The Exploration of Queer Transformative Spaces and Community in Gloria Anzaldúa's Poetry

June is Pride Month, a time to both rejoice in and celebrate queer voices and to highlight ways in which one can explore, transform, and experience queerness and community. One of these ways is through poetry. For me, the work of Gloria Anzaldúa was the perfect place to start exploring what queerness and community look like in poetry—and may also prove useful as you rejoice and reflect on what this might look like for you.

Gloria E. Anzaldúa was a queer Chicana poet, writer, and feminist theorist who wrote ground-breaking cultural, feminist, and queer theories in her multiple books and essays, the most famous being Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987). In her last book ‘Light in the Dark’ (2015), which was put together after her death with the help of AnaLouise Keating, Anzaldúa speaks about how ‘border artists’ (artists that are in in-between spaces, cultures, sexualities, genders, races, etc., i.e., queer in all the senses of the word) inhabit transitional spaces which, in turn, create new spaces. They create “rupture” and “resistance” through their art (p.49). Anzaldúa’s work invites the unknown, the strange, the unconscious, and the queer to be investigated, celebrated, and utilized

According to Anzaldúa, taking inspiration from the Aztecs, poetry has the shamanistic power to transform the poet as well as the audience. It bridges and transforms and is a deeply revolutionary tool in order to, as seen in Núñez-Puente, “develop a perspective that takes into account the whole planet.” Anzaldúa’s poetry is “both/either”, going beyond borders, representing division and connection. This poetic queering of things is why she is capable of seeing beyond sexual and gendered binaries and patriarchal impositions. The queerness and disruption in her work is one which is a process of formation and resistance, it is unfixed, fluid, and “against the naturalization of the dominant system of sexual classification”. It sees queer people, or the queering of space and experience, as acceptance of all the “contradiction and paradox” (Anzaldúa, 2015, p.56) living in-between binary and traditional ideas of masculinity and femininity.

This questioning of the naturalization/normalization of dominant culture is utilized by Anzaldúa in her work as a backlash to heteronormative culture and the gender binary existent within society’s multiple layers of identification. In her poem ‘The New Speakers’ she writes:

“Critics label the speakers: male, female.
They assign genitals to our words
but we’re not just penises or vaginas
nor are our words easy to classify”

Her rebelling against and transforming of cisgender binary culture in this poem attests to the ability of poetry to promote self-understanding and fluidity through the use of queerness as a tool for the investigation of the status quo, both in body and speech.

Through this, I believe she asks us to do the same. She is pushing her audience to ask themselves questions. What does my identity mean to me? Why do I desire this, but not that? Who am I, and who are we? And so forth, until nothing and everything makes sense in this intertwining web of contradictions. This is a transformational, poetic, and queer process which Anzaldúa’s work prompts us to interact with. It is the way in which poetry helps us to reach self-understanding, explore sexuality, identity, and love.

In ‘The New Speakers’, Anzaldúa also points to a sense of community as part of this process of queer poetic experience, and the seeing oneself represented in others and vice versa:

“But what we want
–what we presume to want–
is to see our words engraved
on the people’s faces,
feel our words catalyze
emotions in their lives.
(…)
We don’t want to be
Stars but parts
of constellations.”

Anzaldúa reflected on how we all live amongst each other, all different identities, races, classes, sexualities “live in close proximity and intimacy with each other” (2015, p.79). This experience, wherein one is sometimes an insider and others an outsider, can be used as a tool for reconfiguring oneself as within and without the binary of identity in these classifications. She enacts a transcendence of sorts, where one is both “self and other” (p.79). This, she says, is painful as it is “reconstructing a new life,” but that this is important for self and community growth. It is a cultivation of empathy, understanding, and love.

Moreover, this queering poetic process, one of fluidity and empathy, focuses on not only the questioning of the naturalization of heterosexist culture and the imposition of gender binaries, but of binaries and individualisms in general. Anzaldúa writes:

“We are all strands of energy connected to each other in the web of existence” (2015, p.83).

The transformative power of poetry showcases the importance of human connection, and allows for feelings of deep interdependence, mirroring, and growth within queer identity and beyond. This queering of things, a creative and transformational process, allows us to explore ourselves and our connection with those around us. Thus, poetry, according to Anzaldúa, becomes a tool for cultivating intimacy with the complexities of sexuality and society.

Written by Alicia Caldentey Langley (she/they).

Bibliography

Anzaldúa, G. E. (2015). Light In The Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Núñez-Puente, C. (2018) “Queeremos a Gloria Anzaldúa: Identity, Difference, New Tribalism, and Affective Eco-Dialogues”. Camino Real 10:13. Alcalá de Henares: Instituto Franklin.

Poetry Foundation. (2023). Gloria E. Anzaldúa. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gloria-e-anzaldua.

The New Speakers: The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, ed. AnaLouise Keating, pp. 24-25. Copyright 2009, The Gloria E. Anzaldua Literary Trust and AnaLouise Keating.