The Uses of Phenomenology for Latinx Feminisms: Developing a Phenomenological Approach Informed by Rupture

Abstract

Given the various shortcomings of classical phenomenological methods identified by critical and liberatory theorists, this paper considers what phenomenology has to offer theorists of multiply marginalized experience. The paper begins with an account of the major reasons for which Latinx feminists such as Linda Martín Alcoff, Jacqueline Martinez, and Mariana Ortega have found a phenomenological approach useful in their projects. This account reveals that though Latinx feminist phenomenologists have found useful resources for theorizing multiply marginalized theory and identity in the classical texts of phenomenology, experiences unique to those subjected to marginalization remain significantly underdeveloped or absent from classical accounts. Taking seriously the primacy of lived experiences of ‘rupture’, this paper argues, is therefore necessary in the development of a phenomenological approach that does justice to life in the borderlands and the lived experience of being-between-worlds. Informed by the work of Latinx feminist theorists such as Gloria Anzaldúa and María Lugones, this paper closes with a proposed critical feminist phenomenological approach that centers the moment of ‘rupture’ described in such work. Ultimately, this paper argues that the communication and documentation of these ruptures in the form of phenomenological description allows for the examination and interrogation of sedimented logics of oppression on the way to liberatory ends.

1. Introduction

One of the key questions regarding contemporary phenomenology is that of understanding the presence and influence of phenomenology across a wide variety of disciplines and inter-disciplines in spite of the serious and abundant allegations of phenomenology as essentialist, essentializing, masculinist, too grounded in experience for legitimate historical or discursive critique, neglectful of socio-political realities like marginalized/minoritized experience, or otherwise incompatible with liberatory aims. In considering this question, I propose a shift away from justifications of how contemporary work in feminist and critical phenomenology is ‘real’ phenomenology, from explaining and proving that this work is good enough for the subfield to asking, what, specifically, phenomenology has to offer theorists of multiply marginalized lived experience1.

In this paper, I offer a reading of Latinx feminist phenomenologies both in an attempt to answer this question and to provide a foundation for a phenomenological approach, informed by this work, that does justice to multiply marginalized experience. To begin, I explore the work of Latinx feminist theorists who have explicitly situated their work within or alongside the phenomenological tradition2. I then turn to the development of a constructive account of a critical feminist phenomenological approach that is informed by a more expansive understanding of Latinx feminist phenomenology. In developing my approach, I take as my starting point the necessity of considering the way in which multiply marginalized subjects navigate unfamiliar cultural contexts and engagements with constant ruptures in meaning; it is the theorization of these ruptures, I argue, that determines the contours of the appropriate phenomenological approach3.

2. Phenomenology in Latinx Feminisms

Chicanx and Latinx phenomenological texts have been neglected, and some altogether overlooked, in the broad contemporary phenomenological literature as well as in more recent critical phenomenological work. This is in spite of the fact that these texts anticipate many of the features central to what has recently been characterized as the “critical turn in phenomenology”4. Even prior to this “critical turn”, however, Latinx feminist phenomenologists have reflected on the difficulty of navigating the space between worlds that their work occupies. In their monograph texts, both Jacqueline Martinez and Mariana Ortega, for example, write that they have felt the weight of negotiating disciplinary borderlands, where boundaries are “diligently patrolled”, and affiliations “strongly felt” [3] (p. 4), balancing the academy’s demand for theoretical rigor by way of abstraction and “universality” with the priority of retaining some degree of accessibility and import to audiences and communities whose conditions of oppression are so central to the theorists’ own values and identities.

However, as Martinez makes clear in “Racisms, Heterosexisms, and Identities: A Semiotic Phenomenology of Self-Understanding”, the fact of academic training in phenomenology as elements of these theorists’ lived situation that inform their reflections on identity and selfhood is not merely incidental to such projects:

It is not an accident that my scholarly training in semiotics and phenomenology leads me to foreground [phenomenology]. The phenomenological point in particular requires that the researcher interrogate the terms and conditions of her entry into the research as part of methodological rigor. [My use of phenomenology] in my own work [is] where the emphasis on interrogating the genesis of one’s critical perspectives concerning racial/ethnic and sexual identities as they are connected to the particularities of one’s experience and sensibilities as a human being emerges. [5] (p. 111)

What these descriptions bring to light are particular features of phenomenological methodology that allow Latinx theorists the opportunity to take up the rhetoric of academic philosophy and that provide a space in academic philosophy to write from within resistance as well as about it [6] (p. 30). As Ortega writes in the closing remarks of the final chapter of In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self, “I take what is given to me and make it my own … with words, with ink, with my lived experience. I offer you these words, these thoughts. I carve out a space for me in this philosophy that was never meant to be a home for me—this is one of my hometactics” [3] (p. 210).

These considerations, taken together with the exploration of the following Latinx feminist phenomenological accounts, lead me to identify three major reasons for which phenomenological tools, frameworks, and/or concepts are taken up by Latinx feminist theorists: (1) phenomenological concepts are useful for theorizing multiply marginalized experience, allowing for the possibility of “bridging the gap” between theory and practice; (2) phenomenological descriptions can do justice to the lived aspects of marginalized and minoritized lived experience, for example, racial embodiment, such that they can articulate and accommodate the heterogeneity and interrelation of intermeshed [7] (p. 4) (inter)subjectivities; and (3) as a result, phenomenological methods allow for the interrogation and thus potential transformation of the normative logics that serve to perpetuate conditions of oppression in multifarious and insidious ways. Below, I draw on the work of Latinx feminist theorists Linda Martín Alcoff, Jacqueline Martinez, and Mariana Ortega, who have all referred to, or identified, their own work as phenomenology.

The Phenomenologies of Alcoff, Martinez, and Ortega

From the outset of the 1999 article, “Towards a Phenomenology of Racial Embodiment” [8]5, Alcoff’s understanding of the use of phenomenology for theorizing race is made clear; she begins the piece by stating her rejection of the “contemporary scepticism toward race as a natural kind”, racial nominalism, which is the position that “[r]ace is not real, principally because recent science has invalidated race as a salient or even meaningful biological category”, on what she qualifies as phenomenological grounds [8] (p. 15). Thus, the “preliminary phenomenological account of racial identity” that she provides in this text is articulated as a response to a broader discussion on the metaphysics of race taking place within the discipline.

