Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions Ester R. Shapiro (bio) Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions by Maria Lugones. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2003, 249 pp., $75.00 hardcover, $27.95 paper. In this profound, provocative, and richly rewarding collection of previously published and new essays, feminist philosopher and popular educator Maria Lugones shares themes emerging from decades of hard-won learning within collaborative emancipatory practice. A volume in the series Feminist Constructions, dedicated to accessible new work in feminist ethics, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes uses "theoretico-practical" reflection within experiential social learning to dissolve false dichotomies between theory and practice, offering a remarkably compelling textual version of the transformative classroom. Recognizing text's possibilities and limitations in facilitating social learning from shifting locations, Lugones weaves together innovative textual strategies to demonstrate how political coalitions challenge cherished notions of individualism, privacy and difference, illuminate human complexity and permeability, and construct connections defying barriers to collective movements. Her feminist philosophical analysis emerges from deliberative use of poetics, vivid personal testimonials, and witnessings in varied practice settings, and from collaboration with textile artist Mildred Beltre, illustrating and inspiring the rigorous, destabilizing self-questioning that makes trustworthy coalitions possible. Lugones meticulously exposes the logic of social stories and epistemic positions emerging from shifting locations of power, provoking readers into multiple engagements with lived experience and the consequences of multiple sites of oppression while articulating constructive, collaborative stances. As a result, Lugones offers a unique interdisciplinary resource bridging epistemology and strategies of intersubjective practice with analysis of practice-based methods promoting solidarities for social change. Lugones's substantive introduction presents unifying methods and themes as she re-visioned chapters outside their original political/pedagogical projects and re-positioned them as organically interwoven, beginning with her ethical and methodological starting point, "I won't think what I won't practice" (5). She instructs readers on how we can best join her liminal, transformative pilgrimage: "I invite you to read the text praxically, in the spirit of disruption, taking up the nonscripted possibilities in the cracks in domination. . . . Under the weight of oppression, with little room to maneuver, I attempt to intervene in the conceptual traps that constitute us as oppressed" (30). Lugones communicates through various channels, including dazzling displays of spanglish, initiating new choreographies of self-in-relation-and-reflection. Lugones candidly articulates her methods [End Page 233] for learning from difference through "playfulness, world-traveling, and loving perception" (the title of Chapter 4, among her most influential essays), engaging diverse readers through textual constructions designed to defeat barriers to mutual understanding and collaboration. Speaking from within her own multiple realities as Latina, lesbian, immigrant, teacher, and activist, Lugones urges us to reflect from within the messy realities of emancipatory social practice on our own participation in conspiracies of privilege. Her earnest playfulness exposes methods of incomprehension or defensive refusals used to protect ethnocentrist-racist subjectivities, inviting us to look her in the eye and consider what we see of our own reflection. "On the Logic of Pluralist Feminism" demonstrates how identifying the "problem" of difference without making plurality central in feminist thought operates as a technology of fragmentation perpetuating oppression. The essay "Hard-to-Handle Anger" draws a useful distinction between reactive, first-order anger of subordination and forward-looking, politicizing second-order anger capable of transforming oppression by transmuting fear into power. Lugones also explores anger between oppressed peers, distinguishing constructive anger from anger masking grief at encountering racism's violent distortions. "Purity, Impurity and Separation" uses the action/memory of making mayonnaise to explore distinctions between "curdling" separations erasing multiplicity, in contrast to "interweaving" which defeats the cutting edges of fragmentation. Lugones concludes with three delightfully provocative chapters designed to expand communities and social spaces embracing multiplicity by speaking with loving pride to the multi-cultural mestizos, the streetwalkers/callejeras, and the cachapera/tortillera (lesbians) among us. Lugones compassionately explores distinctive dilemmas of exposure for men of color and for Latina lesbians, encouraging readers to reject the internalized fragmentation of the colonizing gaze with its policing of the proper boundaries of community and to occupy public spaces in novel ways, enlarging our capacity for inclusive participation. Lugones's...