Mariana Ortega is Associate Professor of Philosophy, Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Latina/o Studies at Pennsylvania State University. She is the author of
To Be a Mouth: Anzaldúan Carnalities
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Published:December 2024
Chapter 2 presents an analysis of the various stages of Gloria Anzaldúa's conocimiento and reads conocimiento as mouthly and as affective mapping, a self's affective attunement to perceptual bodily activity as well as intuitions, images, and spiritual experiences. Understood in terms of affective mapping, conocimiento is connected to a carnal aesthetics that is multisensory and multimodal. Carnalities, the operations of such a carnal aesthetics, are defined as creative practices informed by the perception-affect nexus and the entwinement between the self and the earth and spirit worlds and the various beings they encompass. Carnal aesthetics is vital for marginalized selves, as it opens possibilities for being attentive to one's inner life and to affective attunement within different circumstances and contexts, as well as for self-naming and self-transformation in movements of the otherwise, in practices that destabilize the colonial eye.
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