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I hinted in my previous post that maybe I should do an illustrated version of my in-process book, Zen and the Artful Buddhist: Asperger’s, Art, and Academia. I have illustrated a few pages, but it’s taking far longer than I imagined it would. This book idea has been percolating for a few years. Some days I want it to be published by an academic press, but now that it’s morphed into an illustrated book, I’m not so sure about an academic press. The book meanders. As does my mind. All the time. Illustrating the book feels right: it’s creative, innovative, and will illustrate (literally) my evolving understanding of how I’ve been impacted by learning late in life that I have Asperger Syndrome (now, a part of ASD, Autism Spectrum Disorder). One need not have Asperger’s to reflect on one’s life, to be sure. Yet this is the lens through which I see more clearly my years as a professor.Before starting to illustrate the book, I was working on and off on another large (31x51 inches) painting. I only work on the painting an hour or so at a time, since it requires intense concentration and it is physically demanding. It requires standing, and the more I paint, the further I have to reach to complete rows higher on the paper, creating strain on my back, eyes, and wrist, to name a few. This current painting is precisely what I have been working on at various points for the past several years, namely short, parallel lines in multiple rows. While working on the piece, I thought a lot about my teaching style.So far, my illustrated book project shows various connections between my art, Asperger’s, Buddhism, and academia – all large topics themselves. I’m not an expert on Asperger’s, but what I’ve learned provides insight into my art-making. And insofar as any artwork contains the “fingerprints” of the artist, my pattern-heavy, highly-repetitive paintings also connect to themes I recognize in how I taught my courses. Of course, I could add much more nuance, but here is a short list of Asperger-related traits that run through my art and teaching:Detail: I always thought it was normal to focus on details, but I see now that I was having students look at the trees so much that we sometimes would miss the forest;Precision: accurate pronunciation of foreign terms (e.g., Sanskrit);Repetition: similar assignments, just different material;Nuance: overall picture shows nuances, but one still needs to look intently at the details first;Plans: agonizing over planning the syllabus every semester.My latest large painting contains roughly thirty-one thousand parallel lines, each one fitted within a half inch band of parallel lines. Like my teaching, it contains lots of details, all of which are necessary for building the overall painting. Looking back on my teaching, I now wonder what sort of balance I struck between looking at the individual lines/trees and making clear the connections that were being constructed throughout the course/forest. While illustrating my book project, I see similar challenges emerging. My next (illustrated) post will delve into more nuances about my progress.

(An audio version of this blog may be found here.) My editor is one of my most ardent supporters and a beloved friend. We are working, together, on my next book. He has not, in many months, received any pages from me. At a recent gathering, he asked me if I had been writing.My editor’s question was not intended as chastisement nor judgement. His tone of voice was casual, even pleasant. Immediately upon hearing his question, I felt a pang of shame or guilt or embarrassment—one of those kinds of stomach feelings that confirms that you are doing something irresponsible or questionable or inappropriate. Thankfully, my stomach relaxed as quickly as it had tightened. I told him I had not been writing. My editor waited for the explanation or the details. I told him that in the last few months, the time I had previously devoted to writing is now being used for coloring. I expected him to be surprised, but instead he was quizzical.He asked me what I liked about coloring. I really didn’t have an answer—I had not reflected on “why” I liked it. Again, my stomach flinched as if I was childish/shy—pointlessly confessional. I realized that while I am greatly enjoying my new-found hobby, I question my time being spent in this way—especially if it means that I am not writing. Then he said (knowing me and my ways)—it’s probably meditative. I accepted his speculation, then I told him I wanted him to look through my coloring books, select the best pieces. I wanted to display my best pieces in my house. He agreed.Coloring has become my new jam! But I am cautious, hesitant…The impulse to color was strong during the quarantine, but I resisted it. At that time, the activity seemed frivolous and lacking in enough “productive merit” to warrant pursuit. Then in January of this year, a roundtable participant gifted me with a coloring book and colored pencils. During that meeting I began to color.  