For this essay, I would like to focus on the topic of gender roles and relations and/or problems of sexism. To do this, use the book Borderlands/La Frontera by Gloria Anzaldúa.
Below I have included the assignment instructions and some of the topics/quotes I found in the book that may be good to use for the essay.
Topics ideas to focus on Anzuldua and her perspectives on gender roles and relations and/or problems of sexism
Various perspectives about women’s roles
Adnzuldua is fed up with the idea women are more nurturing
Anzuldua page 102 talks about male and female and how it works, idealistic thinking
Life on the borderlands and how identity is ground to the Indian women
Anzuldua has a fear of going home
“The world is not a safe place to live in. We shiver in separate cells in enclosed cities, shoulders hunched, barely keeping the panic below the surface of the skin, daily drinking shock alone with our morning coffee, fearing the torches being set to our buildings, the attacks in the streets. Shutting down. Woman does not feel safe when her own culture, and white culture, are critical of her; when the males of all races hunt her as prey. 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 spaces between the different worlds she inhabits” (Anzaldúa 42).
“The answer to the problem between… between male and females, lies in healing the split that originates in the very foundation of our lives, our culture, our languages, our thoughts. A massive uprooting of dualistic thinking in the individual and collective consciousness is the beginning of a long struggle, but one that could, in our best hopes, bring us to the end of rape, of violence, of war” (102).
“As a mestiza, I have no country, my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are mine because I am every women’s sister or potential lover. (As a lesbian I have no race, my own people disclaim me; but I am all races because there is the queer of me in all races.) I am cultureless because, as a feminist, I challenge the collective cultural/religious male-derived beliefs of India-Hispanics and Anglos; yet I am cultured because I am participating in the creation of yet another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet (102-103).
Essay 2: World-Changing Techniques
I. Topic. This essay asks you to analyze the techniques that Gloria Anzaldúa and/or Wendell Berry use to change their readers’ sense of some aspect of the world in order to advance a thesis that makes an illuminating claim about their techniques.
II. Formal Details. The essay should be about 3.5-4.5 pages in length, double-spaced, in a 12-point font. (Try not to go over 5 full pages.) Top and bottom margins should be 1 inch wide; side margins should be 1 or 1.25 inches. The essay should have a title. The essay should include direct evidence from the text to illustrate and support your claims. Quotations and paraphrases from the texts you are examining should be cited using MLA style.
III. Due Date. The completed essay will be due on Thursday, March 28 at 10:00 p.m. via Blackboard. Extensions are available on request.
IV. Developing Your Approach to the Topic: Requirements and Guidelines.
A. Focus. The essay may work with examples from their poems, their non-fiction essays, or both, but it should stay consistently focused on a particular aspect of the world that the writings are working on. You may choose as your focus one of the following aspects of the world that concern Anzaldúa and Berry.
• boundaries, borders, divisions, margins
• the relation of inner life to external world
• growth and the management of growth
• conflict management
• gender roles and relations and/or problems of sexism
• concepts of race and/or problems of racism
If there is another aspect of the world that you would like to make the focus of your essay, you should check with me before you start writing.
B. Analyzing Techniques for Changing the World. What your analysis should work to discover is how the author(s) you are considering works on their material in order to change their readers’ perception, understanding, or experience of the aspect of the world that is the focus of your essay. An author might set about doing this is any number of ways, and your assignment is to discover and explain how Anzaldúa and/or Berry is doing this work. You might keep in mind, though, that their specific techniques must try to accomplish at least two goals. On the one hand, they must try to create a point of view on the world or a vision of how the world is. On the other hand, they must enable, encourage, or persuade the reader to adopt that point of view or accept that vision. How, specifically, are they shaping their writing in order to accomplish those goals?
C. Scope of Analysis of Technique. Your scope here is to find a middle ground between making a claim that applies only to a single piece of writing (e.g. “Berry uses such and such techniques in the poem ‘Horses’”) and making a claim that applies to the entirety of a writer’s work (e.g. “In her writing, Anzaldúa always uses such and such techniques to get her readers to think differently about borders”). This middle ground is to identify techniques that you can reasonably claim are characteristic or representative of the work of the writer or writers when they deal with the aspect of the world you are considering. To establish this claim reasonably, you will need to draw your examples for analysis from a varied set of contexts: different poems, different chapters. In determining the scope of your analysis, keep in mind the following criteria.
• These contexts you select do not need to encompass both prose and poetry, although they may. (That is, you can choose to select all of your examples from poems or from prose and advance a claim that applies only to the writing in that genre.)
• If you find that a writer’s techniques for dealing with an aspect of the world differ significantly, depending on the context, that can be your claim.
• If you would like to look at both Berry and Anzaldúa, you should focus your analysis on discovering either one important technique that they share or one important way in which their techniques for making change in a particular aspect of the world differ.
• Because your claim does not apply to the entirety of a writer’s work, the existence of counter-examples to your claims will not invalidate your claim. However, your claims will be more meaningful and more valid the more they authentically represent what the reader will find elsewhere in the writer’s work. Therefore, you should make sure that the examples you are working with do not stand out in the writer’s work as unusual or peculiar but are, rather, representative of what the writer tends to do. Selecting your examples so that they clearly engage a range of contexts will help to confirm that they are representative.
• Because you are analyzing writing technique, you will need to work with direct evidence consistently throughout the essay.
