Quiz 4- FINAL
Natalie Cisneros
Quiz 4: Final
Analyze each of the following passages by answering each of the three sets of questions/ following the directions below for each passage. Each set of responses should be between 250 and 300 words (the entire quiz should be between 1000 and 1200 words total). Email completed responses directly to me at ncis...@allegheny.edu
1. How does this passage relate to the text as a whole? Where does it fall in
the text, and why?
2. What does this passage mean? What is your interpretation of the passage? Define all major terms.
3. Explain the significance of the passage. Why is this a particularly important or philosophically significant passage?
“Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants. Los atravesados life here: the squint-eyed, the perverse, the queer, the troublesome, the mongrel, the mulato, the half-breed, the half dead; in short, those who cross over, pass over, or go through the confines of the “normal.”” (Borderlands/La Frontera, 25).
“There is something compelling about being both male and female, about having an entry into both worlds. Contrary to some psychiatric tenets, half and halfs are not suffering from a confusion of sexual identity, or even from a confusion of gender. What we are suffering from is an absolute despot of duality that says we are able to be only one or the other. It claims that human nature is limited and cannot evolve into something better. But I, like other queer people, am two in one body, both male and female. I am the embodiment of the hieros gamos: the coming together of opposite qualities within” (Borderlands/La Frontera, 41).
“There are many defense strategies that the self uses to escape the agony of inadequacy and I have used all of them. I have split from and disowned those parts of myself that others rejected. I have used rage to drive others away and to insulate myself against exposure. I have reciprocated with contempt for those who have roused shame in me. I have internalized rage and contempt, one part of the self (the accusatory, resucatory, judgmental) using defense strategies against another part of the self (the object of contempt)” (Borderlands/La Frontera, 67).
“Writing produces anxiety. Looking inside myself and my experience, looking at my conflicts, engenders anxiety in me. Being a writer feels very much like being a Chicana, or being queer—lots of squirming, coming up against all sorts of walls. Or its opposite: nothing defined or definite, a boundless, floating state of limbo where I kick my heels, brood, percolate, hibernate and wait for something to happen” (Borderlands/La Frontera, 94).