Alcoff utilizes phenomenological descriptions of lived experiences of racialization in outlining the ways in which racism is manifest at the level of perception itself, while also invoking phenomenological concepts such as “epidermal schema”, “being-in-the-world”, “being-with-others”, “being-for-others” and, perhaps to the greatest degree, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s account of perception and sedimented knowledges in theorizing racial identity. In these ways, Alcoff’s approach both makes apparent the ways in which phenomenological description can productively contribute to a theory of racial identity, as well as some ways in which phenomenological concepts can be taken up in critical philosophies of race. In addition to Merleau-Ponty, Alcoff engages Frantz Fanon, Lewis Gordon, and Gail Weiss in elaborating her account of racialized embodiment. As examples of “first-person memoirs and rich descriptions of racial experience that might be tapped for theoretical analysis” [8] (p. 18), Alcoff offers a handful of phenomenological descriptions of racialized embodiment, which features white American Beat novelist Jack Kerouac’s journal, an autobiographical “confession” in Mexican–American journalist and essayist Richard Rodriguez’s Days of Obligation, the recounted experiences of a male Asian American colleague in the classroom, and personal reflections on a past romantic relationship of her own. Alcoff writes in the 2006 version of the text that “[s]uch subjective descriptions […] show how one’s designated race is a constitutive element of fundamental, everyday embodied existence, psychic life, and social interaction” [9] (pp. 182–183).

In addition, Alcoff finds that the insights garnered by these phenomenological descriptions are particularly valuable insofar as they provide tools for interrogating conditions in which discriminations carried out at the level of perception are made manifest and perpetuated in everyday engagements. These interrogations, in turn, allow for the possibility of transforming racializing processes [9] (p. 194). The facts of racism as manifest at the level of perception, and of perception as sedimented contextual knowledges (per Merleau-Ponty), mean that phenomenological accounts serve an important purpose in theorizing racial identity, processes of racialization, and the possibilities for transforming those processes.

Just as Alcoff’s phenomenology of racial embodiment showcases arguments regarding the necessity of phenomenological description for understanding and transforming conditions of oppression that pre-date what has been called “the critical turn in phenomenology”, so too does Martinez’s 2000 monograph, Phenomenology of Chicana Experience and Identity6, published in the following year. For Martinez, the phenomenological method itself is key in distilling the kinds of description and analysis of lived experience that allow for the interrogation of the normative logics and oppressive conditions by which racialized experience is made both possible and actual.

Martinez immediately makes clear that her use of phenomenological methodology in the project is motivated by her desire to address and bridge what she identifies as a gap between the theoretical and the praxical, between “the words spoken or written and the fact of lived experience”, which she notes is a troubling feature of many academic discursive spaces with alleged commitments to liberatory and transformative goals. Her text therefore makes use of phenomenological methodology in an attempt to bridge this gap and to offer a means by which manners and styles of being of those who struggle against oppression, namely racial, sexual, and class oppressions, can be reflected on and interrogated [11] (p. 6).

The key, here, lies in the way that Martinez herself interprets and performs the phenomenological method—in this case, one which happens to be closely aligned with Husserlian phenomenological procedures and commitments. For Martinez, phenomenology constitutes both a theoretical perspective and an applied research procedure, serving as fertile ground for the development of methods of discourse and practice concerned precisely with issues of oppression and liberation. Martinez’s understanding of phenomenology as a theoretical perspective is that it is one which concerns itself with the nature of human existence, prioritizing the study of lived experience and life world. As a research procedure, Martinez’s phenomenology prescribes a methodology through which it is possible to examine the terms by which particular possibilities of human existence are made manifest in the concrete in an attempt “to articulate the essential existential structures of what is present in the immediate lived experience of the person” [11] (p. x), as well as the inherent sociality of the existential world, of which the essential existential structures are always already a part [11] (p. xi).

For Martinez, however, implementation of a phenomenological methodology in investigating issues of injustice remains only part of the picture. In order for phenomenology to serve as a valuable tool in transforming oppression and discrimination, it must be fundamentally critical and interpretive in its descriptions of lived experience [11] (p. xi). Moreover, phenomenological methodology must always be accompanied by a situating of the theorist herself in order for its liberatory potential to be realized. For this reason, another feature of the phenomenological method that Martinez highlights is crucial for its deployment in liberatory projects is its reiterative nature, which she refers to as the “open-ended”ness of phenomenological methodology. As a result of this reiterative nature, the researcher herself becomes more accountable to the claims she makes with relation to the lived situation from which she is theorizing [11] (p. xii). This feature echoes Merleau-Ponty’s multiple references to the idea, inspired by comments from Husserl, of the philosopher as “a perpetual beginner” and philosophy as “an ever-renewed experiment of its own beginning” that entails “learning to see the world anew”, “indefinitely doubled” by the necessity of directing “toward itself the very same interrogation that it directs toward all forms of knowledge”, and thus something of “an infinite dialogue or meditation” [12] (p. lxxxv). Thus, a crucial aspect of the phenomenological approach Martinez adopts in her text is that, despite its roots in a Husserlian orientation, the terms of the description that it provides are continually placed under scrutiny [11] (pp. 95–96).

With some qualifications, Martinez, like Alcoff, finds phenomenological concepts and methods to be especially useful for theorizing (multiply) marginalized experience. As discussed above, phenomenology qua research procedure, in Martinez’s reading, makes possible an examination of the terms by which particular possibilities of human existence are made manifest in the concrete in an attempt “to articulate the essential existential structures of what is present in the immediate lived experience of the person” [11] (p. x), as well as the inherent sociality of the existential world, of which the essential existential structures are always already a part [11] (p. xi). Moreover, phenomenology qua theoretical perspective is one which concerns itself with the nature of human existence, prioritizing the study of lived experience and life world. This allows Martinez to begin her phenomenological investigation into Chicana experience and identity with an account of her own first-person, lived experiences in the development of what she calls coming to speak as a Chicana lesbian, and for the possibility of the project as one which constitutes the ’spinning and weaving’ of semiotic existential phenomenology and Martinez’s own life experience as a Chicana, which she supplements with and situates within a greater body of Chicanx, especially lesbian, literature. For these reasons, Martinez finds that an investigation oriented by the phenomenological method serves as a prime theoretical and praxical space for the identification, interrogation, and transformation of conditions of oppression, namely, in the prioritizing of examinations of lived bodies and experience, and in the consequent prescription of a critical methodology that makes explicit the ways in which processes of discrimination and marginalization developed in the preconscious are made manifest and perpetuated in lived engagements.

In her 2016 monograph text, In-Between, Ortega is primarily concerned with the construction of a phenomenological account of selfhood and identity that does justice to the lived experiences of those who are marginalized and minoritized by dominant logics, particularly, those experiences articulated by Latinas in the United States. Ortega’s project takes note of significant “criss-crossings” between existential phenomenology, Latina feminism, and philosophies of race that allow her to construct what she calls a mestiza7 theory of multiplicitous selfhood. In addition to tracking these criss-crossings, in this work, Ortega offers original phenomenological description in theorizing the multiplicitous self’s existential characteristics of being-between-worlds, being-in-worlds, and becoming-with, the existential pluralism that makes possible her account of the multiplicitous self on the basis of these existential characteristics, as well as the practices of critical world traveling and hometactics. Ortega also offers a set of six loosely defining characteristics of Latina feminist phenomenology, which allows her to read the works of theorists like Gloria Anzaldúa and María Lugones as part of a tradition of liberatory phenomenological projects.

