Resumen de “Almas afines,” “kindred spirits,” like-minded souls: an anzaldúan meditation on identities and transformation
Unlike those readers who passionately describe Anzaldúa according to such categories, as, say, Chicana lesbian, tejana queer, or feminist, I’m sometimes tempted to swing to the other extreme: to entirely reject all labels and describe her in unmarked terms—as “author,” “philosopher,” “theorist,” or “creative writer.” Yet to exclusively describe her in unmarked ways is really no better than locking her into very specific identity categories, for to do so ignores those times and texts where Anzaldúa embraces the labels and selfdefines very specifically, as Chicana and/or feminist and/or lesbian, and so on. Welcome to my dilemma. The labels generally used to describe Anzaldúa are too limited, but they are not entirely incorrect. I can neither reject nor embrace them. And so I wonder: how can I describe Anzaldúa in ways that acknowledge her groundbreaking work in identity-related fields without freezing her into these identities which she herself questioned and (at least sometimes) outgrew? This is my unresolved dilemma and what this paper is about.
