En/Gendering Borders

Renato Rosaldo calls for new kinds of ethnographic writing and research, drawing on the new writing to challenge the hardened and dated Chicano warrior figures, in particular the borderland ruminations of Chicana writers, such as Sandra Cisneros.

In “Feminism on the Border,” Sonia Saldívar-Hull examines key texts written by Chicanas to examine configurations of feminism that render visible race, class, and gender. She interrogates linkages between feminism and Marxism to ask questions about the place of Chicanas in larger notions of sisterhood.

Martha Balaguera illuminates how gender and geographical transitions shape each other, blurring distinctions of shelter and homelessness, motion and boundedness, freedom and unfreedom, and undergirding her conceptual innovation of “confinement in motion.”