From the outset, Ortega clarifies that her taking-up of Heideggerian phenomenology in her project to develop an account of multiplicitous selfhood constitutes not “an endorsement of his political or personal views” but, instead “an engagement with valuable phenomenological insights from his description of the self as Dasein” [3] (p. 5). And while part of her goal is indeed to “shatter Heidegger’s account of Dasein” [3] (p. 5), the existential impact of Heidegger’s account of being is particularly moving for Ortega. It thus serves as one of the major features that allows her to bring European classical phenomenology into conversation with Latinx feminist work.

Ortega writes that the most important similarity between Latina feminist phenomenological accounts of the self and existential phenomenological accounts is “the commitment to provide an account of selfhood that does justice to lived experience” [3] (p. 6). I read this in line with Martinez’s claim that the prioritization of lived experience in phenomenological analysis is precisely what allows for a bridging of the gap between the theoretical and practical, or the spoken and the lived, which Ortega does identify in “‘New Mestizas’, ‘“World”-Travelers’, and ‘Dasein’: Phenomenology and the Multi-Voiced, Multi-Cultural Self”, writing that “[t]he aim of so-called phenomenological theories is to close the gap, or at least to attempt to close the gap, between theory and practice, between how we think of the world and how we live it” [13] (p. 3).

In addition, it is by providing these accounts of lived experience that the articulation of resistant practices, as well as the interrogation and transformation of conditions of oppression and marginalization, are made possible. Ortega writes,

In their attempt to make their voices known, women of color have appealed to their experiences and have offered powerful narratives and intersectional analyses of their condition and of their struggle to survive as well as to resist in world that have not been welcoming. […] Their appeal to experience is, in my view, a disclosure, a making visible, audible, a making perceptible, those beings in marginalized and non-dominant positions whose histories have been previously erased, ignored, or covered up. [3] (p. 7)

Interestingly, it is precisely the lived experiences of selves such as Anzaldúa’s new mestiza which Ortega argues thoroughly problematize traditional phenomenological accounts of selfhood and identity [3] (p. 26). Heidegger’s Dasein, which Ortega argues possesses existential characteristics that are compatible with and complementary to certain aspects of the accounts that Latina feminist theorists posit, ultimately fails to fully capture the lived experience of marginalized selves.

With these texts considered, it is clear to see the overlap in the work of Latinx and Chicanx feminist phenomenologists who have explicitly situated themselves as phenomenologists regarding their considerations of the usefulness of phenomenology for theorizing multiply marginalized experience. All three theorists have found use for phenomenological concepts in their accounts, especially in “bridging the gap” between theory and practice. These theorists all provide arguments for the ways in which phenomenological descriptions can do justice to the lived aspects of marginalized and minoritized lived experience. They each also highlight that, as a result, phenomenological methods make possible the interrogation and transformation of oppressive normative logics. Moreover, all of the major monograph texts surveyed here were published prior to what has been recently identified as the “critical turn in phenomenology”, and each of them, in one or another aspect, has offered arguments, concepts, or revisions in phenomenology that have come to be associated with or understood to characterize the critical phenomenology literature of the last few years. In the following section, I develop a critical feminist phenomenological approach grounded in the work of multiply marginalized phenomenologists—specifically, the phenomenological work that falls under the expansive understanding of “Latina feminist phenomenology” outlined in Ortega’s In-Between—and which begins with the lived experience of what I refer to as “rupture”.

3. Rupture and Phenomenology

In order to develop a critical feminist phenomenological approach that does justice to the lived experience of multiply marginalized subjects, I wish to identify the particular lived experiences that motivate Latinx theorizing and how these experiences serve to constitute the nature of such theorizing. In thinking through the development of this approach, I am guided by the question posed by Bonnie Mann in “The Difference of Feminist Phenomenology: The Case of Shame”: “What commands [the feminist phenomenologist’s] attention? What animates her curiosity? […] What is the relation between the matter of concern and the philosophy, such that the practice develops this way or that?” [14] (pp. 50–51).

In the remainder of this paper, I find an answer to this question in the moment of rupture, what I theorize as an ambivalent experience of being-between-worlds, characterized by (1) a breakdown of equipment occasioned by incommensurate norms and (2) an intimate awareness of disorientation, uncanniness, and/or not-being-at-ease that often leads to a kind of petrification, as well as the cultivation of the perceptual capacity of la facultad. The experience of rupture, by virtue of these characteristics, may allow for the possibility of the “exposure”, to a greater or lesser degree, of the norms stressed in the experience, and potentially prompt conscious reflection on these norms in the direction of resistance and ultimate transformation. In this consideration, I concern myself primarily with the ways in which multiply marginalized subjects navigate unfamiliar cultural contexts and engagements with constant ruptures in meaning, what Ortega describes as a thick sense of not being-at-ease [3] (p. 63). As mentioned above, this is a key feature of Latina feminist accounts of lived experience that Ortega argues has not been properly theorized in classical phenomenologies. Further, I bring in Martinez’s characterization of these ruptures as a kind of “involuntary suspension of the natural attitude” [15] (p. 227) in laying the groundwork for the approach. Ultimately, I argue that the communication and documentation of these ruptures in the form of phenomenological description allows for the examination and interrogation of sedimented logics of oppression on the way to liberatory ends.

3.1. Rupture, Not Being-At Ease, and La Facultad

The initial prose of Gloria Anzaldúa’s now-classic 1987 text, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, begins with a vivid and moving description of the U.S.–Mexico border as an open wound. She writes,

The U.S.-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country—a border culture. [16] (p. 25)

These opening lines of the work are profound. They bring into sharp relief the painful image of torn flesh, continually re-opened, re-agitated, of the borderlands as a site of visible trauma where the sticky swirling of lifeblood oozes from worlds moving against one another, scraping themselves raw in the process. One imagines the precarious layer of coagulated blood, lined with yellow crust, that temporarily staves off the bleeding before the friction between worlds once again ruptures the delicate surface. The mixture of blood that forms the border culture is a decadent mestizaje, a mixture, rich with contradictions, unstable and ever-shifting with the tensions betwixt and between worlds.

The image Anzaldúa invokes to open her text is not just representative of the material conditions of “the actual physical borderland […] [of] the Texas-U.S. Southwest/Mexican border”, of the chafing of the “Third World” against the “First”, but also the “psychological borderlands, the sexual borderlands and the spiritual borderlands [that] are not particular to the Southwest”. As Anzaldúa elaborates,

In fact, the Borderlands are physically present wherever two or more cultures edge each other, where people of different races occupy the same territory, where under, lower, middle and upper classes touch, where the space between two individuals shrinks with intimacy. [16] (p. 19)

While the term “borderlands” can thus apply quite broadly, what makes Anzaldua’s Borderlands/La Frontera such a raw and compelling piece of literature is her speaking of and from her own lived situation as a queer Chicana woman living on the U.S. Texas–Mexico border.

