Bodily encounters: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera

Abstract

Gloria Anzaldúa’s polymorphous text suggests a controversial and contradictory locus of bodily encounters, as the above quotes exemplify: on the one hand, it is, for her, a place which is necessarily defined by the metaphor of the crossroads as a positive and regenerating site that demolishes frontiers and, on the other hand, it is conceived as a painful and treacherous place, a "thin edge of barbwire" (35). This locus of bodily encounters, like Anzaldúa’s text itself, is also clearly a gendered space: as she puts it, it is her home, the politicized place she speaks from—the place of the Chicana, the new mestiza.