This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

Chapter 2, “Entering the Lives of Others: Theory in the Flesh,” aims to ground white-dominated academic feminist theory in the lived experiences of Third World women. As with the first chapter, the initial piece, “Wonder Woman” by Genny Lim, is a play on the familiar sentiment that all women are connected through womanhood, despite their differences. However, Lim takes care to express those identities that set women apart from each other. Lim’s piece provides a transition into the following prose and poetry that elaborates on the ways that different identities can intersect within the realm of womanhood.

In “La Güera,” Cherríe Moraga discusses the relative privilege she experienced being both white and Chicana while passing for Caucasian. By characterizing her realization of lesbianism as a turning point when she better understood the discrimination against her Chicana mother, she is giving readers an example of ways both privilege and oppression can intersect in a unique identity. She also explores concepts of race and ethnicity as they relate to sexuality, which complicates theoretic concepts by combining all three in a single narrative.

In both zooming in on her personal experiences and broadening out to the role of Asian Americans in America, Mitsuye Yamada considers her internalized patriarchal beliefs and the status of Asian Americans in “Invisibility is an Unnatural Disaster.” Her reflections on her life reveal how her understanding of her identities has evolved from acceptance of instances of racism and sexism, and subsequent perpetuation, to a growing awareness of both self and others. She draws parallels between her evolution and that of Asian Americans as a group, especially women, likening the invisibility she faces from white people and men to the wider invisibility of Asian Americans in the US. By naming this invisibility and the ways she has internalized her oppression, she is outlining a path for fellow Asian Americans, especially women, to actively step forward from the background and be advocates for themselves.

Continuing on the complication of oppression, both within and outside of Third World communities, Anita Valerio, now Max Valerio, describes the multifaceted oppression he faces in “It’s in My Blood, My Face—My Mother’s Voice, the Way I Sweat.” In being a Native American, he and his community members were violently discriminated against by white Americans, but even within his community he was oppressed for his womanhood and for being a lesbian at the time of his poem’s publication. Barbara Cameron is another queer Native American writer who contributed “Gee, You Don’t Seem Like an Indian from the Reservation,” in which she similarly describes discrimination from white people, but also from fellow Third World people, stating that there needs to be an exchange, that “we not only must struggle with the racism and homophobia from straight white America, but must often struggle with the homophobia that exists within our third world communities” (45).

“…And Even Fidel Can’t Change That!” by Aurora Levins Morales also looks at internalized oppression within the Third World community with her examples of misogyny that her fellow Latinas perpetuate. These three poems go further into the perspective of identity within Third World groups, countering mainstream theory that focuses mainly on people of color within a white context. By tackling the issue of internalized oppression and oppression that marginalized communities perpetuate, they are fleshing out the concept of intersectionality and adding nuance to mainstream feminism and activism of the time.

Mitsuye Yamada also considers her internalized patriarchal beliefs in “Invisibility is an Unnatural Disaster,” reflecting back on her life as an Asian-American woman and how her understanding of those identities has evolved from acceptance and unintended perpetuation to a growing awareness of both self and others. As a younger woman, she treated instances of racism and sexism she faced both within and outside of her community as “natural,” as if the racism and sexism were “objective events totally out of my control” (34). She draws parallels between the invisibility she faces from white people and men and that of all Asian Americans. By naming this invisibility and the ways she internalizes oppression, she encourages fellow Asian Americans, especially women, to actively step forward from the background. The chapter ends with a poem by Chrystos, “I Walk in the History of My People,” taking the historical event of the Battle of Wounded Knee and turning it into a metaphor, embodying the wound of Indigenous oppression as an injury of her own knee, creating a sense of immediacy by detailing the physical harm in explicit detail while tethering it to her cultural inheritance.

By moving from the well-laid track of commonality among women to the diversity of oppressions different women face, Chapter 2 complicates feminist, economic, cultural, and race theory by examining the lives of women who are unable to separate their identities. The chapter includes the facet of queerness, which was far less accepted even by activist groups of the time. Supporting this new examination, we see concrete examples of what it means for some women to live with color, womanhood, poverty, and/or queerness, rather than focusing on removed academic analyses, which were often written and published by white feminist scholars during this time. This intimacy adds a vital humanness and empathy to what the authors consider an over-intellectualized topic.