Copping Out: Internalizing Subversion

Like Gates, the both Anzaldua and Campbell look at personal language practices as ways to subvert the institutional language practices that dominant and diminish cultural identities.  In Campbell’s text, she focuses primarily on how patriarchy is structured within the institution through law—such as how marital law is structured to make women inferior.  She explains that patriarchal structure in Western culture deems that a women is “unsexed” when she succeeds and a male is “unsexed” when he fails. Anzaldua focuses on how the linguistic and cultural structure of language reinforces the inferiority or marginalized groups, but specifically, makes the connection between personal, ethnic identity and linguistic identity:

“So, if you want to really hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity—I am my language” (1588)

Anzaldua is demonstrating how language—structured to prefer white males—unconsciously allows marginalized groups to internalized his or her perceived inferiority. Campbell also discusses how this structure allows women to internalize their inferiority to where they don’t see themselves as “agents of change” (128).  Anzaldua and Campbell both recognize this internalization and make a theory of language that attempts to combat this internalization.  To Anzaldua, writing and articulating experience is way to understand domination: “But, in reconstructing the tramas behind the images, I make ‘sense’ of them, and once they have ‘meaning’ they are changed, transformed” (1594).  Writing is a way of labeling experience to come to terms with the cognitive dissonance—the cultural ambiguity—that confuses the sense of identity and belonging.  Anzaldua focuses her attention on the act or experience of writing and communicating as a way to understand the self in relation to the world—to make a commitment about the experiences we’re making.  Campbell also discusses “consciousness raising” as a way to subvert the dominant structures—combatting internalization, but also as a way for solidarity between other women who share similar experiences and dominantion.  “Consciousness raising” involves both subversion, solidarity, but also for the self to recognize their own identity in relation to the world.  Anzaldua synthesizes well by explaining; “The word, the image and the feeling have a palatable energy, a kind of power” (1594).  The act of writing and communicating is a powerful tool to make change in this world to understand the self, the world, and how we are distinct.

As a side note, I want to also comment on this idea of “copping out”—both Campbell and Anzaldua mention this idea of “copping out” as a way of simplifying the complexity and multiplicity of identities and language practices.  Campbell mentions how internalization allows women to give themselves reductive labels—“’cop out’” (129)—instead of discovering their selves through writing.  Anzaldua also talks about giving ourselves reductive labels of race to move through contexts silent—without making waves in the structure of the language or institution (1590).  Anzaldua and Campbell would (probably) agree that these series of “cop outs” are moments where the structure has successfully internalized the power structures—the battle comes when actually writing and discovering what the self truly means to oneself and in relation to the world.