Shapeshifting Subjects

Cultural theorist and creative writer Gloria Anzaldúa is known for her ideas introduced in her mixed-genre, multilingual, groundbreaking book Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, a personal and political history of the US-Mexican border. Of her many concepts explored by scholars, one has remained undertheorized until this project: la naguala, meaning shapeshifter in the still widely spoken Mesoamerican language of Nahuatl. In Shapeshifting Subjects: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Naguala and Border Arte, Kelli D. Zaytoun finds in Anzaldúa’s naguala not a metaphor in the traditional sense but a cutting-edge theory and creative practice that reveal a radically relational consciousness at work with decolonial potential. Zaytoun brings attention to Anzaldúa’s shapeshifting-inspired practice of border arte, examining her careful use of an Indigenous past as well as the ways her shapeshifting responds to transgenerational trauma and healing. Analyzing Anzaldúa’s oeuvre in conversation with Latina/x feminist phenomenology, posthumanism, new materialisms, Indigenous feminist theories, and Nahua metaphysics, Zaytoun argues that shapeshifting border artists and their witnesses enact a practice of personal and coalitional transformation that functions outside modern epistemologies and aesthetics to resist multiple forms of oppression. This transdisciplinary book also brings the concept of shapeshifting into conversation with diasporic Arab feminists, building on Anzaldúa’s interest in working across differences and honoring intersectional experience while addressing the drawbacks of identity politics.