Abstract
Critically investigating the concept of community, this article explores some of the ideological and epistemological frameworks that have defined both the potentialities and the limitations of community as a liberatory and/or liberated space. This article sheds light on how ambiguously identified, bodied, and placed people are affected by cultures and systems of oppression in ways that create unique tensions with community and generate knowledge of the meaning of community itself. The major foci include the transgression, occupation, and policing of racial, gendered, and sexualized borders. In the final section, emerging questions, reflections, and implications for the field of social welfare are discussed.
In everyday life, as well as across disciplines, diverse, and sometimes contradictory conceptualizations of community abound. Traditional discourse has tended to romanticize and stabilize the idea of community (Adelman & Frey, 1997); grounded in either geographic or identity-based commonalities, community is conceptualized as a real or imagined place where a sense of connectedness, belonging, and responsibility exists and meaning making happens (underwood & Frey, 2008; Willson, 2006). Important as these attributes are for individual and collective well-being, when “community” is perceived as static, apolitical, homogeneous, and lacking ambiguity, it can become a totalizing mechanism that suppresses difference (Young, 1990). In relation to communities of color, conventional discourse may make sexual diversity invisible; likewise, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) communities are often imagined as being white by default (Morrow, 2003; Nash, 2008). In traditional conceptualizations of community, therefore, the multidimensionality of marginalized populations is often unacknowledged.
Although the prevailing discourse on community often excludes the perspectives of marginalized populations, community is frequently used when describing them (Hill Collins, 2010). In this respect, the social work profession is no exception (note, e.g., the field’s tendency to use phrases like the
Despite these complexities, connections to community remain fundamental to how people make sense of everyday life and mobilize for action, making community a construct that is worth reconstructing in more expansive and flexible terms. Framing the discourse on community within the context of knowledge and power, I use the term
Community borders are fertile ground for understanding race, gender, and sexuality as systems of power in which cultures of oppression are not only acted out but transformed and resisted. I contend that community borders are transgressive spaces that are shifting, multidimensional, and highly political. As an act of decolonizing community, one can think about community borders as both geographic spaces and ways of knowing each other and ourselves. Furthermore, the ways in which community borders as physical and conceptual boundaries are positioned, passed through, and populated reflect how these spaces complicate notions of social justice.
Within this larger frame, a focus on ambiguity is necessary to challenge singular and simplistic ideas of community borders and belongingness. Focusing on ambiguity allows one to see how ideological structures mediate our ability to imagine what a community is and how its borders are defined. It also helps in better understanding how and why ideas of community are sometimes leveraged and abandoned. By centering the unique knowledges derived from within and across borders, one can better understand the potentialities, as well as the limitations, of community as both a liberated space and a mechanism for liberation.
In this article, I develop these arguments in five sections. In the first section, Reclaiming Community, I elaborate on how the idea of community can be used to resist and transform dominating forces, outlining issues that are related to borders around race, gender, and sexuality and the subjugation of knowledges that are generated from within these borderlands. In doing so, I examine community and community borders as catalysts of social justice, imbued with liberatory potential.
In the second section, Borderlands as an Endarkened Epistemology, I introduce the guiding framework of this article, a blend of Chicana feminisms and Latin American epistemology, both of which engage with the conceptual depth and dexterity of borders and borderlands. This framework includes an understanding of the physical body, its interpretation and location within and across borders as “something that knows” as well as a “way of knowing.” This framework is both sensitive and responsive to issues of power; it disrupts dominant conceptualizations of community, challenges the subjugation of certain knowledges, and advances social justice.
In the third section, Ambiguous Bodies Are Ambiguous Borders, I continue to push the theoretical framework of borders, borderlands, and border thinking. In particular, I push toward thinking about the body itself as a border with the potential to be
In the fourth section, Transgressing, Occupying, and Policing Borders, I begin with a brief discussion of the creation of and multiple interactions with borders as affected by cultures of oppression and the containment and management of otherness and difference and present three ways in which individuals and communities interact with these borders. The first way is through the
In the fifth section, Reflections for Social Welfare, I describe how thinking about community borders challenges some prevailing paradigms in social welfare and calls for the continual interrogation of disciplinary boundaries. In particular, I suggest that the complex geographies of the lived experience and knowledge generated by the body can lead to more inclusive understandings of how communities can be healed within and across borders. I also encourage further exploration of transgressive community practices and the translation of those knowledges and practices into scholarship and education.
Reclaiming Community
Two main contentions within the traditional discourse of community provide the starting point for this exploration. First, prevailing notions of community tend to fix identities and minimalize bodies
Second, prevailing constructions tend to fix community in space. Conflating geographic location with community, such constructions define community as a readily identifiable, bordered space that delineates who is inside and who is not. At the same time, the dominant discourse frames community in terms of connection, belonging, meaning making, and security while using community as a marker of difference. In doing so, it suggests sociospatial distance, obscures power relations, and conflates marginality and community. These constructions foreclose important conversations around lived experiences of community, experiences that are ambiguous, multidimensional, fluid, and liminal—that create and occupy, in fact, the borderlands.
