The Gendered Construction of Border-Crossing in Canada: Immigrant and Indigenous Women‘s Life Histories in the Tracks of Gloria Anzalduéa

Authors

  • Alia Hazineh
  • Theresa Jbeili
  • Kathleen Thomas-McNeill

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.15273/jue.v11i2.11039

Keywords:

conocimiento, nepantla, borderzone, border-crosser, immigration, citizenship, colonialism, secularism, multiculturalism

Abstract

Our paper offers a new direction for Canadian scholarship on women and border studies by contextualizing women border- crossers within Anzalduéa‘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 Anzalduéa‘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 Anzalduéa‘s framework to the Canadian context yields new insights into secularism, citizenships, multiculturalism, and belonging.

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Published

2021-07-27

Issue

Vol. 11 No. 2 (2021)

Section

Articles

License

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