Since that meeting, coloring has become a major past-time. My hesitancy is that I still question my use of time for this enjoyable activity.When I color, I lose myself. It is a way to relax, enjoy the moment. I focus without concern or worry. When I color there is no cynicism or irony. There is no pursuit. I am not prey. The worries, sorrows, and nameless fears dissipate. While I know these merits and I need these moments, I still question my time being used in this way.In recent months, I have explored varieties of implements: pencils, pens, gels, glitters and markers. I now have opinions about fine lines, thick lines and double-sided utensils. Last week, while grocery shopping, I swung past the back-to-school display to see if there were any markers or colored pencils I was unacquainted with or any refills I might make use of. I made a purchase.My fascination with this newfound hobby is multi-faceted. I am captured by learning to work with color (itself). I am intrigued by the many tints, tones, hues, and shades of any one color, while also being annoyed that for our limited eyesight there are only a few colors in our spectrum. Yes, white and black provide a bit more variability, but not much. I have a very wide lexicon for the color green. I am getting more acquainted with red.I have learned that the more acquainted I am with a particular subject or object, the more detailed is my coloring of it. This is why I know green. I am a long-time gardener. I have deep knowledge of trees, flowers, vegetables, bees, birds, soils, rocks and weather. I noticed that when I color a forest scene or landscape a kind of intimate knowing comes into play. I have clarity for the colors I select and the mood I create. When realistic precision is not the aim, I enjoy coloring geometric shapes and patterns.  In these pages there are no preconceived ideas of how things “should” look. The freedom of coloring without rules or prescriptions is refreshing.So many of my administrative duties are managing, planning, supporting, and caring. We set goals, know our aims, and reflect upon our experiences. The hours I spend coloring are hours devoted to creating beauty without the incumbrance of metrics or the obligation of accomplishment. Surely, this is, indeed, time well spent?Several years ago, I was a participant in a mid-career workshop which provided us the opportunity to develop an art or a craft. During conversation about which art or craft each participant might pursue the discussions grew tense. As colleagues considered their project options, they became stressed and felt pressed upon.  There were tears. After too much discussion, consternation, and push-back, our wise leader said,“Everything you put your mind to does not have to be at the highest echelon. You can do something on an amateur level. You can engage in something for the simple pleasure of enjoying it. You can learn something or relearn learn something without pressuring yourself to be the best at it. You can play at something without becoming an expert at it. Pick an artistic expression that will bring you joy.”This lesson stays with me. This is why I color.I have not stopped writing. I have started coloring. Right now, expressing ideas in colors feels better than expressing myself in words. I suspect the words will soon return. I hope the colors never depart.

  For two years I planned my full-year sabbatical, something colleagues said would be a life-changing experience. My sabbatical days were filled with research and art-making. By spring, making art nudged research out of the picture. I was transitioning from an art hobbyist to an art professional. The thought of spending my days teaching made me physically ill, despite the fact that I had poured much of my time into continually improving my pedagogy. This change of attitude was not due to boredom, burnout, or frustration over university politics. I was an artist, full stop, so that’s how I chose to live. Two years later, I took an early retirement package. I have wanted to write a book about these developments, something I might title Zen and the Artful Buddhist: Asperger’s, Art, and Academia. But I don’t have the time, energy, or inclination to write a book. However, creating an illustrated version does appeal to me, and I’ll say more about that in another post. I’m more realistic, and more selective about how I use my time now that I’m retired. A friend commented last week, “I’m not surprised that you have found new things to keep yourself busy.” My days are now spent in my art studio or at my part-time job at a local art gallery and framing shop. Down the hall is my former colleague, who, during a sabbatical, said to herself “I’m done with teaching.” She was my department chair for ten years, and she is my best (artist) friend. We regularly critique each other’s work and go for beer at 3:30 (aka “beer:30”) in the afternoon because we can. Plus, the pub is on the ground floor, two doors down. She moved out-of-state two weeks ago, and there’s now a feeling of loss each time I enter my studio. I’ve started painting a lot of intricate, repetitive patterns lately, something I was doing regularly a few years ago. People often comment that my art and art-making processes must be spiritual and/or meditative. With my pattern-heavy art, I can see what they mean, but I still refuse to use the word “spiritual” in general or in reference to my artwork. Something about the repetition of patterns calls for deep concentration. It’s also very soothing, calming any Asperger Syndrome-related anxiety. I often tune out my surroundings by putting in my earbuds and listening to my “liked songs” playlist. My music is not soothing to most people, but repetitive sounds soothe many folks with Asperger’s. My days are spent either working in a place that is part of the art community, or in my studio making art. As one of my art mentors used to say in figure drawing class — I took a few summer courses — “This is the hardest thing you are going to do today.” Art making is hard work. It calls for constant decisions, corrections, redirections, planning, and more. And then there are all the questions about why you made those choices. It never ends. And I’ve said nothing about all the other aspects of being an artist, like marketing your work, and so on. I suppose I will say more about living as a full-time artist in another post.

