Natalie Cisneros

This chapter shows how Friedrich Nietzsche’s work on genealogy can be read critically and strategically alongside Gloria Anzaldúa’s thought to develop a conception of “embodied genealogy” as a mode of critical, historical, and transformative philosophical practice. Anzaldúa’s thought resonates with Nietzsche’s conception of genealogy, a method of philosophical practice that sheds critical light on dominant ways of knowing by calling into question assumptions about historical necessity and rational progress. Reading Anzaldúa’s work through this lens sheds light on her contributions to philosophical conversations about knowledge, identity, and community. Anzaldúa’s work can also be read as a productive critique and necessary supplement to a Nietzschean conception of genealogical ways of knowing. Considering Anzaldúa’s thought and Nietzschean genealogy together yields a rich philosophical ground for thinking through questions about knowledge, embodiment, and identity in general, and the intellectual and political practice of Latina feminist philosophy in particular.

Western philosophy’s relationship with prisons stretches from Plato’s own incarceration to the modern era of mass incarceration. Philosophy Imprisoned: The Love of Wisdom in the Age of Mass Incarceration draws together a broad range of philosophical thinkers, from both inside and outside prison walls, in the United States and beyond, who draw on a variety of critical perspectives (including phenomenology, deconstruction, and feminist theory) and historical and contemporary figures in philosophy (including Kant, Hegel, Foucault, and Angela Davis) to think about prisons in this new historical era. All of these contributors have experiences within prison walls: some are or have been incarcerated, some have taught or are teaching in prisons, and all have been students of both philosophy and the carceral system. The powerful testimonials and theoretical arguments are appropriate reading not only for philosophers and prison theorists generally, but also for prison reformers and abolitionists.

In this paper, I provide an analysis of the emergence of “problematic of alien sexuality.” I first locate discourses about “alien sexuality,” and the so-called anchor baby in particular, within other national discourses surrounding maternity, the fetus, and citizenship. I analyze the ways that national political discourses surrounding “anchor babies” and “alien maternity” construct the “problematic of alien sexuality,” thus constituting the “alien” subject as always-already perverse. I suggest that this production of a sexually deviant and threatening “alien” subject functions in the normative dichotomy that places the sexually pure citizen on the one hand, and the perverse anticitizen on the other, in what I call “backwards uncitizening.” My analysis of this process shows that the perverse “alien” subject, as constituted in significant part by nonjuridical normalizing mechanisms of biopower, resists the juridical discourse that is supposed to determine it