What's with me and third world lesbian feminists?

I started doing work this week with Nohemy around three anthologies: Making Face, Making Soul, Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists of Color edited by Gloria Anzaldúa; This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color edited by Cherríe Morgana and Gloria Anzaldúa and; This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation edited by Gloria Anzaldúa and Analouise Keating.

This is not the first time I've done work in This Bridge; for some reason, this particular work keeps popping up in a lot of the theory work I do. I think I'm attracted to its content particularly because it's a comfortable, familiar text. It speaks some of the silences of my various closeted identities, as a person of color, as a multiracial/multiethnic American, as queer (in the definition that invites problemitization).

Renée Martínez grounds her identity as the central battleground for peace in her essay "Del puente al arco iris: transformando de guerrera a mujer de la paz–from bridge to rainbow: transforming from warrior to woman of peace," which appears in This Bridge We Call home. Writing nearly 20 years after the publication of the original Bridge, Martínez notes her appreciation for the text not as a guide, but as a companion. This familiarity, this affinity has always been my particular experience with Bridge, but I couldn't express as well as Martínez. I want to be able to do the same project as the brave companieras whose words trickle over me like water: I want to write my soul/write for change.

Identities are difficult. Often, we are made to choose some over others - the choice requires negotiating closet doors and silences, hiding and confronting, constructing a "me" location that appears to be coherent and may well endear itself to its audience. I make a specific choice in this regard every day. The questions that inform my choice are many and difficult: is it safe for me to be queer? will denying the authenticity of my whiteness compromise my credibility? will identifying myself as a feminist among men put up defensive barriers? It seems at time like the only times I am everything I am all at once are the times when I'm alone, or the times when I'm dreaming. I'm asking a question: what does the politics and activism look like for a queer man of color? Are they feminist? Do they embrace disability rights? Are they socialist?

The location of these fractured identities is one, whole body. Therefore, I'm suggesting that an arena, a battlefield, a playground for the interplay of these identities is in my skin, beneath it. In this way, I am the politics of a queer man of color. The distinctions made regarding my identities, while painful, do not break me in half. My tendency to be self-destructive when things get intimidatingly complicated, to have questionable sexual experiences, to drink, downing out the immediacy of my problems, create the only tangible scars. Through it all, I am intact, and I occupy a space, a bridge perhaps, that is neither here nor there, between yet never in.

Martínez offers the imagery of the arco iris–rainbow to explain how her struggle to sort through her identities lead her from warrior to peacemaker. Her project is a radical care of the self: a bridge, trodden upon, immobile, takes the abuse of time and circumstance; the arco iris is illusive yet inspiring - its feet straddle a great distance. The work that must take place between warrior and peacemaker is the work of reflection that takes place in the arena of self care. Divisions are real in the world we occupy, but there is great power in realizing that these divisions do not cause us to come undone. The very fact that we wake up every morning, more or less intact, contained in one skin, is proof positive that we are not captives of division. Foucault would lead me to believe that we are only captives of our identities if we consent to our own captivity...


My next work will be an investigation of activism, fighting, and peace. Is it impossible to fight for peace, or is the battle, as Martínez suggests, a battle for a claim to a whole self. These questions and more to follow.