“I just do not know if I have it in me to write another paper” were one student’s words midway through my Hosea exegesis course. By this time, I was on my third semester of pandemic teaching. Zoom fatigue had set in alongside our unceasing grief for the daily Coronavirus death tolls. Hearing each other in a virtual space that seemed coerced and yet routine was not limited to a spotty Wi-Fi signal or faulty audio equipment. Our hearing—that kind we learn from—had fallen numb. Pre-pandemic, the design and pedagogical approach to my Hosea exegesis course had reached a sweet spot. I had a good learning balance between group work (contextualizing the biblical critic and reading in community) and individual final projects. As for the psychosocial dynamics of this space, it was easy to read the feeling states in the room—enervation, anxiety, but also, surprise, discovery, or intrigue. And by midway through the course, everything in my syllabus usually went as planned, barring a few late papers. As such, hearing to learn and learning to hear seemed to work harmoniously with our embodied practices in the classroom. The abrupt shift to pandemic teaching posed unique challenges to my hearing-learning reflexes. Upon reflection, the issue was not auditory but rather a stale hollowness of presence or what I call “the hollow hearing effect.” Arriving at this diagnosis of the learning experience was, indeed, a process, beginning with the shocking midsemester flip to online teaching to running a new learning platform to revamping my syllabi for a new virtual world of teaching Bible. Soon, the rhythms of my synchronized classroom felt random and sluggish, in part because of our connectedness to the globe’s misery but disconnectedness on Zoom. Then comes spring 2021, the semester of my Hosea exegesis course. Going in, I recall feeling optimistic about my redesigned syllabus. Instead of my usual “reading in community” group assignment, I had students contribute asynchronously to a video community commentary. Here, students created a ten-minute video in which they read their English translation of the assigned Hebrew verse, highlighted one major poetic feature, discussed two contrasting interpretations, and lastly applied their reading to a contemporary issue (e.g., trauma, migration, empire, gender, violence, justice). Below each uploaded video commentary, students had the opportunity to pose questions and offer constructive feedback. Each week, their online community commentary unfolded according to plan. Although their feedback fell between modest and missing, their videos showed a genuine and critical engagement with Hosea. I was especially moved by their applications of Hosea to various contemporary issues (white privilege, anti-black violence, family separation at the Texas-Mexico border, reproductive justice, the pandemic, etc.). Despite the decent success of this assignment, students were still coping with the constraints and hardships caused by COVID-19. While I could help them decipher the trauma in Hosea, I had difficulty reading their own learning woes online. By week ten, it finally became apparent that my syllabus’ mechanical precision did not exempt students from the grief-inducing complexities of a global pandemic. Their day-to-day angst of forced immobility and family separation were coupled with a weekly dose of prophetic texts rife with trauma, violence, and abuse. Add to this their application of Hosea to contemporary traumas, and the results were a learning breakdown. Once I was made aware of this, I felt like I do when I travel with my family through an international airport. Usually, I am leading the way to our connecting gate. Without looking back, I soon go from a steady walk to a marathon-style stride. Though I arrive on time, my family is nowhere to be seen. Out of breath, they finally arrive asking angrily, “Why didn’t you stop for us?” Hence, though I made it to week ten of my syllabus, my students were “crawling towards the finish line.” Unlike my airport marathon, I decided to put the brakes on my syllabus two weeks before my Hosea exegesis course ended. As a remedy to my students’ learning woes, I decided to offer them a second option for their final project. In lieu of an academic exegesis paper, students could submit an art exegesis project. Indeed, my recourse to art was not some random contrivance. From the standpoint of prophetic literature, the art of poetry served as a viable care-strategy for coping with the traumas of imperial conquest. Moreover, artmaking and the traumas of forced migration have been central to my advocacy work in the US-Mexico borderlands (see Arte de Lágrimas: Refugee Artwork Project). Thus, to turn to art for a final project made sense at a deeper level. In the end, every student in the course submitted an art exegesis project, which included original art, an art talk, and reflection. Here is an example of one student’s triptych art exegesis (oil paintings):   “I Will Tear” (Hosea 5:14)               “I will love them freely…And lengthen his roots” (Hosea 14:4-5)               “And Shall Arise among your people” (Hosea 10:14)           Among the responses, one student stated, “It revealed to me things about the text and about myself that I don’t think I would have seen doing my standard mode of exegesis.” As their teacher, it gave me a way of hearing my students that was far from hollow but rather healing.