Indeed, the preliminary description of the grating and bleeding of two or more worlds involved in the production of a border culture serves as the basis for Anzaldúa’s phenomenological account of lived experience in the U.S.–Mexico borderlands8. As she goes on to detail through the text, actually living in the borderlands requires navigating the precarious spaces between worlds, straddling contradictions, and constantly shapeshifting to meet strict and often conflicting criteria for survival. Los atravesados, the border-dwellers, of which women-of-color are explicitly named in Anzaldúa’s account, are out of place in either/any of the worlds moving in tension with one another:

Alienated from her mother culture, ‘alien’ in the dominant culture, the woman of color does not feel safe within the inner life of her Self. Petrified, she can’t respond, her face caught between los intersticios, the places between the different worlds she inhabits. [16] (p. 42)

Thus, the profound introductory image is not a mere metaphor for a coming together of cultures, but a powerful representation of the painful strife inherent within lived, material realities in the overlapping margins of worlds. The tearing, or rupturing, of the skin of worlds in contact with one another thus has its parallel in the lived experience of rupture: the “intimate terrorism” of life in the borderlands that Anzaldúa characterizes as alienating, at once routine and shocking, which encourages a “shutting down” or “petrification” in the face of threats of, often, very real danger (e.g., racist acts of terrorism, assaults sexual or otherwise, etc.). With respect to this intimate terrorism, she writes, “our cultures take away our ability to act […]. Blocked, immobilized, we can’t move forward, can’t move backward” [16] (pp. 42–43). The experience of such ruptures thus has the potential to thoroughly disrupt one’s going about in the world, to halt one’s progression, one’s sense of bodily agency, to initiate a kind of state of psychic or spiritual suspended animation.

Such experiences of rupture, as well as their existential import, are well documented in Latinx feminist work. It is precisely the lived fact of such experiences that Ortega takes up in her work on multiplicitous selfhood and life between worlds, specifically in offering a critique of classical phenomenological (as well as broader philosophical) accounts. As she explains in her 2021 “In-Between-Worlds and Re-membering: Latina Feminist Phenomenology and the Existential Analytic of Dasein”, such experiences of rupture are “a crucial element in a life of in-betweenness”, which, moreover, prompt a sense of what she terms “not being-at-ease”9. She explains,

In my view, this sense of not being-at-ease can be either thin (ruptures of everyday norms and practices that are usually transparent) or thick (ruptures of norms and practices that are more meaningful to the self and thus lead to existential crises regarding identity and other features of the self). [18] (p. 450)

This latter sense of not being-at-ease is especially significant for Ortega’s account, as it serves as one of the primary features of marginalized lived experience that serves to problematize traditional or classical phenomenological accounts which, in Ortega’s work, is the existential analytic developed in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. The primary reason that Heidegger’s existential analytic does not fully capture the lived experience of marginalized selves, according to Ortega in her 2016 monograph In-Between, is that Heidegger only considers instances in which being-at-ease, the “function of one’s ability to be non-reflective about everyday norms” [3] (p. 60), breaks down in minimal ways that do not interfere significantly with the way in which selves find themselves “in-the-world” with familiarity and ease [18] (p. 499).

Ortega writes that, on the other hand, “experiences of the selves described by Latina theorists include a lived experience of constantly not being-at-ease due to the numerous ruptures or tears of everyday norms and practices”10. Ortega names such a feature of marginalized/multiplicitous selves’ experience a ‘thick’ sense of not being-at-ease, in contrast to the ‘thin’ sense that Heidegger describes in his account of Dasein. As she elaborates,

The experience of selves described by Latina feminists shows a life of constant ruptures and a persistent breaking down of equipment, both in terms of everyday norms and practices and in terms of deeper existential and societal issues. […] [Phenomenological] account[s] would be enhanced by the recognition of and engagement with the experiences in a life of constant ruptures prompted by marginalization and a life at the borders and borderlands—ruptures that Anzaldúa, Lugones, and other Latina feminists so vividly describe. [3] (p. 61)

Thus, in order for phenomenological projects to develop an account of the self that takes into consideration the lives of selves at the margins, they must address the ways in which these selves experience this ‘thick’ sense of not being-at-ease, which is precisely the direction that Ortega takes in her development of multiplicitous selfhood. The existential significance of a life of constant ruptures lies in the fact that the subjects who experience them “cannot be understood as being-at-ease in the world and, consequently, have to be continually reflective about their everyday experience” [18] (p. 499). Such existential consequences are illustrated in Anzaldúa’s description of petrification above: a complete breakdown of the equipment necessary to make sense of, to act in, one’s world(s). As Anzaldúa describes, “[t]he ambivalence from the clash of voices results in mental and emotional states of perplexity. Internal strife results in insecurity and indecisiveness. The mestiza’s dual or multiple personality is plagued by psychic restlessness” [16] (p. 100).

It is necessary to recognize, however, that the effects of rupture as documented by Latinx feminist thinkers do not end here. The experiencing of near-constant ruptures, of continually re-opened wounds, has the potential to cultivate a certain kind of unconscious sensitivity or perceptive capacity, which Anzaldúa has termed ‘la facultad’, or, ‘the faculty’. As she writes, “[c]onfronting anything that tears the fabric of our everyday mode of consciousness and that thrusts us into a less literal and more psychic sense of reality increases awareness and la facultad” [16] (p. 61). In her introduction of the term in Borderlands/La Frontera, she explains that “[l]a facultad is the capacity to see in surface phenomena the meaning of deeper realities, to see the deep structure below the surface. It is an instant ‘sensing’, a quick perception arrived at without conscious reasoning” [16] (p. 60). Though la facultad is latent in all people, given the frequency of encounters that they are subject to, la facultad, explains Anzaldúa, is more likely to be cultivated or developed by those “who are pushed out of the tribe for being different”, those “who do not feel psychologically or physically safe in the world”, and “those who are pounced on most” [16] (p. 60). As those who have experienced a traumatic event, and particularly those who are survivors of repeated or extended trauma, know, “[w]e lose something in this mode of initiation, something is taken from us: our innocence, our unknowing ways, our safe and easy ignorance” [16] (p. 61). As Ortega puts it, the familiarity and ease with which others may find themselves in-the-world is fundamentally altered in a life of constant being-between-worlds.

Although one major aspect of la facultad is the sensing of proximate or approaching danger cultivated by an instinctual fear of pain, another aspect is what Anzaldúa describes as a deeper sensing, an anticipation of “anything that breaks into one’s everyday mode of perception, that causes a break in one’s defenses and resistance, anything that takes one from one’s habitual grounding, causes the depths to open up, causes a shift in perception” that “deepens the way we see concrete objects and people” [16] (p. 61). Thus, the continual experience of rupture can prompt an unconscious perceptive capacity for anticipating rupture, according to Anzaldúa.

