Areej Abuqudairi

Project Overview This paper examines race as a disabling condition. It discusses how does it feel like to be a woman of color in a western society, and how does this bodily difference function as a certain impermanent. This projects significance comes from its emphasis on the consequences of a bodily difference on the major activities of our lives.

Scope of the work This paper examines the portrayal of race as a disabling condition in both Gloria Anzaldua’s poem “To live in the Borderlands means you” and in Cherrie Moraga’s poem “For the Color of My Mother”. Both poems present race as a disabling condition because of the limits that it forces on women of color, objectifying them and disabling them from speaking, and making them loose their identities. In the first poem, the author describes her own personal experience of being a woman of color and living in the borderlands. This poem depicts having several races in your blood as a trap that enables you from making any decision. In “For the Color of my Mother” Cherrie Moraga depicts race as a factor that objectifies women of color and silence them. She describes this through talking on the behalf of her mother who was completely silenced because she was Mexican.

Bold textExcerpts

“In other words, race here is portrayed as a trap that enables you from making a decision. This trap is like having an impairment that creates a certain “limitations” to one of the major part of your life. In this sense, race functions as an obstacle that prevents an essential component of life. This life component is freedom. When you have several races within you, you feel that you have to be connected with all of them. You loose your identity as a result of that, because you have to satisfy more than one race. It is so difficult to fit in all of these races, but at the same time it is difficult to get rid of the fact that they are not part of you.”

““On September 12, the day after the attack on the United States, I watched the media coverage and a very middle-class looking woman interviewed on the street said she “no longer felt safe in America.” I was born and have grown up in this country. As a mixed race, half Black and half White woman born into poverty, I have never felt safe here” In this article, the author speaks about the real terror in the United States; poverty, bad health insurance system…etc. And she includes being of a mixed race as one of those factors that cause the real terror that has always existed in the United States before and after the events of the eleventh of September. The reason, I brought this example to support the fact that being of a mixed race can be a very disabling condition. It is disabling in this sense, because it is a source of fear. The feeling of not being safe or protected results in limiting some of the major activities in our lives, and therefore it is a disabling condition.”

Bibliography

Eagelton, Mary. Working with Feminist Criticism. Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1996.

Disch, Estelle. Reconstructing Gender: A Multicultural Anthology. Boston: Mc Graw Hill, 1997.

Thomson, Rosemarie. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

White, Frances. Dark Continent of Our Bodies: Black feminism and the Politics of Respectability. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001.

Related Links:'

http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/ http://www.cherriemoraga.com/About/AboutShBio.html