Gloria Anzaldúa, Mestiza Consciousness, and “Feminism of Difference”

• Main Authors: Claudia de Lima Costa, Eliana de Souza Ávila
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina 2005-01-01
• Series: Revista Estudos Feministas
• Subjects: interseccionalidade; hibridez; teoria queer; política identitária; política de alianças
• Online Access: https://periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/ref/article/view/8386

This article situates Gloria Anzaldúa’s influential “La Conciencia de la mestiza / Towards a New Consciousness” within the history of feminism, focusing on her epistemological perspective of intersectional difference to articulate a politics of coalition against the exclusion of alterity from privileged sites of modernity construction, in both space and time. Drawing on various academic sources of Anzaldúa criticism, we highlight some important ways her theory of mestiza identity actually anticipates not only critiques of the concepts of the subject, difference and modernity but also distinctions between capitalist and critical versions of cultural hybridity, all of which require sensitivity to discourses of dehistoricization, cooptation and assimilation.