Michael De Anda Muñiz Week 5 Breaking out of Boundaries

Of this week’s readings, I was most drawn to Maria Cotera’s discussion of movement and breaking out of boundaries. She cites Paula Gunn Allen when she says, “the decision to engage publicly with dominant forms of knowledge production often requires that women of color transcend established disciplinary, discursive, and geographical boundaries” (13-4). Furthermore, Allen claims that the intellectual contributions of historical women of color “have been ‘disappeared’ from our national imaginary because the ‘border texts’ produced in their travels in and between different sites of struggle challenge the disciplinary, aesthetic, and ideological norms of both dominant and counterhegemonic canons” (15). This discussion connects to something larger than my dissertation. I expect my entire academic career to be concerned with historically constructed boundaries within and outside the academy.

As I have mentioned earlier in class, I consider myself to be anti-disciplinary. The ways that women of color and queer folks of color have been silenced and disappeared from our historical understandings is a major reason why I take this stance. Boundaries around disciplines and categories were constructed by those who could afford to create these separations. They were not built for the benefit of those who transgress boundaries. My dissertation research focus on Latina social justice artists requires me to reject traditional academic boundaries. They as people and their work often move across various borders and boundaries. I find Sociology, and academia in general, extremely limiting. In some ways, when we are “trained” in traditional disciplines, we begin to create blind spots about the lives of women of color. So, a major part of my work is to find new academic spaces where women of color’s experiences can be fully seen and understood.

Chela Sandoval’s concept of “oppositional consciousness” names the ways that US third world feminists refused “to buckle under, to submit to sublimation or assimilation within hegemonic feminist praxis” (2009:340). They refused due to their loyalty to the differential mode of consciousness, which she defines as “the ability to read the current situation of power and to self-consciously choose and adopt the ideological form best suited to push against its configurations” (2009:348). Feminists of color move across boundaries that dominant ideologies construct. If I am to work with women of color in a non-oppressive way, then my approach needs to match their lives. If they are transgressing boundaries and strategically choosing to use different ideologies, then I cannot simply confine myself to one disciplinary approach. I must move as they move. I take women of color’s approach to boundaries when I attempt to transgress boundaries between disciplines, forms of knowledge, and activism and academia.

Sandoval, Chela. 1991/2009. “U.S. third world feminism: The theory and method of oppositional consciousness in the postmodern world.” Pp. 328-354 in Geographic Thought: A Praxis Perspective edited by George Henderson and Marvin Waterstone. London: Routledge.