Gender on the Borderlands: Re-textualizing the Classics

Gender on the Borderlands: Re-textualizing the Classics

Deena J. González

Special Issue, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies: 24(2)Antonia Castañeda and Sue Armitage, Eds. 2003.

It has not been terribly popular to read against the racial grain, even in western/frontier U.S. history circles. Many texts and other efforts move toward multicultural inclusion or diversity training. To incorporate race or to address racism, however, is not the same as reading against the grain. Including race, or culture, or ethnicity simply means that an effort has been expended in the direction of a contribution, but the effort is not a fundamental reassessment of the old order of things. Reading in a contradictory way, or pulling out of texts contradictions and foolish logic on the basis of race or ethnicity, can be a lonely scholarly undertaking, depending on the author’s position in the academy. Sometimes it even results in poor teaching evaluations because the modern classroom is still grounded on affirmation and confirmation, on supporting a canon and not its revision. To envision bold and fierce re-readings of the historical record can also result in a divided classroom, a besieged professorate, or a university in crisis. With ethnic studies endeavors of recent decades, however, a great deal of thought has gone into how one “teaches truths to power.” The simple phrase captures eloquently a fundamental university mission (search for truth) as it lays bare the most basic reality: Those speaking truth are sometimes not in control of institutions of higher learning.