SOURCE: Alarcón, Norma. “Anzaldúa's Frontera: Inscribing Gynetics.” In Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader, edited by Gabriela F. Arredondo, Aída Hurtado, Norma Klahn, Olga Nájera-Ramírez, and Patricia Zavella, pp. 354-69. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003.

In the following essay, Alarcón analyzes the role of Anzaldúa's theory of mestiza consciousness in her attempt to repossess the borderlands in Borderlands/La Frontera.

The Inscription of the Subject

In our time the very categorical and/or conceptual frameworks through which we explicitly or implicitly perceive our sociopolitical realities and our own subjective (private) contextual insertion are very much in question. There is a desire to construct our own (women of color) epistemologies and ontologies and to obtain the interpretive agency with which to make claims to our own critical theory. Theoretically infused writing practices, such as those found in anthologies like This Bridge Called...