La Frontera Gloria Anzaldúa Analysis

Whether through art or language, representations of identity ensue from processes that communicate what manners of being are considered culturally valid within a society. The expression of these expected conditions of existence depends on normative forms of social conditioning, and it is from within this fixed set of self-reproducing actions that hegemonic apparatuses possess power over people. Owing to an ideological foundation situated among various terms pioneered by Gloria Anzaldúa in her piece titled Borderlands/La Frontera, José Esteban Muñoz develops an ability to comprehend how the performance of intersubjective queerness disturbs essences of normativity, and comforts those who disidentify with mainstream perception. The following concepts

Similar to mestiza in that it originates from an experience of oppression; the term la facultad, she writes, is “anything that takes one from one 's habitual grounding, causes the depths to open up, causes a shift in perception,”... [it] “deepens the way we see concrete objects and people; the senses become so acute and piercing that we can see through things, view events in depth, a piercing that reaches the underworld (the realm of the soul)” (p.39). In other words she describes a form of resistance to social rejection based on a lack of conformity to norms, a hypersensitivity of the senses, an expansion of the subject’s ability to perceive social cues, their surroundings, and the self. La facultad is an ability to recognize threat, the result of a harrowing awareness, but also a capacity to see hidden attachments and meanings. It is owing to this understanding that Anzaldúa critiques notions of previous discourse within feminism for the lack of intersubjectivity, and is able to “disrupt the standardized protocols of gender studies and activism” by rejecting the “positioning of gender as the primary and singular node of difference within feminist theory and politics” (Muñoz, p.22). That is to say that Anzaldúa established a necessity to situate theories of social analysis among multiple interfaces of identity, and based on

The two differ in that, within this position of in-between, Anzaldúa envisions an opportunity to promote the unified acceptance of all languages and cultures, although Muñoz is more so concerned with how art is both influenced by identity and possesses the ability to alter one’s perspective of the world. According to Anzaldúa, the role of the mestiza “is to link people with each other --- the Blacks with Jews with Indians with Asians with whites with extraterrestrials. It is to transfer ideas and information from one culture to another” (85). Through this she means that an understanding of identity as being comprised of intersubjective parts allows a person to operate outside of normative ideology, or mechanisms of subjugation. For her, mestiza is both a spiritual awakening and a political act against the apparatuses that gain power by dividing members of the human species. Muñoz, on the other hand, is concerning with how performances of disidentification may unpack, or otherwise analyze into component elements, the omnipresent presentation of cultural normalcy. For him, “identity markers such as queer (from the German word quer meaning “transverse” or mestizo (Spanish for “mixed”) are terms that defy notions of uniform identity or origins“ (p.31). Based on this comprehension of identity as being