Extract

Alina SUFARU

Université de Versailles-Saint-Quentin

By providing “an analogy between contemporary women and the Aztec mythic story of Cotalicue’s daughter Coyolxauhqui”, Gloria Anzaldúa claims that writing has the ability to forge a new female identity and agency:

[To me Coyolxauhqui’s story] is a symbol not only of violence and hatred against women but also how we’re split body and mind, spirit and soul. We’re separated. […] When you take a person and divide her up, you disempower her. She’s no longer a threat. My whole struggle in writing, in this anticolonial struggle, has been to put us back together again. To connect up the body with the soul and the mind with the spirit. That’s why for me there’s such a link between the text and the body, between textuality and sexuality, between the body and the spirit.1

According to Anzaldúa, writers, and female writers in particular, have the power and the responsibility to mold more tolerant societies by deconstructing the patriarchal discourse and re/constructing concepts and definitions which should enable women to depict more veracious representations themselves. Published in 1987, her groundbreaking work Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza2 maps a theory of “the plurality of self”, of a migrating identity, which she defines as mestiza or border consciousness. The latter is intrinsically connected to a space as fluctuating as the self, the nepantla, a Nahuatl word that means middle land, or the land in the middle. Anzaldúa...