Making space for experiences in the borderlands requires critical attention to expanding key notions in the discourse around community. These notions include how community borders are defined, how belongingness can be attained or surrendered, and how communities both form and respond to systems of power. “That community is difficult to define yet easy to use makes it useful for responding to changes associated with the reconfiguration of systems of racism, sexism, class exploitation, and heterosexism” (Hill Collins, 2010, p. 24). Ambiguous in definition, its conceptual versatility makes community a potent site for reclamation. Hill Collins continued: “Because the construct of community includes both a principle of actual social organization (from local to global settings) and an elastic idea that people use in everyday life, the theme of community organizing is central to anti-oppressive and emancipatory projects within intersecting power relations” (p. 22).
Because they are already places of overlap and convergence where meaning making occurs (Carter, 2010), borders can be places for salvaging liminal knowledges, that is, epistemic salvage. One way to reclaim borders and the power to define them is to decolonize the concept of community by including “subjugated and indigenous knowledges from diverse social and geographical locales [and] the multiple realities perceived and constructed by different people and divergent historical times and cultural places” (Kincheloe, 2008, p. 2), and thus regain authority over subjugated knowledges that are generated in lived experience (for discussions of subjugated knowledges, see Foucault & Gordon, 1980; Hartman, 1992; Spivak & Morris, 2010; in social work, see Figueira-McDonough, Netting, & Nichols-Casebolt, 2001; Tangenberg & Kemp, 2002). This type of epistemological sovereignty is essential to challenging the Western-Eurocentric stranglehold on what people view as legitimate knowledge. Reclaiming borderlands and the knowledge generated within them allows us to continue to imagine the community, its nuances and possibilities, in more relevant, innovative, and liberatory ways.
Borderlands as an Endarkened Epistemology
Two important frameworks for understanding the ample meanings and implications of borders and borderlands are Chicana feminisms, driven largely by the work of Gloria Anzaldúa, and Latin American epistemologies, particularly, the advancements made by the Latin American philosopher Walter Mignolo. These frameworks are sensitive and responsive to identity, place, and power. They conceive of the border as a liminal space that generates and resolves conflict, situated both physically and conceptually between domination and resistance but also a “home” with the power to restore and transform. Anzaldúa (1987) conceived of the borderlands as liminal spaces between races/ethnicities/cultures, genders, and sexualities that produce epistemic resources for resisting dominating culture and creating “new” knowledges—an “open wound . . . that bleeds” (p. 25), yet, also a place with the potential for healing and liberation. For Anzaldúa, such transformation occurs through the recovery of knowledges that are related to the lived experiences of community, especially those that are marginalized within dominant ideological landscapes.
Also relevant to reconceptualizing community, Chicana feminisms pay attention to relationships among the physical body (and its desires), the (physical and spiritual) environment, and lived experiences in generating valuable knowledges. To this extent, Moraga and Anzaldúa (1981) developed a way of theorizing
In concert with Chicana feminisms, Mignolo (2000, 2007) used the idea of borders in working toward the decolonization of knowledge. His theory on border epistemology (or border thinking) includes the idea of the border as both a
Two aspects of border thinking are relevant to understanding the community as a physical and conceptual place with the potential for liberation and social justice. First, border thinking aims to identify and fracture the dominance of Eurocentric knowledge and related means of producing and validating knowledge (Carter, 2010). Doing so involves recognizing the validity of other knowledges and accepting the limitations and detriments of Eurocentrism, including its imperialist, suppressive roots. Second, border thinking involves an epistemic shift “toward the geo- and body-politics of ‘other’ knowledges” (Carter, 2010, p. 440). “Geopolitics of knowledges” spatializes, locates, and gives authority to other ways of knowing, while the “body-politics of knowledges” is embodied knowledge, substantially generated from the lived experiences of race, gender, and sexuality (Carter, 2010, p. 441). These lived experiences may draw and define boundaries differently from those of Western knowledge, which, within the context of globalization, displaces knowledge that is gained through the spatial, lived experiences of the body and replaces it with aspatial, corporately produced, and market-driven forms of knowledge (Carter, 2010). In this sense, the lived experience of bodies may not be so readily understood within dominant frameworks, and therefore experiences of place may not be either. Both geopolitics and body politics of knowledges recognize how historical conditions, such as processes of colonization, and contemporary conditions, such as neoliberal globalization, have altered traditional knowledges into hybrid forms, distinguishing this place-based framework from other conceptualizations of place
Ambiguous Bodies Are Ambiguous Borders
Weaving together these epistemological and theoretical frameworks leads to more nuanced thinking about the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality are tied not only to how we imagine community but to the generation of knowledge within and across borders. The forging of borders, whether physical or conceptual, between the known and unknown, the knowable and the unknowable, is often ambiguous. Ambiguity can be seen as a phenomenon that creates liminal, interstitial spaces, or indefinite spaces “in between.” Being uneasy to interpret or define in terms of body, for example, concerning race, gender, and sexuality, creates a border that is itself ambiguous and has implications for community. When both place and identity shift and change, new communities are forged. How do shifting bodies and places affect the definition and experience of community and its potential for social justice? Ambiguity disrupts the social hierarchy by inhibiting the social “sorting and grouping” that maintains the status quo and is therefore a critical site for social change and social justice.