Understanding, or, at the very least, taking seriously, the primacy of lived experiences of rupture in Latinx theorizing specifically, as well as marginalized theorizing more generally, is thus necessary in the development of a phenomenological approach that does justice to life in the borderlands, or life between-worlds. Sustained consideration of such lived experiences informs the development of, for example, Anzaldúa’s la facultad, as well as the existential characteristics of multiplicitous selfhood, like being-between-worlds, being-in-worlds, and becoming-with, that Ortega develops in her work. Such sustained consideration may also reveal certain phenomenological sensibilities apparent in the accounts of Latinx feminist theorists, a reading that I turn to in the following section.

3.2. Rupture as Involuntary Suspension of the Natural Attitude

In her 2014 “Culture, Communication, and Latina Feminist Philosophy: Toward a Critical Phenomenology of Culture”, Martinez offers an account of what she considers to be the phenomenological sensibilities found in the work of Latinx feminist philosophers, including Gloria Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Ofelia Schutte. This reading is made, she explains, in an effort to bring philosophy into greater relevance outside of the academic and scholarly worlds. Martinez writes that affording philosophy such greater relevance “allows for an interrogation of the totalizing perceptions that are at work within normative processes of epistemological legitimation”, thereby making it “possible to cultivate perceptual capacities […] that intervene in the normatively tacit cultural dispositions that often limit the possibilities of understanding” [15] (p. 221). One can thus read this article as an extension of her goal in her 2000 monograph to use phenomenology to bridge the gap between theory and praxis for the identification and transformation of oppressive or marginalizing conditions of our society and existence.

The three concepts that Martinez isolates from Gloria Anzaldúa’s work specifically in this article include borderlands, la facultad, and la conciencia de la mestiza (mestiza consciousness). Martinez seeks to identify the ways in which phenomenological sensibilities are apparent in these concepts in pointing to perceptual capacities cultivated by the necessity of having to constantly navigate culture-specific norms and engagements with which one is unfamiliar. As detailed above, the experience of life in the borderlands, of being-between-worlds, can result in a particular kind of seeing, or noticing, as the result of the persistent chafing and grating of cultures against one another. La facultad is cultivated after repeated exposure to rupture, allowing for a “noticing” of particular circumstances in anticipation of rupture. As Martinez describes,

To notice what is unnoticed places one neither outside nor inside, but in the relation between, often experienced as a vague and underdetermined place. This ‘noticing’, subtle and accumulating from encounter after encounter, takes on a density that can no longer be ignored (it becomes acute), balances are shifted and presuppositions previously held intact are suspended, bringing new things into conscious awareness. [15] (pp. 226–227)

Following this description, Martinez invites the reader to consider Anzaldúa’s account of life in the borderlands, the experience of rupture that occurs after “encounter after encounter” with contradicting or incommensurate norms at the borders, or “unnatural boundaries”, that surround each world, in relation to the confrontation with the “natural attitude” prescribed in the classical phenomenological epochē. She writes,

Typically, in our everyday lives, when we call something ‘unnatural’—like homosexuality, for example—that very designation announces a commitment to a ‘natural attitude’ (in this case, a ‘natural attitude’ rooted in heteronormativity). In Anzaldúa’s formulation, however, ‘unnatural’ does not function as judgment that remains tacitly at work within firm and dense boundaries, but an experience of unplaced and disjointed energies that loosens the normative boundaries. [15] (p. 226)

Indeed, as Anzaldúa’s own account confirms, in being subject to conflicting systems of cultural information and norms, la mestiza experiences “a swamping of her psychological borders” [16] (p. 101). Moreover, Anzaldúa goes on to describe that the experience is predicated on a clashing of sedimented cultural elements, writing that “[t]he borders and walls that are supposed to keep the undesirable ideas out are entrenched habits and patterns of behavior; these habits and patterns are the enemy within” [16] (p. 101). Understood in this way, it is possible to see the parallels that Martinez seeks to draw between the entrenched habits and patterns of behavior that are revealed through the experiences of rupture detailed in Latinx feminist accounts, and the ‘natural attitude’ that includes “all scientific, philosophical, cultural, and everyday assumptions” [19] (p. 11) to be bracketed in the classical phenomenological epochē.

Importantly, for Martinez’s reading, a major way in which these two come apart is that, in the epochē, the natural attitude is bracketed, or suspended, as a deliberate step in the process of phenomenological investigation. This leads her to propose that the significance of coming into contact with “unnatural boundaries” that characterizes a life in the borderlands can be understood as an “involuntary suspension of the ‘natural attitude’” [15] (p. 226). As Martinez elaborates,

In phenomenological philosophy, a suspension of the ‘natural attitude’, or the invocation of the epochē, is commonly understood as a consciously taken step. Yet, in Anzaldúa’s account, borderlands are not places one chooses to ‘visit’ or consciously attend to, but rather emerge as one finds oneself at odds within the normative and communicative conditions of one’s life. [15] (p. 226)

Important to note, however, is that, for Martinez, the involuntary suspension of the natural attitude is only part of the picture. It is not the case that the lived experience of rupture in the borderlands necessarily results in transformative reflection and critique of the circumstances or contexts that prompt it. Rather, she claims, the moment of the involuntary suspension has the potential to “[bring] new and unanticipated things into conscious awareness” [15] (p. 227).

Martinez illustrates this point with the example of Lugones’ analysis of identity and “world” in her essay, “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception”, published in 1987 as a standalone article and subsequently revised for publication in her 2003 collection of essays, Pilgrimages/Peregrinajes: Theorizing Coalition Against Multiple Oppressions. Martinez writes that, in this piece, Lugones

offers a clear and penetrating example of how one comes to and moves through an involuntary suspension of the natural attitude. […] Recognizing a serious disjunction between her self-perception and others’ perception of her leads Lugones to reflect upon the ‘worlds’ she lives in and how it is that in some ‘worlds’ her ‘playfulness’ is recognized, whereas in others it is not. [15] (p. 227)

In order to understand the significance of this example, it is necessary to consider the narrative structure of Lugones’ discussion in this piece. “Playfulness, ‘World’-Traveling, and Loving Perception” is an essay in which Lugones recounts a time when she found herself to be in “a state of profound confusion”11 over whether or not she possessed the attribute of playfulness. Initially, in the attempt to articulate an explanation for her confusion, Lugones explains that she had considered the possibility of “worlds” she inhabited in which she did not feel at ease, and that this lack of ease in certain “worlds” compared to other “worlds” was responsible for the possibility of simultaneously having and not having the attribute of playfulness. Within the “worlds” where she was at ease, she would have this attribute, and within the “worlds” where she was not at ease, she would lack it. With this as a possible explanation12, Lugones writes that she was left wondering what exactly she herself meant by some of these terms. This articulation, for Lugones, raised questions that led her to examine and develop the concepts of “world”, “world”-travel, and the multiplicitous self in the essay. Following a discussion of these concepts in the text, Lugones returns to the question of whether she possesses the attribute of playfulness.