(Part Five of a Five Part Serialized Blog) Art is a midwife of transformation and transmutation. Art transforms us through our encounter with it, both in the world and out of our hearts and hands. Art also transmutes what we’ve created into something meaningful and powerful for people other than ourselves. How many times have we written something, taught something, shared something, only to hear our students share with us that they received and heard something we would never have guessed? A midwife helps to bring forth new life, but soon afterward, the midwife departs, and it is our responsibility to nurture and care for that new and sacred life. Something I can’t quite name occurred in this class, and I don’t know if there is a map or a listicle that can help me or you recreate it. Perhaps the beginning of the map emerges from the questions I began to pose in the midst of the chaos and death of 2020. Is what I’m teaching, what I’m asking students to internalize and wrestle with, speaking forward into our futures? Whose futures? Is what I’m teaching meeting the needs—embodied, individual, and communal—that are making themselves known in the classroom? Or is my teaching, my agenda, burying those needs, diminishing what is being excavated and surfaced in student’s lives and in mine? Are participants, including myself, having to disengage with their innermost needs, their generational needs, to “learn”? I don’t know if I’ll ever teach the Spirituality and the Arts class again. It was suspended time. A unique experience that I am still processing and trying to understand. I am transformed by it. I will never see my students the same way again. The way they taught one another and me out of the wealth of their experiences, through what their heart and hands made, astounded me. Teaching art as theology and spirituality was a remarkable pivot from the face-to-face classroom and from the online classroom space that I had learned to carefully curate over the years. Centering art and art making as teacher felt like liminal space where the conditions, needs, questions, and urgency of the moment converged to build something that maybe couldn’t or shouldn’t be repeated. In many ways, this course took more out of me than any other class I’ve ever taught. It was also the pivot each of us needed in teaching and learning in theological education for these times. The course was a shift into the now and the immediacy of our collective consciousness and bodies moving through painful and joyful times together. The class was a shift into thinking beyond isolation, beyond death and death-dealing, into growing and truth telling. Art, both the process of making and sharing what we made, midwifed our anger, sorrow, grief, and joy in ways that a traditional course might not have made possible. It felt raw and holy. As a spiritual practice, our time together learning about the connection between art, spirituality, and theology became a collective prayer in many voices, uttering both similar and dissonant cries, chaotic and beautiful at the same time. We are each still discovering the ways in which the course, now complete, is ushering forth transformation and transmutation in our lives and being. And yes, everyone received an “A,” whatever that means now.

(Part Four of a Five Part Serialized Blog)  There’s a difference between mending and healing. When we talk of healing, we are talking about going back to the “before” times, back to the time before harm occurred. However, we can’t always return to those places, can we? When we talk about mending, we are describing something being patched up but still bearing the scars of the injury or wound. During the process of learning how to teach and participate in this course, I witnessed the power of art to mend. At the end of each two-week period, our classroom of artists would upload images of their pieces to our course page. We would meet together for two to three hours to share our work, to discuss together the challenges of making each piece, and to mark the spiritual shifts taking place through the practice of making art in the midst of everything happening in the world and in our personal lives. Darci and I facilitated the conversation and took the posture of co-learners with the artists in the space. We realized quickly that the process of making and sharing art was a spiritual practice for our class in this pandemic learning time, because of the way it reconnected the threads to one another that were severed through online learning and lockdowns. It also connected us by holding space for the ongoing rage and grief we felt. During the semester, Black people were continually murdered by police and vigilantes, and as we witnessed together the aftermath of the Atlanta spa shootings of Asian women. Art and the process of creating art did not allow us to cover up our feelings. Art exposed the anger and grief we felt, utterly and viscerally. Art did not make room for short cuts and avoidance of those experiences and reactions that felt raw and painful. Every two weeks, we gathered to witness, learn, and confront what art had brought out in us and through us. We participated in visible mending. Art stitched us together in our grief, joy, and gratitude in a