Multiplicitous selves in Latina feminist phenomenology

This video lecture is part of the Identity and Selfhood course on Substack. You can find the reading list here. Links to readings and access to the full lectures as video and audio are provided to subscribers, with low-income and student learner discounts available on my homepage.

The idea of a stable, singular self doesn’t reflect the diverse lived experiences of those in marginalized groups. In fact, an influential group of Latina feminist thinkers writing in past few decades has argued that the self is multiplicitous, either for some people or for all.

Gloria Anzaldúa considers the self that lives at the borderlands and highlights what she calls a mestiza consciousness. Although her work is often embraced as a celebration of multiplicity, I show that underwriting Anzaldúa’s work is a dream of unifying the self given that multiplicity is a feature of oppression. I draw on the work of Mariana Ortega in making this argument, as Ortega seeks to affirm unity and multiplicity at once. By contrast, María Lugones advocates a radical multiplicity of the self, but not in the way we usually think of multiplicity. Lugones argues against the idea that the self is either fragmented/split or unified: instead, it is curdled.

All three of these thinkers interweave the theoretical and the personal, with Anzaldúa writing in an experimental and multilingual style, Lugones drawing on examples from feminine-coded practices such as cooking, and Ortega exploring the challenges of immigrating to a land that allows some features of yourself to come to the fore while suppressing others. As you watch the video (or listen - see audio below!), consider: