“Down into your cunt”: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Drawings as Queer Feminist Eco-Repair

In the late 1970s, the feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa began a rigorous daily practice of drawing and meditation, to help heal her body from the effects of agricultural pesticide exposure. Her drawing practice developed alongside her long study of pre-Columbian art, from which she adapted numerous formal tropes from Aztec and Mixtec images. Her works on paper not only influenced her feminist written work; they expanded into public guided meditations that she offered while working as an adjunct professor at three different universities in California. In these meditations Anzaldúa invited listeners to visualize a set of roots emerging from their lower bodies that would then grow into the ground, spreading out as new and abundant lands. At the time, Anzaldúa was experimenting with various healing methods to help her address the hormonal imbalances that she had suffered since childhood – problems that stemmed from her exposure to pesticides in the Texas-Mexico agricultural fields where she and her family worked.

This paper situates the drawings in relation to her audio archive for the first time, identifying the queer feminist Borderlands ecological imaginary – a constructed, shared past that extended across the U.S. and Latin America – that Anzaldúa employed to heal the body’s dissonant states of being. As memories of ecologically damaged lands and bodies increasingly infused her theoretical writings and other works on paper, her meditations maintained an ongoing dialogue with pattern and atmosphere, to imagine an ephemeral, alternative corporeal state that re-positioned what it meant to “work the land.”