Anzaldúan Autohisteoría

Abstract

I propose an analytical approach to making queer Chicana home in the interstices of Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s fiction, story, theory, and autohistoria. Grounded in women of color feminisms, the first half of this essay explores the textual spaces between literary and theoretical creation through a mapping of Anzaldúa’s autohistoria-teoría, or autohisteoría, a theorizing third space defined by its challenge to rigid categorizations of scholarly and creative or literary production. In the second half of this essay I offer an engagement of autohisteoría in two works by Anzaldúa. By placing her concept of autohisteoría in conversation with her short stories “Swallowing Firefl ies” and “La historia de una marimacho,” I argue that Anzaldúa’s work at the intersections of story and theory offers a powerful mode of centering queer Chicana desire through the critical lenses of actualizing gaze, dialogic exchange, and rewriting impossibilities. Anzaldúa’s notion of autohisteoría, positioned within a borderlands space of creative production, has the potential to create more inclusive modes of intellectual production and reception for writers and readers of color and queer communities who have struggled to find spaces of affirmation and recognition, in academia and beyond.