time that felt like crisis and chaos. As part of each bi-weekly project, I posted a podcast discussing the material for the week together with current events and personal stories. The week of the Atlanta spa shootings hit me especially hard. I saw my mother and grandmothers in the faces and names of the women who were gunned down. Everything I knew and taught about U.S. imperialism, militarism, and the historic and policy-based sexualization of Asian women across the trans-pacific and here in the U.S. felt incredibly close. I kept thinking of every instance, and there have been many, where I or someone I knew was on the receiving end of anti-Asian racism and violence. I thought about the systematized invisibility of anti-Asian racism and violence and the gaslighting of Asian people at the denial of our histories and experiences. All of which were glaringly evident in the way police and the media reported on the Atlanta spa shootings. The rage bubbled over then, intermingled with the physical pain of grief, a burning spot in my chest that had been there my whole life, but felt suddenly unbearable. I wanted to cancel the podcast and cancel our class meet up for that week. I didn’t have the energy or the filter to proceed as normal. In a fog of grief, I swiftly wrote out the class cancelation email and the apology for the missing podcast, but I never sent it. After I wrote out the memo, I remembered what this class had shown and taught me through our weeks together. Art doesn’t cover up. Art radically reveals. Art calls us to bear witness to the truth-telling limited by words alone. I showed up that week when it would have been perfectly acceptable to disengage. I reframed the podcast around the texts of the lives of Asian women throughout U.S. history and trans-pacific history. What did it mean to un-colonize the image and embodiment of Asian women through the eyes of the divine presence? To unmake the lies about Asian women as only flesh for white supremacist consumption through the practices and processes of art? What would that mean to and for me as an Asian and Korean American woman? At the end of our class meeting, we closed with a practice I call the Gaze of Gratitude. A practice I’ve developed as an online teaching ritual, for times when words fail. We used Zoom in gallery mode to scroll through each square, to behold each artist’s face and without words, to gaze upon each person with gratitude and to allow that gratitude to peer and shine out of our eyes and expressions. I wept. I couldn’t help it. I was once again in awe of the space that making and talking about art could facilitate; a space to reveal and contribute to necessary mending in community.

As the fall semester draws to a close, I reflect on how our classrooms continue to absorb the dense impact of exhaustion, grief, and so many unknowns. The isolation and physical distancing brought by COVID-19 during the first months of 2020 have remained a reality for much longer than any of us could have anticipated. We have hardly been able to metabolize our grief, frustration, fatigue, and the toll the lack of contact and sensation has had on our bodies. Along with COVID-19, we have continued to somatize the woundedness of profound inequalities in our communities, as I have written elsewhere. From election cycles in the Américas, to ongoing anti-Black racism and violence, white supremacy, settler/extractive colonialism, racial capitalism, and cishet patriarchy, we continue to survive systems of exploitation, dominance, and oppressions of all tenors. In light of this historical moment, my colleague at the Pacific School of Religion, Dr. Aizaiah Yong, and I chose to codesign a syllabus that engaged formation through the lens of spirituality and leadership, in an attempt to deepen our lives individually and collectively. It intentionally centered the work of Black, Indigenous, and other scholars of color. We created a compendium aimed at sustaining our vitality, rootedness, and creativity during this period of remote learning where we surveyed practices and scholarship from varied religious traditions, geopolitical contexts, and artistic modalities. Throughout the last four months, our virtual classroom became a collaborative learning environment where coconspirators “identif[ied] and valorize[d] that which often does not even appear as knowledge in the light of the dominant epistemologies,” as de Sousa Santos puts it.[1] By privileging experiential epistemologies, we attempted to interrupt the dominant politics of knowledge and made every effort to enflesh sensorial experiences, understanding that they are fundamental in the shaping of knowledge and students’ formation. Corporeal ways of knowing presuppose contact, sensation, concrete, emergent, and living bodies, in all their capacity for suffering and healing, copresence and distance, for knowing-with rather than knowing-about. The semester’s various activities ranged widely: we created centering and closing moments where we could collectively breathe, built sacred spaces, performed an archeology of our joys, recollected our ancestral connections, our ecostories, ecomemories, understood land as formation, as pedagogy, thought about emergent strategies for transformation, engaged with how we metabolize anger, and how to develop a keener experience of tenderness.