ABSTRACT
Lesbian feminist theorizations of difference have invoked Gloria Anzaldúa's Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestizo, with its foregrounding of the mestizo, as demonstrating the possibility of a radically new, utopic hybridization. In Borderlands, the border is emblematic of this duality. The slash of the border is the very site at which the taxonomic closure it effects is also indefinitely deferred. Anzaldúa's discussion of the border is centered primarily, but not solely, on the American/Mexican border: The actual physical borderland that I'm dealing with in this book is the Texas-US Southwest/Mexican border. The classic geometric representation of the border is the line, a representation which is certainly typographically prominent in Borderlands. The border's horizontal bar simultaneously denotes, through its function as an axis of symmetry, sameness and, given that onehalf of each tide is not substituted for but supplements the other in a recognition of the inherent asymmetry of translation, difference.
