us something fundamental about the way she constitutes herself/is constituted as a woman.
Moraga realized that a feminist movement with an exclusive focus on gender oppression could not provide the home she was looking for (Loving 125).In 1981, partly as a result of the alienation each had suffered within
Moraga's example illustrates the possibility of coming to understand someone else's experience of oppression through empathetic identification—what Moraga, following Emma Goldman, calls “entering into the lives of others” (Bridge 27). Her example also illustrates the point that however dependent empathetic identification is on personal experience, the simple fact of experiencing oppression is not sufficient for under-standing someone else's oppressive situation. Moraga's initial (and largely unexamined) reaction to her own experiences of oppression at first prevented her from empathizing with her mother's plight. It was not until she reinterpreted her experiences according to a different and more
When, in her writings, Moraga talks about the need for people to “deal with the primary source of [their] own oppression… [and] to emotionally come to terms with what it feels like to be a victim,” she is not advocating the kind of narcissistic navelgazing that equates victim-hood with innocence (Bridge 30). As Haraway rightly suggests, Moraga does not claim the “privileged position of the oppression that incorporates all other dominations,” or the self-righteous “innocence of the merely violated.” Central to Moraga's understanding of oppression is that it is a physical, material, psychological, and/or rhetorical manifestation of the intersecting relations of domination that constitute our shared world. To the extent that individuals are differentially situated within those relations, they may be simultaneously constituted as both oppressor and oppressed. So, an upper-class white woman can be oppressed by patriarchy at the same time that she oppresses others (such as poor men of color) through the privilege afforded to her by her race and class. Moraga would further argue that relinquishing the notion that there is a “privileged position of the oppression that incorporates all other dominations” does not free us of the need to relate causally the intersecting relations of domination that condition our experiences of oppression. And since the exercise of oppression is systematic and relations of domination are structural, Moraga understands that an examination of oppression is simultaneously an examination of fundamental aspects of a world that is hierarchically organized according to categories of class, race, gender, and sexuality. Thus, Moraga's call for women of color to examine their own lives is ultimately a call for women of color to understand
[33] The centrality of experiences of subordination to Chicana feminist theorizing is elegantly illustrated by Saldívar-Hull, especially in her autobiographical first chapter. Although Saldívar-Hull is careful to avoid a positivist conception of experience, she nevertheless maintains, “As Chicanas, however, our specific experiences as working-class-origin, ethnic women under the law of the fathers undergird our theories” (12).
Moraga is aware that what she is asking for will not be easy. She understands why we are often afraid to examine how we are implicated in relations of domination: “the sources of oppression form not only our radicalism, but also our pain. Therefore, they are often the places we feel we must protect unexamined at all costs” (Loving 134). To do the kind of self-reflexive examination Moraga calls for can mean having to admit “how deeply ‘the man's’ words have been ingrained in us” (Bridge 32). The project of examining our own location within the relations of domination becomes even riskier when we realize that doing so might mean giving up “whatever privileges we have managed to squeeze out of this society by virtue of our gender, race, class or sexuality” (Bridge 30). We are afraid to admit that we have benefited from the oppression of others. “[We fear] the immobilization threatened by [our] own incipient guilt.” We fear we might have to “change [our lives] once [we] have seen [ourselves] in the bodies of the people [we have] called different. [We fear] the hatred, anger, and vengeance of those [we have] hurt” (Loving 56–57).
Moraga's self-interrogation involved acknowledging how she has been guilty of working her own privilege, “ignorantly, at the expense of others” (Bridge 34). Moraga now, unlike many other white-skinned “His-panics,” has come to understand—through making connections between her experience as a woman in a male world and a lesbian in a heterosexual world—how what functions as the privilege of looking “white” in U.S. society has significantly shaped her experience of the world. The consequences, for Moraga, have been both positive and negative. On the one hand, she credits her light skin and Anglo surname with pushing her into the college prep “A” group in high school and with making her and her siblings “the success stories of the family,” and, on the other, she has had to “push up against a wall of resistance from [her] own people” in her attempts to claim a Chicana/o identity (Loving 96–97; Bridge 33–34).
What should be clear from my analysis of Moraga's work is that her “theory in the flesh” is derived from, although not uniformly determined by, “the physical realities” of her life, her “social location.” I have shown that the social categories that make up her particular social location are
A realist theory of identity thus provides women of color with a nonessentialist way to ground their identities. It gives us a way of knowing and acting from within our own social location or “flesh.” Like Moraga, we will no longer have to aspire to a bodiless, genderless, raceless, and sexless existence (an existence that has traditionally been conceptualized in terms of the unmarked but nevertheless privileged heterosexual white male) to claim justifiable knowledge of the world around us. A realist theory of identity gives women of color a way to substantiate that we do possess knowledge—knowledge important not only for ourselves but also for all who wish to more accurately understand the world—and that we possess it partly as a result of the fact that we are women of color.