Martinez finds the moment of “profound confusion” in this recounting to be a representative example of the experience of an involuntary suspension of the natural attitude in response to an encounter with an unnatural boundary, a coming together of different worlds los atravesados inhabit in a simultaneously jarring and mundane way. And, indeed, this moment is precisely what elicits Lugones’ own theorizing of “worlds” and “world”-traveling as an explanation for what she refers to as her feelings of “schizophrenia” reminiscent of Anzaldúa’s description of la mestiza’s ambivalence, insecurity, and indecisiveness resulting from her dual or multiple personality being plagued by psychic restlessness. Martinez admits that although it is unclear—“impossible to say, perhaps even for Lugones herself”—how exactly this moment of rupture leads to Lugones’ autobiographical theorizing, “it is clear that in the writing of this essay Lugones has highlighted the conceptual importance of seeing how the misalignments of self-perception with others’ perception of oneself can be a powerful impetus to reflection” [15] (p. 227).

It is necessary to understand the major intervention in the phenomenological literature that Martinez is staging in this text. As discussed earlier, Martinez ultimately believes that in order for phenomenology to serve as a valuable tool in transforming oppression and discrimination, it must be fundamentally critical and interpretive in its descriptions. Thus, to read her argument as one which proposes the experience of rupture as an involuntary suspension of the natural attitude in a strict Husserlian sense—or, in the sense of a complete, presuppositionless reduction—would be, I would argue, to fundamentally misunderstand the direction Martinez seeks to take in offering this argument in the first place. I thus find it helpful to approach this article as performing a kind of “shattering” of Husserl’s phenomenological epochē, similar to Ortega’s shattering of Heidegger’s account of Dasein in her 2016 In-Between13. Given Martinez’s description of confronting the “unnaturalness” of homosexuality as a lesbian as potentially prompting a suspension of “a ‘natural attitude’ rooted in heteronormativity” [15] (p. 226), I argue that we should read Martinez’s “natural attitude” as any particular set of theses that structure any particular world. In doing so, it becomes possible to understand the experience of rupture as an involuntary suspension of the natural attitude—as a throwing into question of the presuppositions inherent in the culturally sedimented normative frameworks or logics by which a given world, or worlds, is/are structured. As Anzaldúa writes in Luz en lo Oscuro/Light in the Dark, “[w]hat you or your cultures believe to be true is provisional and depends on a specific perspective. What your eyes, ears, and other physical senses perceive is not the whole picture but one determined by your core beliefs and prevailing societal assumptions” [20] (p. 119). I believe it is still important to keep in mind, as numerous theorists, including Martinez, have argued, the fact of the impossibility of a complete reduction—that is to say, the suspension of all of the theses of a given world in a single phenomenological exercise is, practically speaking, not possible. That said, the throwing into doubt the legitimacy of one thesis of a given world, such as a thesis of heteronormativity, is likely to call into question the legitimacy of a host of other theses—e.g., patriarchy—given the entanglement and co-constitution of such theses within the logic of that world.

Ultimately, I find Martinez’s proposition for reading the moment of rupture as an involuntary suspension of the natural attitude both intriguing and compelling. With some adjustments, I am interested in developing this proposition into a phenomenological approach that is informed by, and begins with, the moment of rupture as theorized in Latinx feminist phenomenologies. I take up the development of this approach in the remainder of this paper.

3.3. A Phenomenological Approach Informed by Rupture

While the word “rupture” appears across a wide selection of Latinx and Chicanx feminist texts, it has not exactly been taken up as a standalone term or concept and thoroughly fleshed out or theorized in these accounts. That is to say, there is not a precise experience that has been explicitly termed “rupture” in any of these accounts; rather, the word “rupture” has been invoked mainly in order to supplement the description of experiences that bear similarities to one another in the literature. In order to begin sketching a phenomenological approach that begins with the moment of rupture, I first wish to clarify precisely the sense of rupture I am interested in capturing here.

To begin, I want to bring in the distinction that Ortega makes in her work, namely In-Between, between types of ruptures that precipitate not being-at-ease in either a thin sense or a thick sense. Recall that Ortega distinguishes from ruptures of norms and practices that are usually transparent, which elicit a thin sense of not being-at-ease and do not preclude the possibility of being-in-the-world in a non-reflective way, from ruptures of norms and practices that are more meaningful to the self, which elicit a thick sense of not being-at-ease, often resulting in existential crises regarding identity and other features of the self [18] (p. 450). Significantly, the lives of multiply marginalized subjects feature a near-constant state of not being-at-ease due to the numerous ruptures of both types experienced in the borderlands. It is the latter type of rupture, however, argues Ortega, that goes undertheorized in classical phenomenological projects and yet is characteristic of the kind of experience that Latinx and Chicanx phenomenological accounts so frequently document in their work. As noted previously, Ortega believes that, for this reason, “[phenomenological] account[s] would be enhanced by the recognition of and engagement with the experiences in a life of constant ruptures prompted by marginalization and a life at the borders and borderlands—ruptures that Anzaldúa, Lugones, and other Latina feminists so vividly describe” [3] (p. 61).

With this in mind, my aim in developing this phenomenological approach is to center precisely these types of ruptures. I want to start by highlighting a quote from Anzaldúa’s Borderlands that I believe succinctly communicates what I believe to be the most foundational aspect of rupture for this approach. In the closing chapter of part one of Borderlands/La Frontera, La conciencia de la mestiza/Towards a New Consciousness, Anzaldúa describes the experience of la mestiza trapped between worlds, writing,

Like all people, we perceive the version of reality that our culture communicates. Like others having or living in more than one culture, we get multiple, often opposing messages. The coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference causes un choque, a cultural collision. [16] (p. 100)

Fundamentally, the experience of rupture I seek to pinpoint is this experience that occurs as a result of this “coming together of two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference” for perceiving reality. Rupture is thus prompted by the kind of cultural collision, or choque, that occurs in, e.g., the borderlands—precisely the kind(s) that Anzaldúa documents in Borderlands/La Frontera.

Like Martinez, I also believe Lugones’ essay “Playfulness, ‘World’-traveling and Loving Perception” details another compelling account of such a choque. However, unlike Martinez, I do not read the choque in Lugones’ account as one that is prompted by an incongruence between her own self-perception and others’ perception of her. I find that, if one reads the account that Lugones details in this essay carefully, she appears to be prompted into reflection by confronting not merely an incongruence between self and other, but rather, an incongruence between selves. For example, Lugones writes,

Some time ago, I came to be in a state of profound confusion as I experienced myself as both having and not having a particular attribute. I was sure I had the attribute in question and, on the other hand, I was sure that I did not have it. I remain convinced that I both have and do not have this attribute. The attribute is playfulness. [6] (p. 86)

It seems clear from this passage that Lugones’ initial confusion arises from a contradiction between her own conflicting self-perceptions, and not between her self-perception and others’ perceptions of her. What appears to be particularly jarring about this contradiction lies in the fact of her feelings of certainty; it is her own certainty in both being and not being (playful, in this case) that leads her to pose the question of whether she is playful to others. Her investigation moves forward once she has different groups of people confirm each of these perceptions for her, and Lugones reflects on, or takes stock of, the intersubjective environments to which these people and herself belong. The different responses provided by these different people, namely, her faraway friends who know her well (likely her friends back in Argentina) and the people around her at the time (likely those she had come to know in the United States), ultimately lead her to theorize the multiple “worlds” she inhabits and travels between.

