As part of Hispanic Heritage Month and National Coming Out Week, the LGBT Center and Flora Stone Mather Center for Women invite the Case Western Reserve University community to participate in a multilingual, multi-vocal celebration of the life and work of Gloria Anzaldua.
All faculty, staff and students are welcome to read and reflect on Anzaldua’s work in all languages and dialects. The event will take place Monday, Oct. 8, from 5 to 7 p.m. in the Thwing Center atrium.
About Anzaldua
Gloria Anzaldua (1942-2004) was a Chicana lesbian activist whose influential works on ethnicity, queer theory, feminism and identity continue to be essential reading in many disciplines. In her most well-known work, La Frontera (The Borderlands), Anzaldua used poetry and prose to explore her place in physical and cultural borders, challenging the idea that one is bound by one identity.
Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga co-edited This Bridge Called My Back, which was one of the first academic collections to center the voices of women of color.
Copies of Anzaldua’s work are available in the Flora Stone Mather Center for Women and Kelvin Smith Library.
Those who want to read from another’s work or perform their own are encouraged to consider some of the questions Anzaldua raised, including:
- What are the borderlands?
- What does it mean to live within them, be bound and policed by them?
- What is freeing about the borderlands?
- Why do we create borders?
- What does it mean to transgress them?
There also will be a selection of readings to explore at the event.
RSVP by Friday, Oct. 5, through a Google Form.