ABSTRACT
Feminist theorizations of difference have invoked Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza with its foregrounding of the figures of the border and the mestiza, as demonstrating the possibility of a radically new, utopie hybridization. In Borderlands, the border is emblematic of this duality. Borderlands argues for the political radicalness of hybridization and intermixture and, by corollary, for the political conservatism of separatism and classificatory demarcation. The slash of the border is the very site at which the taxonomic closure it effects is also indefinitely deferred. Borderlands fixes the border as only the site of indistinguishability and not also of distinction, of confluence and not also of divergence. In agreement with Bhabha’s argument that ‘the production of hybridization’, far from initiating an escape from, is ‘the effect of colonial power’, the author's reading of the mestiza represents her not as transcending but as figuring that fundamental irresolution of the legislative border which, as Borderlands demonstrates, structures colonialism.