I believe that understanding this distinction is crucial for understanding the experience of rupture that is documented in Lugones’ account. As Lugones makes explicit, the way she came to propose the concept of “world” to herself was “through [experiencing] the kind of ontological confusion about [herself] that we, women of color, refer to half-jokingly as ‘schizophrenia’ […] and through [her] effort to make some sense of this ontological confusion” [6] (p. 86). This “schizophrenia”, what Anzaldúa refers to as la mestiza’s “dual or multiple personality”, and what Lugones and Ortega both take up in theorizing multiplicitous selfhood, is not just based on an incongruence between one’s own self-perception and others’ perception of one, but an incongruence between one’s selves that is tied up in the kinds of constructions one animates in the worlds one inhabits. Of course, it would be inaccurate to lean too heavily on the distinction between self and other in this account. What I think is imperative to take from the essay, and what Lugones is very clear about highlighting in her theorizing of “worlds” and “world”-traveling, is that these constructions of self are constituted intersubjectively within and by the various worlds that we inhabit.

For the sake of my own account, this particular feature of the experience of rupture is one I refer to as ambivalence14. With ambivalence, I wish to highlight the characteristic of rupture that comes from the holding of conflicting, incompatible, or incommensurate understandings, orientations, perceptions, or perspectives resulting from the inhabiting of multiple worlds. The ambivalence of rupture describes the experience of being pulled or directed in multiple ways, of oscillating between or around many poles15. Ambivalence can be understood through the concept of mental nepantilism, a term Anzaldúa derives from nepantla, which she describes as “an Aztec word meaning torn between ways” [16] (p. 100). As Anzaldúa describes,

Living between cultures results in ‘seeing’ double, […] Removed from that culture’s center, you glimpse the sea in which you’ve been immersed but to which you were oblivious, no longer seeing the world the way you were enculturated to see it.

While much of the previous discussion has been anchored in Anzaldúa’s early work, Borderlands/La Frontera, in fleshing out the concept of rupture, it is here that I want to transition to a reading of el arrebato, the first step in what Anzaldúa terms the seven stages of conocimiento in her posthumously published 2015 Luz en lo Oscuro/Light in the Dark: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. Though I read this text as extending and expanding much of the thought that was present in the 1987 text, here, I am specifically interested in the way in which Anzaldúa’s explication of the seven stages of conocimiento can be read as an extension of the development of la conciencia de la mestiza (mestiza consciousness) through el camino de la mestiza (the mestiza way).

As mentioned above, for Anzaldúa, the arrebato is the first moment in the seven stages of conocimiento, a process of spiritual activism that transforms the subject in the direction of self-reflexive knowing, resistance, and liberation. Arrebato can be quite literally translated as a rapture, an explosive snatching up or snatching away, a tearing of oneself from where one is grounded. As Anzaldúa explains in Luz en lo Oscuro/Light in the Dark, the arrebato can have profound, traumatic, existential consequences on one’s perception and understanding of self and reality:

Every arrebato—a violent attack, rift with a loved one, illness, death in the family, betrayal, systematic racism, and marginalization—rips you from your familiar ‘home’, casting you out of your personal Eden […] Cada arrebatada (snatching) turns your world upside down and cracks the walls of your reality […] You are no longer who you used to be. [20] (p. 125)

Though Anzaldúa provides numerous examples of such arrebatos throughout the text—including the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a violent burglary, leaving home to begin doctoral study at a major state university, being diagnosed with diabetes—the example that resonates the most with me, as someone born and raised in California, is that of the earthquake. Anzaldúa’s description of the earthquake serves as another powerful illustration of the moment of rupture. She begins,

You’re strolling downtown. Suddenly the sidewalk buckles and rises before you. Bricks fly through the air. Your thigh muscles tense to run, but shock holds you in check. Dust rains down all around you, dimming your sight, clogging your nostrils, coating your throat. In front of you the second story of a building caves into the ground floor. Just as suddenly, the Earth stops trembling. [20] (p. 126)

The details of this example suggest that her description is likely a recounting of her experience of the devastating magnitude 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake that occurred in Northern California in October 1989, which caused tens of deaths, thousands of injuries, and billions of dollars in property damage. In this moving passage, Anzaldúa tells of crumbling façades, a woman pinned under rubble, driving home through the smoke of buildings on fire, and bracing herself in her apartment doorway during each aftershock:

Just when you think the ground beneath your feet is stable, the two plates again grind together along the San Andreas Fault. The seismic rupture moves the Monterey Peninsula three inches north. It shifts you into the crack between the worlds, shattering the mythology that grounds you. You strive for leverage in the fissures, but Tonan, la madre Tierra, keeps stirring beneath you. […] Éste arrebato, the earthquake, jerks you from the familiar and safe terrain and catapults you into nepantla. [20] (p. 122)

The movement of the ground, depending on the details of geologic event, can range from an intense rattling to a slow but forceful swaying. The uncanniness of perceiving the solid ground below you transform into an unstable, shifting or swaying surface in a split second, together with the devastation that the quake has the potential to cause, combine to produce a truly harrowing experience. For those living along the transform plate boundary between the Pacific and North American Plates, apprehension of the “Big One”, the hypothetical earthquake of overwhelming magnitude that is allegedly expected to occur along the San Andreas Fault16 “at any moment”, lies dormant in the back of the mind between every quake, such that the first thought following the initial rumble of the earth or rattle of dishes that constitutes the first perceptible sign of tremor, at the time one’s eyes snap up to meet the wide-eyed gaze of the closest other person in the vicinity, is most certainly “is this the Big One?”

Of course, not all earthquakes—relatively few, in fact—result in death and destruction. Earthquakes vary widely in magnitude, and the seismic rupture (i.e., cracking of rock) that produces a tectonic earthquake has the potential either to remain underground or to break the surface, resulting in a surface rupture. Fault lines, the boundaries that mark the coming together of two or more tectonic plates, are often marked by such surface ruptures, where the geologic record of either plate, the layers of sedimentation, have become exposed. The variability of result produced by the tectonic earthquake, the existence of the fault line as the boundary that marks where tectonic plates grind against one another, and the jarring experience of the quake by those living near the epicenter, are all features I wish to highlight for the development of a phenomenological approach informed by rupture17.

Thus, I propose that, through a consideration of the seismic rupture, we can understand the lived experience of rupture as such: in the encounters of marginalized subjects, incommensurate norms push and pull in competing directions, stress building between them as between tectonic plates, until, perhaps, the moment of rupture, the arrebato, tears them apart, potentially exposing their layers of historical sedimentation18 to the “open air”. Like an earthquake, the rupture is a moment of greater or lesser destabilization and, often, trauma. The rupture can be violent, altogether precluding the possibility of reflection or resistance and inflicting harm. Sometimes, however, this disorientation, while potentially deeply unsettling, allows for the possibility of reflection.

As seen in the previous discussion of Martinez’s 2014 “Culture, Communication, and Latina Feminist Philosophy: Toward a Critical Phenomenology of Culture”, Martinez reads such moments of rupture as potentially prompting an involuntary suspension of the natural attitude. While for Martinez, however, it remains altogether unclear how this unconscious suspension of the natural attitude leads to conscious reflection on the circumstances, contexts, or situations that prompted the suspension, I find the process to be indicated rather clearly in Anzaldúa’s work. Such experiences of rupture, as argued in her Borderlands/La Frontera, are ones that cultivate and sharpen la facultad, a heightened sensitivity or perceptual capacity for anticipating ruptures. Importantly, in her description in Luz en lo Oscuro/Light in the Dark, Anzaldúa emphasizes the movement from confusion, instability, trauma, though to the act of questioning with the cultivation or activation of la facultad:

Cada arrebatamiento is an awakening that causes you to question who you are, what the world is about. The urgency to know what you’re experiencing awakens la facultad, the ability to shift attention and see through the surface of things and situations. [20] (p. 125)

Clearly, the feeling of ambivalence or recognition of being-between-worlds is a key factor here. It is the confusion that results from multiple clashing logics for making sense of self and reality that motivates a re-situating of one’s self in relation to the worlds involved in the moment of rupture. This prompts what Anzaldúa refers to as a double vision or multiple seeing. She explains:

When two or more opposing accounts, perspectives, or belief systems appear side by side or intertwined, a kind of double or multiple ‘seeing’ results, forcing you into continuous dialectical encounters with these different stories, situations, and people. Trying to understand these convergences compels you to critique your own perspective and assumptions. [20] (p. 125)

Very important to note here are her comments on how the multiple seeing forces one into continuous dialectical encounters with aspects at both the micro- and macro-levels of the worlds in question—a process which Alcoff highlights as crucial for a comprehensive analysis of, e.g., racialized embodiment. In an effort to understand how their logics come together and apart, a critical orientation toward one’s own perspective is taken up, and a critical eye turned inward is opened. The movement is thus one between worlds, between the incommensurate logics of these worlds and the relation of self to world, which can only be resolved in a reconfiguration of identity. As Anzaldúa elaborates,

From the in-between place of nepantla you see through the fiction of the monoculture, the myth of the superiority of the white races. And eventually you begin seeing through your ethnic culture’s myth of the inferiority of mujeres. As you struggle to form a new identity, a demythologization of race occurs. You begin to see race as an experience of reality from a particular perspective and a specific time and place (history), not as a fixed feature of personality or identity. [20] (p. 127)

One might argue that, as the materials included in Luz en lo Oscuro/Light in the Dark were not published until 2015, and Martinez’s “Culture, Communication, and Latina Feminist Philosophy: Toward a Critical Phenomenology of Culture” was published a year prior in 2014, there was not an opportunity for Martinez to supplement her own account with these remarks. However, as mentioned previously, much of Anzaldúa’s work in Luz en lo Oscuro/Light in the Dark builds off of her theory in Borderlands/La Frontera. As mentioned above, I read the seven stages of conocimiento as one such example, with its early roots in el camino de la mestiza on the way to la conciencia de la mestiza. Indeed, in perhaps the most cited chapter of Borderlands/La Frontera, Anzaldúa outlines el camino de la mestiza, or the mestiza way, in a manner that I believe makes quite explicit the movement from the cultivation of la facultad through conscious reflection, analysis, and transformation of the normative structures of the worlds in tension. I quote her here at length:

[La mestiza] puts history through a sieve, winnows out the lies, looks at the forces that we as a race, as women, have been a part of. Luego bota lo qua no vale, los desmientos, los desencuentos, el embrutecimiento. Aguarda el juicio, hondo y enraízado, de la gente antigua. This step is a conscious rupture with all oppressive traditions of all cultures and religions. She communicates that rupture, documents the struggle. She reinterprets history and, using new symbols, she shapes new myths. She adopts new perspectives toward the dark-skinned, women and queers. She strengthens her tolerance (and intolerance) for ambiguity. She is willing to share, to make herself vulnerable to foreign ways of seeing and thinking. She surrenders all notions of safety, of the familiar. Deconstruct, construct19. [16] (p. 104)

What is additionally revealed here is that rupture is not necessarily a moment that one involuntarily experiences, or to which one is subjected, but can also be a moment instigated through communication and documentation, a conscious rupture. For Anzaldúa, creative engagements are especially appropriate for instigating rupture; as she explains, “[t]hrough creative engagements, you embed your experiences in a larger frame of reference, connecting your personal struggles with those of other beings on the planet, with the struggles of Earth itself” [20] (p. 119). Thus, it becomes possible to understand how recorded accounts of rupture—what we might call phenomenological descriptions of rupture—in the form of theoretical contributions, narrative accounts, poetics, or oral histories offer us the opportunity to examine fault lines, the boundaries between worlds, for records of the sedimented cultural habits that are at play in these moments of rupture. Examination of the layers of cultural habit—in this case, across temporal and geographic axes—has the potential to reveal to us the relationship between the incommensurate norms stressed in anticipation of the rupture.

4. Conclusions

Despite the various shortcomings of traditional phenomenological approaches, multiply marginalized theorists—including Latinx and Chicanx feminist theorists—have taken up phenomenological concepts, descriptions, and methods in their theorizing of lived experience. These theorists have also identified a number of ways in which phenomenological approaches must be revised, reconfigured, reoriented, or rewritten in order to adequately accommodate the complexities of multiply marginalized experience, given that these complexities remain significantly underdeveloped in, or otherwise entirely absent from, classical accounts.

In particular, as Ortega has argued, taking seriously the primacy of lived experiences of rupture is necessary in the development of a phenomenological approach that does justice to life in the borderlands and the lived experience of being-between-worlds. Centering the moment of rupture is thus key for the development a critical feminist phenomenological approach that seeks to do justice to multiply marginalized experience. The approach that I have outlined here, developed from the insights of Chicanx and Latinx theorists on the experience of rupture, is one that explores the possibility of rupture as a suspension of the natural attitude, as Martinez has suggested, and thus as a central element of phenomenological analysis. In addition to offering this approach, I also insist that contemporary critical phenomenologists recognize the “criticality”20 inherent in the feminist phenomenological projects that Latinx and Chicanx feminists, and especially queer Chicanxs and Latinxs, have been practicing and advocating for many decades.