“The Cyborg Coyote: Generating Theory in the Borderlands”

Like early feminism, borderlands theory is still (and properly so) an amalgamation of often competing voices and visions, slashing across feminism, Marxism, postcolonial theory, frontier theory, postmodernism, queer theory, and race and identity studies. And like early feminism, it is still sometimes viewed as dangerously unfixed, inhabiting the margins of academia, an iconoclastic outlaw challenging dominant paradigms and charging roughshod across disciplinary borders. It is also perhaps only natural then, that borderlands theory may be viewed as the offspring of two iconoclastic Western foremothers: Gloria Anzaldúa and Donna Haraway . This essay will explore two texts rarely brought together but which I argue form the foundations of the critical apparatus of contemporary borderlands theory. My goal is to examine the synergistic matrix that emerges from the confluence of two foundational works—Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) and Haraway’s 1985 essa