Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2019

Publication Title

Disability and the Global South

Volume

6

Issue

1

Pages

1562-1580

Publisher Name

The Critical Institute

Abstract

Gloria Anzaldúa’s writing has been read as decolonial based on her resistance to dominant national, racial, and cultural formations. This essay turns to unpublished documents from the Gloria Anzaldúa archive that are decolonial at a more fundamental level. In autobiographical writings about her own experiences with disability, as well as doodles and figure drawings, the alternate forms of human life that Anzaldúa depicts defy the logics of identification and differentiation that underlie colonial hierarchies. Refusing to fix bodies with labels, Anzaldúa accepted mystical encounters and inter-species minglings without judgment. She experienced her own disabling conditions (including a severe hormone imbalance and Type 1 diabetes) in the epistemological fold between medical diagnoses (which enforce the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being) and trans-corporeal perceptions that defy empirical analysis. I analyze the ways in which these more capacious ways of being resonate with recent developments in posthumanist theory and disability ethics.

Comments

Author Posting © The Author, 2019. This article is posted here by permission of the The Author for personal use, not for redistribution. The article was published in Disability and the Global South, Volume 6, Issue 1, 2019, https://dgsjournal.org/vol-6-no-1/

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

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