Let me speak then of my own work.

 

I came of age in rhetoric and composition as it grew into a field focused on interdisciplinarity and multiple cultural approaches. I focus my teaching on the multiple border spaces of identity and writing; in my teaching, then, I try to encourage the direct questioning of text, power, and identity that is at the heart of contemporary composition and rhetoric. Like Royster and Kirsch, I believe in the necessity of critical imagination, strategic contemplation, social circulation, and globalization. My lived experience, and my students’ lived experience, does not serve the purpose of canned “personal essays” but instead cultivates a robust inquiry into the connection between personal and political, private and public, individual and system. I court both conflict and respect. Since conflict is unavoidable in the context of passionate engagement with a topic, we need to be able to question boundaries and reposition ourselves in order to fully engage the material. Part of that positioning and repositioning takes the form of accepting the multiple and conflicting standpoints we contain even within ourselves.

 

I use the term standpoint deliberately here to evoke Nancy Hartsock’s elucidation of that theory as yet another tangled line in the rootstock of my feminist practice. I will, however, tangle that line further with critique, for while I certainly appreciate the use of situated knowledge for making theory, that theory has itself been roundly criticized for reinscribing essentialist, positivist thought—especially in relation to groups living within and without the borders/margins of white feminism. More productive here is a theory of plural, overlapping, transformational standpoints—thresholds—articulated by AnaLouise Keating. For Keating, thresholds are "complex interconnections among a variety of sometimes contradictory worlds—points crossed by multiple intersecting possibilities, opportunities, and challenges" (10). Threshold theories come from a place of radical relationality, a nonoppositional view of difference, a sense of "raw openness" to change (56). Discussing Anzaldúa's nepantla as a threshold theory, Keating writes:

 

Nepantla represents an unstable, unpredictable, precarious, transitional space/time/epistemology lacking clear boundaries, directions, or definitions. . . . During nepantla, our status-quo stories and comfortable self-conceptions are shattered as apparently fixed meanings and categories—whether based on gender, ethnicity/"race," sexuality, religion, nationality, politics, family, or some combination of these categories and perhaps others as well—unravel. (56–57)

 

What is a threshold, the site of such unraveling? A point between, belonging to neither. A doorway facing both sides; and when one threshold opens to the next, we find an endless chain of facing/approaching/leaving. Like the rhizome, like rootstock, thresholds assume—no, demand—a dynamic, bobbing-and-weaving approach that, as I wrote in Radical Feminism, Writing, and Critical Agency, is a hallmark of feminist textuality. Our own radical alterity, and our own tangled response to it, can work as resistance, as critical energy.