Open AccessThe Gendered Construction of Border-Crossing in Canada: Immigrant and Indigenous Women’s Life Histories in the Tracks of Gloria Anzaldúa
Author(s) -
Alia Hazineh,
Theresa Jbeili,
Kathleen Thomas-McNeill
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
the journal for undergraduate ethnography
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2369-8721
DOI - 10.15273/jue.v11i2.11039
Subject(s) - gender studies , border crossing , context (archaeology) , multiculturalism , scholarship , citizenship , agency (philosophy) , sociology , homeland , narrative , subjectivity , immigration , identity (music) , secularism , politics , power (physics) , indigenous , political science , history , aesthetics , social science , law , ecology , pedagogy , linguistics , philosophy , physics , archaeology , epistemology , quantum mechanics , biology
Our paper offers a new direction for Canadian scholarship on women and border studies by contextualizing women border- crossers within Anzaldúa’s conocimiento model. Based on the narratives of six women border-crossers in Canada, we argue that citizenship is a form of regulatory state-power where “belonging” is bureaucratically defined. For these women, belonging to a homeland is embodied in the interplay between Anzaldúa’s facultad and shadowbeast—between the agency of spirituality and the vagaries of political subjectivity. They crossed the border into Canada, and as a result, the whole of Canada became a borderzone within which they negotiated nepantla (the experience of being “in-between” culture and identity categories). We demonstrate how applying Anzaldúa’s framework to the Canadian context yields new insights into secularism, citizenships, multiculturalism, and belonging.