- Title
- Becoming woman: on exile and belonging to the borderlands
- Creator
- Motta, Sara C.
- Relation
- Women in academia crossing North-South borders: Gender, race, and displacement p. 89-116
- Relation
- https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781498517706/Women-in-Academia-Crossing-North%E2%80%93South-Borders-Gender-Race-and-Displacement
- Publisher
- Lexington Books
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2015
- Description
- As a single mother non-elite mestiza Latin Americanist, living in Australia, born in the United Kingdom, raised in a Polish Jewish culture, with the ever-present absence of my Colombian father, I have always lived in the borderlands. Never completely belonging to British society, nor Colombian culture, nor the middle-class whiteness of academia, I was ontologically Other from the beginning and marked as a raced and gendered subject of coloniality. In these borderlands I learned to speak different tongues and contort my heart, body, and mind in multiple ways. Yet this gift of otherness was co-woven through the shadow of exile. As Anzaldua so beautifully describes "we knew we were different, set apart, exiled from what is considered 'normal.' And as we internalized this exile, we came to see the alien within us and too often, as a result, we split apart from ourselves and each other". I augmented this exile paradoxically in the search for home and belonging. As a means to resist processes of subjectification and experiences of violent uprooting I became an academic. I embodied the thinking abstracted knower, developing the truth over and about others (and myself) and in the process closing off the possibilities for becoming otherwise in theory and practice and for healing my internal exile.
- Subject
- narrative writing; exile; homecomings; transformations; postcolonial feminism
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1316754
- Identifier
- uon:23263
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781498517690
- Language
- eng
- Hits: 686
- Visitors: 672
- Downloads: 1