E-REA (Dec 2014)

The Wound as Bridge: The Path of Conocimiento in Gloria Anzaldúa's Work

  • Mirella VALLONE

DOI
https://doi.org/10.4000/erea.4135
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 12, no. 1

Abstract

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This article examines the role that pain and vulnerability played in shaping Gloria Anzaldúa’s poetics. Her approach to wounding and pain and her proposals for healing and transformation are discussed at various stages of her career considered as different stages along the path of conocimiento. The latter is an epistemology she developed in the post-Borderlands years, by which she meant a form of spiritual inquiry /activism reached via creative acts.What emerges from this analysis is a vision in which the personal and the social are closely connected and in which various traditions (the Aztec and the Catholic) converge and mix to provide a conception of pain not as privatizing, meaningless, and world-destroying, but as significant and transformative. Even in the last part of her career, when the feeling of personal and social vulnerability became stronger due to her diabetes and to the 9/11 attacks, she invited readers to overcome the temptation to victimhood and to use pain as a conduit to recognizing another’s suffering, opening the possibility of an ethical encounter.

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