“Entre dos cuerpos de agua” . La poesía decolonial de Gloria Anzaldúa y Natalie Díaz

Abstract

This contribution offers a parallel reading of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera (1987) and Natalie Díaz’ Postcolonial Love Poem (2020), putting their work in a dialogue with the decolonialist María Lugones and the philosopher Hélène Cixous. With her demand for an ‘écriture féminine’ Cixous questioned the separation of body and mind and its implications for the performance of gender. With their specific decolonial ‘écriture féminine’, as well as their queer and indigenous writings, Anzaldúa and Díaz go even further and establish an intersectional understanding of the human being as a body of water between two bodies of water, as Anzaldúa translates her concept of Nepantla. All three authors are interested not in a state of but in a process of being, not in immobile dogmata but in concepts of fluidity. This article therefore argues that a consequent feminism would always have to be decolonial, and real decolonialism would always already be antipatriarchal.