The Unassimilated Theorist

Abstract

Gloria Anzaldúa's work invites us to reach beyond the usual conventions of academic writing to make visible the relations between self and world, feeling and thinking, personal experience and theory. As a philosopher, I read her for her insights about and analyses of multiple oppression, mixed identities, and alternative epistemologies. But as another Latina trying to write theory, I read her as one dying for thirst chokes on the first gulp of water. Her fearless accounts of violence in the Chicano/a community, her unapologetic disclosures of her spiritual faith, and her belief in the theoretical value of the personal voice emboldened me to reveal parts of myself in my writing that had felt incongruous in the professional discourses of the academy, even in the supposedly anticonventional circles of feminist theory.