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WORLD ANTHROPOLOGICAL UNION

CONGRESS 2024​

Paper

Unclassified Feminist Lloronas: Noes on the Hierarchies of Anger and Dispassion in the Decolonized Academic Text

presenters

    Prof Smadar Lavie

    Nationality: USA

    Residence: USA

    University of California at Davis

    Presence:Online

Employing Anzaldua’s autohistoria-teoria methodological framework presents subaltern theorization and autoethnography as testimony. The U.S.-U.K. formula requires substantiating an anthropological argument’s authenticity by deploying snippets as ethnographic examples. Anzaldua, however, refuses to reappropriate “informant” vignettes as she generalizes her model for experiential knowledge -- Conocimiento. Nevertheless, subaltern women scholars from the Global South, are not part of the North American “woman of color” classification of Latinas, African-Americans, and Asians, are expected to use the U.S.-U.K. formula of dispassionate scholarship. After years of struggle, North American women of color finally have the privilege of being angry or emotional in their academic publications. But the underlying assumption for the unclassified woman scholar from the Global South is that she comes from her country’s cosmopolitan elite and thus is required to deploy the detached Northern social science language. This paper is written in the hopes that the unclassified Anzalduan scholar from the Global South stops being boxed as elite and therefore may employ the emotive auto-ethnography of bearing witness. The agency immanent in queer borderzone activism is the foundation for the Anzalduan self in community, and ought to travel to the Middle East, and their sadness and anger come into power through the voices in ethnographies produced in the global south.

Keywords:

Autoethnography; Feminist of Color Theory; Gloria Anzaldua; Palestine/Israel; World Anthropologies