Creative Openings and World-Making: Postcritique, Reparative Readings, and Anzaldúa’s Borderlands

Authors

  • Selina Foltinek University of Bayreuth

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5283/copas.333

Keywords:

Postcritique, Reparative Readings, Same-Sex, Queer, Sexuality, Gloria Anzaldúa, Borderlands

Abstract

This article examines postcritical and reparative readings of female same-sex narratives and proposes a diversification of reading practices. The approach toward f/f-narratives presented here shifts attention to queer literary visions by questioning the narrative of the “impossible woman” (Valerie Rohy) as well as the hegemony and omnipresence of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” (Paul Ricoeur) in literary and cultural studies. It aims at queering hierarchies of knowledge as well as practices of readings. Eventually, a postcritical reading of Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera“ (1987) interrogates the text’s potential for creative openings and queer world-making by drawing on entanglements of past, present, and future.

Author Biography

Selina Foltinek, University of Bayreuth

 

Selina Foltinek is a research assistant (wiss. Mitarbeiterin) of the DFG-funded project “The Economy and Epistemology of Gossip in late 19th and early 20th-Century US American Literature and Culture” at the University of Bayreuth. She completed her first state exam at the FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg in 2018/19 (English, History, Social and Political Science) and holds a B.A. in English and History. In 2015/16, she spent ten months as a Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH, U.S. In 2020, she received the Duke University Post-Graduate Research Fellowship of the Bavarian American Academy (BAA) to research for her Ph.D. thesis, which is tentatively titled “Knowledge Production and Negotiations of Agency in Semi-Autobiographical Fiction about Female Same-Sex Relationships.” Her research interests include gender and queer studies, postcritique, knowledge production, and US-American literatures from the 19th and 20th century.

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Published

2020-10-26

How to Cite

Foltinek, Selina. “Creative Openings and World-Making: Postcritique, Reparative Readings, and Anzaldúa’s Borderlands”. Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, vol. 21, no. 1, Oct. 2020, pp. 25-42, doi:10.5283/copas.333.

Issue

Vol. 21 No. 1 (2020)

Section

Articles

License

Creative Commons License

Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgment of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal.