SOURCE: Fowlkes, Diane L. “Moving from Feminist Identity Politics to Coalition Politics through a Feminist Materialist Standpoint of Intersubjectivity in Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderland/La Frontera: The New Mestiza.” Hypatia 12, no. 2 (spring 1997): 105-24.

In the following essay, Fowlkes maintains that Borderlands/La Frontera “develops and presents a form of subjectivity and the needed standpoint that prepare the ground for using feminist identity politics to build feminist coalitions.”

When the Combahee River Collective proclaimed its new practice of feminist identity politics (1978), it was acting as part of a grassroots movement that would become a new wave of feminist theorizing.¹ Its Statement was included in the next collection of writings that represented the flowering of identity politics, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981, 1983).² The initiation of feminist identity politics by radical women of color involved two moves, both of which had...