Content area
Full text
This article identifies feminist third-space (both/and) consciousness in academic and nonacademic contexts. Although dissimilar, both academic discourses and zines (self-published magazines) are comprised of complex rhetorical performances with implications for feminist practices of representation and the re-production of meaning. This article first identifies academic third-space sites resulting from the crossing of disciplinary borders followed by an analysis of activist zines as examples of nonacademic third space, with particular emphasis on representations of bodies and sexualities. Zines reveal the (1) transformative potentials beyond gender binaries; (2) re-visioning of histories; (3) practices of reversa (critical reversals of the normative gaze); (4) deployment of (e)motion as embodied resistance; and (5) emergence of a coalitional consciousness and practices of articulation that have the potential to create and mobilize communities for social justice based on egalitarian social relationships.
Keywords: (b)orderlands' rhetorics * coalitional consciousness * decolonial imaginary * politics of articulation * third space * reverso * zines
The work of mestiza consciousness is to break down the subject-object duality that keeps her a prisoner and to show in the flesh and through the images in her work how duality is transcended.
-Gloria Anzaldua, Boideilands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987, 102)
In the quotation above, Gloria Anzaldúa references a mestiza consciousness as that which refuses fixed dichotomous structures and their implications for matters of (self) representation. Theories of mestizaje provide insight into the complexities of those of us whose borderlands' identities and lived experiences render visible the reductions of binary (mis)representations. Having grown up on the Mexico/U.S. border, my own understanding of the concept of borderlands is embodied, intuitive, psychic, and learned. It is also steeped in my geographic origins. In this paper, I move beyond geographic borderlands, while still retaining the notion of both/and consciousness that Anzaldua theorizes. I begin with her definition of a borderland as a "vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary ... in a constant state of transition" (25), and then move into the broader arena I identify as "third space." I make this move to pursue and make meaning in coalition with others whose geographic location is not the border; that is, as an act of coalitional consciousness.
I have borrowed the term "third space" from Chela...