Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles by Paula M. L. Moya "

Book Description In Learning from Experience, Paula Moya offers an alternative to some influential philosophical assumptions about identity and experience in contemporary literary theory. Arguing that the texts and lived experiences of subordinated people are rich sources of insight about our society, Moya presents a nuanced universalist justification for identity-based work in ethnic studies.

This strikingly original book provides eloquent analyses of such postmodernist feminists as Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, Norma Alarcón, and Chela Sandoval, and counters the assimilationist proposals of minority neoconservatives such as Shelby Steele and Richard Rodriguez. It advances realist proposals for multicultural education and offers an understanding of the interpretive power of Chicana feminists including Cherríe Moraga, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Helena María Viramontes. Learning from Experience enlarges our concept of identity and offers new ways to situate aspects of race, gender, class, and sexual orientation in discursive and sociopolitical contexts.

[edit]

DISCUSSION

I find it difficult to write about Learning from Experience, especially given the expertise and eloquence Moya commands of the English language. I am humbled by her argument and recognize that I may never have the words to express as succinctly the experience of what it means to me being Chicano/a.

I recall in class this past week the difficult I had in expressing my understanding of Moya’s writing about experience shaping identity. In her introduction she writes about Joan Scott’s position that experience prevents, rather then allows “critical analyses of the constitutive working of the discursive system through identities (and experiences) are produced” (p. 6). I have not been exposed to Scott's work so I plan to visit the library and see what she has to say about Experience but it sounds like she discounts it. Moya states “thus, in her efforts to establish the correct causal (and historical) relationship between discourse, experience, subjectivity, and identity, Scott, effectively delegitimizes experience as an authroitave source for knowledge. Supposedly, this position reinforces postmodernism that would have us believe it’s all about the power of langue and systems of discourse that create a relative experience of reality. It follows then that actions, accountability and responsibility become meaningless. This was illustrated in a footnote about Butler’s analysis of the New Bedford rape case at the end of “Contingent Foundations. In her deconstruction of a question of the defense attorneys asked of the rape victim, Butler concludes that the real culprit of the crime is the ‘category of sex.’ She writes: ‘Here sex is a category, but not merely a representation; it is a principle of production, intelligibility, and regulation which enforces a violence and rationales it after the fact. The very term by which the violation is explained enact the violation, and concede that the violation was under way before it take the empirical form of a criminal act…As a category that effectively produced the political meaning of what it describes, ‘sex’ here works its silent ‘violence’ in regulating what is and is not designatable (19).” Moya counters by exposing two problems “the first is that by focusing on the relationship between the rape and discourse (‘the very terms by which the violation is explained enact the violation…’), Butler misrepresents the causal nature of the crime. She presumes, but never shows, that the categories she exocoriates (sex and identity) determine that such violations will inevitably occur. It is the unsupported presumption that underlies her claim that ‘the violation was under way, before it take the empirical form of a criminal act.” Meanwhile, the agency (not to mention responsibility) of the men is erased; she represents them as mere ‘effects’ of discourse, as subjects mobilized thorough the grammar of the discourse that has ‘produced’ them.’ The second problem is that by focusing on the words spoken by the defense attorney, Butler unwittingly silences the victim and ignores her experience of the rape.

In class I shared a persona experience of living in a men’s homeless shelter, when I moved to Massachusetts. On a toss of a coin, tales was east coast, and heads was west, I ended up in Boston. I arrived with less than $40 in my pocket. I didn’t know any one but I knew what it was to be homeless from a previous experience, so I immediately searched for available resources. I found myself at the Salvation Army in Cambridge. I recall seeing men who also had that look on their face “how did I end up here?” I recall having to be in by 7:00 p.m. or risk loosing my space in the shelter. In the hall, I sat at a table drinking coffee, not feeling like I really belonged there. Inside, I felt a deep sense of shame and abandonment, which has more to do with the back-story that had me here in the first place. I shared that I tied my boots around my wrist to insure that no one took them in the night. The next morning, I got up and was assigned the cleaning of the restrooms. My military service reinforced the idea that the “head” should be cleaned right, so I was in there with bleach and Ajax scrubbing out the urinals and toilets. I enjoyed cleaning away shit and piss stains as if it was a cathartic cleansing of my sins. One of the regular guys came in and said to me, “Hey dude, this is not the Taj Mahal.” Feeling sheepish, I put away the cleaning supplies and started my day in search of a job and a more stable living arrangement. I only spent one night in that shelter, I moved to the Harvard Men’s Shelter located in the basement of a Lutheran Church. Within three months I had my own apartment in Somerville and a year later I started my MSW program at Boston College. After sharing this story, one of my classmates asked “What’s your point”? I felt embarrassed because I was not sure how to articulate the point.

After reading Chapter 1, I feel I’m better able to express my point. While reading this chapter, I understood Moya on many different levels and was grateful for helping me to finally understand the writing of Moraga and Anzaldúa. Like my colleague, I always wondered what the point of their stories and metaphors and how that related to me. The theory in the flesh has captured my experience in a way I was never able to articulate before. I am a Chicano/a - I know some would ask why I’m putting the “a” at the end of Chicano (which indicates a male gender) those who truly know me, know that as a child I thought of myself as a girl. As such, I was beaten, raped, humiliated and shared in the right of passage that many young girls in our culture experience. I’ve always said, I know what it is to be raped in more ways then physical. Talk about embodied knowledge. It is this experience that has made me acutely aware of the social dynamics that include use of language, social roles, and expectations of normal and deviance. Even as a young child, I observed the agreed upon reality where perpetrator was able to define reality, creating an illusion that we all get along, while simultaneously being aware that an alternative reality was taking place, unseen to most of the people in the social situation. I learned at an early age not to speak of these incidents, silenced, because they revealed a dark world of human oppression. It has been my life long journey to understand this by studying theory of social life and how to give voice to this silenced experience in order to create a better world. Like Moraga’s interview, I know (1) the family as the primary instrument of socialization (2) the need for theory to be grounded in emotional investment (3) the link between social location and experience (4) the body as a source of knowledge and (5) the cerntrality of struggle to the formation of her political consciousness. (p. 49)