[2] Students were invited to imaginatively cocreate workshops, artworks, reflections, engage one another via a “spiritual formation virtual café” suggested by one student, raise difficult questions via online forums, and come up with field guides for spiritual formation with spiritual practices, reflections, centering moments, devotionals, rituals, meditations, art-making, embodied work, and much more. And yet all of these strategies seemed somewhat insufficient in our attempt to foster bonds of copresence, sensation, and contact that body-with-body classrooms offer. How could we respond to the urgencies, the sense of isolation, fragmentation, and the intensities of the present moment through remote learning? How could we open up the nexus of space-place-time to embodiment? How could we be responsive to Lama Rod Owens’ call to embodiment as a returning home to our bodies, in this moment and context, opening up some kind of spaciousness that could allow us to respond to both the woundedness and the joys of the now?[3] How could we cultivate embodiment in a virtual setting with a deep understanding “that disembodiment is the primary strategy through which oppression is maintained,” because we become desensitized to the conditions around us, to our emotions, to our sense of vitality, to that which deeply moves us and puts us back in touch with ourselves, our joys, pleasures, hopes, and dreams?[4] How would we subvert the logic of isolation and “presentify” zoom rooms so that a confluence of encounters, contact, and embodied sensation could transpire? How could we create a classroom experience based on a poetics of presence and intimacy as the artist Elisa Arruda invites us to create? By turning to creative practices and the arts, we were able to weave, potentialize, and ignite a process of contact and sensation. Each week, students received what we called Spiritual Formation Care Packages (SFCP), which were designed based on the readings for that week. They became a series of centering and creative exercises that invited us to meditate, embody, and create for about one full hour per week. The intention of these exercises was to provide support and an opportunity for creative embodiment, integrating what students learned in class with their own lived experiences, creative processes, spiritual traditions, and research. The SFCP ritualized and generated containers allowing students to tap into the power of their spiritualities and creative vigor. Inspired by my own art practices and the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, the packages afforded us an opportunity to sense how our skin, viscera, and psychosomatic bodies carry knowledge that—in moments of pain, dis-ease, conflict, and unknowingness—yield us the capacity to see, touch, and create in expansive and incendiary ways. Art, as Anzaldúa puts it, is the “locus of resistance, of rupture, implosion, explosion, and of putting together the fragments.”[5] It allows us to become anchored in our bodies, to “shock ourselves into new ways of perceiving the world,” to “feel our way without blinders,” to “touch more people,” to evoke the personal and social realities through blood, pus, and sweat. Our creative practices afford us the opportunity to access, re-member, and revive “what most links us with life.”[6] Art practices, as shown in the work of Elisa Arruda, embolden us to reclaim our processes of formation, fully embodying our shadows and desires for presence, joy, pleasure, restoration, expansion, contraction, proximity, sensation, and connection. [su_image_carousel source="media: 244745,244746,244747,244748,244749,244750,244751,244752,244753" limit="100" slides_style="photo" crop="none" align="left" max_width="2000" captions="yes"] About the Artist: Elisa Arruda is a visual artist who was born and raised in Belem do Pará, in the Amazonian region of Brazil. Currently living in São Paulo, Arruda investigates the poetics of intimacy, moving quite freely through several mediums. She pays particular attention to the realms of the domestic and the public as well as the tensions sheltered in dynamics of strength + fragility, endings + beginnings, intimacy + alienation, loss + growth, proximity + confinement. Notes [1] Boaventura de Sousa Santos, The End of Cognitive Empire: The Coming of Age of Epistemologies of the South (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 2. [2] For more on this, please refer to Eros and Ideologies by Laura E. Pérez, Voices from the Ancestors edited by Lara Medina and Martha Gonzales, Land as Pedagogy by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Ecowomanism by Melanie L. Harris, The Way of Tenderness by Zenju Earthlyn Manuel, and Love and Rage by Lama Rod Owen. [3] Lama Rod Owens, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger (Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books, 2020), 119-120. [4] Rod Owens, Love and Rage, 121. [5] Gloria Anzaldúa, The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, AnaLouise Keating, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 177. [6] Anzaldúa, “Speaking in Tongues: A Writer to Third World Women Writers,” 34.