announcements

1. announcements • Carpool for 4/16 Care Project meeting? • Questions on Midterm Paper prompt? • Office hours: • Today! 11 to Noon • Friday – by appointment from 11 to 1 • Mon 4/15 – 11 to Noon and by appointment Noon to 2:30 • Film screenings @ Arts Library! Check in at front desk. • W 4/17, 10am-11:30 – Maquilapolis • F 4/19, 10am-11 – We Don’t Play Golf Here • M 4/22, 10am-11:30 – Maid in America

2. mexicana challenges • “As the interface between Mexicana and Chicana, ‘meXicana’ draws attention to the historical, material, and discursive effects of contact zones and exchanges among various communities on the Mexico-U.S. border, living in the shadows of more than 150 years of conflict, interactions, and tensions. ‘meXicana’ references processes of transculturation, hybridity, and cultural exchanges – the social and economic interdependency and power relations structuring the lives of inhabitants on the borderlands” (Fregoso xiv) • Emphasis not only on how bodies move across borders but also how borders move across bodies • Who is the Chicana? • “the name Chicana, in the present, is the name of resistance that enables cultural and political points of departure and thinking through the multiple migrations and dislocations of women of ‘Mexican’ descent” (Alarcon 65)

3. Alarcon & Chicana feminism • Chicana as refusal to be named Mexican-American • Resisting US homogenization of Latin@s; calling attention to US imperialism • Challenging valorization of mestizaje by Mexican state • Recognizing disavowed indigeneity • “She is the descendant of native women who are continuously transformed into mestizas, Mexicans, émigrés to Anglo-America, Chicanas, Latinas, Hispanics – there are as many names as there are namers” (Alarcon 69) • To call oneself Chicana is to enable entry into planetary civil society not because maquiladora and Chicana are equivalent but because of recognition of how relationship to indigeneity differently determines quality of life  “Common Differences”

4. Culture as mediation Narratives of asian “american” women

5. Grasping culture • US national culture = “the collectively forged images, histories, and narratives that place, displace, and replace individuals in relation to the national polity” (Lowe 2) • “It is through culture that the subject becomes, acts, and speaks itself as ‘American.’ It is likewise through culture that individuals and collectivities struggle and remember and, in that difficult remembering, imagine and practice both subject and community differently” (Lowe 3) • Intextricable nature of cultural and material conditions

6. Culture as mediation, pt 1 • Narrative, testimony, oral history as powerful cultural forms of mediation because it enables understanding of individual subjectivity and larger social forces • “Forms of individual and collective narratives are not merely representations disconnected from ‘real’ political life; nor are these expressions of ‘transparent’ records of histories of struggle” (Lowe 156) • “’… the point is not just “to record” one’s history of struggle or consciousness, but how they are recorded; the way we read, receive, and disseminate such imaginative records is immensely significant’” (Mohanty via Lowe 157)

7. Questions to consider • According to AudreLorde, what are “the master’s tools”? What is the “master’s house”? And why can’t those tools be used to dismantle that house? • Why does Lowe insist that an attention to “difference” as evoked by AudreLorde’s speech on “Master’s Tools” is crucial for Asian immigrant and Asian “American” women? • How do the narratives, testimonies, & oral histories of Asian “American” women transform silence into language and action?