Gloria E. Anzaldúa: Feminist Body Writing and Borderlands

Gloria E. Anzald is a crucial figure in contemporary border and women's studies. When in 1987 she published her ground-breaking book Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza, she became one of the most often quoted writers of the US-Mexican border, but she remains relatively little known outside Americas.

In one of the first monographs written on her work, Grażyna Zygadlo introduces Anzald's work and outlines her feminist revisionist thinking to new audiences, especially in Europe. The author outlines these borderlands as areas where numerous systems of power, exploitation, and oppression intersect - capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and white man's supremacy. She also concentrates on the innovative philosophy of women's writing from the body that Anzald has propagated and on her formative role in the women of color feminism. Zygadlo also works to expand Anzald's borderland thinking by applying it to the recent issues related to migration crisis and border problems in the European Union - namely the contradictory treatment of refugees at the Polish eastern border.

Gloria E. Anzald is situated at the intersections of various disciplines, in particular American cultural studies, feminist criticism, and Latin American postcolonial studies, and is a valuable source of knowledge about Anzald's ideas for undergraduate and graduate students.