Although some view race, gender, and sexuality as stable epistemic resources (Alcoff, 2006), ambiguity challenges the notion that these categories securely hold and provide consistent and readily available knowledge (Ginsberg, 1996). The very lack of an epistemic guarantee for ambiguous bodies requires critical consideration of the relationship between the body and ways of knowing. “Knowledge of the body, which is inherently personal, immediate, and messy, falls outside dominant understandings of acceptable knowledge” (Tangenberg & Kemp, 2002, p. 11). In particular, attention needs to be paid to conceptualizations of the raced-racialized, gendered-sexed-sexualized body that is positioned within cultural and social systems of domination and exploitation because they have too long been absent from social welfare scholarship.
As Dillard (2000) and Hurtado (2003) stressed in their respective theses on endarkened epistemologies, the physical body and its positioning within social hierarchies are core concepts to consider, especially because they are concerned with race, gender, and sexuality. As Bradford and Sartwell (1997, pp. 191–192) wrote: Racing and gendering are social and political processes of consigning bodies to social categories and thus rendering them into political, economic, sexual, and residential positions . . . Race and gender, though they originate in disciplines to which bodies are subjected, become relational in any given transaction; they are ways both of being a body and of interpreting persons.
This relational framework highlights differences among subjective experiences of race, gender, sexuality, in what Grosz (1994, cited in Tangenberg & Kemp, 2002) called the “lived body,” which focuses on the physicality of the body, and the “inscribed body,” on which issues of culture and power are written. For example, those who are perceived as ambiguous in body may not themselves identify in ambiguous terms, and vice versa, those who identify in ambiguous terms may not be perceived as ambiguously bodied. In this way, ambiguity (as the phenomenon described earlier) contests the assumption that identity categories illustrate the relationship between the lived experience and social location (Moya & Hames-Garcia, 2000), therefore challenging traditional notions of community and its ascription.
Ambiguity allows us to bring into question the notion of interdependence evoked by the idea of community, as well as the role of community as a primary way in which we organize ourselves around understandings of race, gender, and sexuality. Ambiguity also compels us to think about other borders that we draw around ourselves physically, socially, and conceptually; how we decide who belongs; and how we address inequalities. In this sense, ambiguous bodies and social positions are also ambiguous borders. The ambiguous borders that are drawn around communities make us think more complexly about privilege, marginality, and social justice. What do these borders mean, how are they drawn around our communities, by whom, and why?
Transgressing, Occupying, and Policing Borders
When one analyzes the construction of borders, questions arise. Who defines community, and what happens when borders (and the definition of borders) are pushed against? Cultural and social systems of oppression are intertwined and play a role in creating borders that people fear being crossed. Scholars have conceptualized the border as a physical consequence of power that is intimately tied to issues of security and sovereignty (Newman, 2006, cited in Carter, 2010). However, others have positioned the border as a place of contradictions and incongruities whose edges are both unpredictable and unstable and full of possibility (Carter, 2010; Shields, 2006; also see Bhabha, 1994).
Van Houtum, Kramsch, and Zierhofer (2005) coined the term
Transgressing Borders
Border crossing and passing are two ways of thinking about how borders are both traversed and transgressed. Border crossing is tied to distinct notions of territory and trespassing, as evidenced by the rising discourse around legality/illegality, citizenship, and immigration policy. However, the trope of border crossing extends beyond the violation of (imperialist) geographic boundaries. For example, one of the first cultural (as well as social and economic) anxieties in relation to border crossing in the United States was related to miscegenation. Clearly grounded in the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, laws were set in place in part to make sexual relationships between black men and white women punishable because white women secured the future of the white race (Zack, 1997). During and beyond slavery, white men were legally sanctioned to rape and impregnate black women not only to break the women’s pride and destroy the family structure of the black community but to ensure the future of an economic structure (white American male economic hegemony) that depended on a perpetual supply of cheap or free labor (Zack, 1997, p. 153). However, white women needed to be sexually available exclusively to white men to ensure the purity of the white racial category. The almost ironic consequence of this type of border crossing was multiracial children, who often had to contend with ambiguous community borders, leaving antimiscegenation an intersectional anxiety-producing legacy that continues to affect people today.
Although we can experience a sense of belonging in a number of communities, we often feel isolation or resentment from many, or all, simultaneously. Crossing borders
Passing has to do with “the boundaries established between identity categories and about the individual and cultural anxieties induced by boundary crossing” (Ginsberg, 1996, p. 2). Passing is fundamentally intersectional and both inform and constrain ideas of community. It occurs across race, gender, and sexuality and is often catalyzed by their coarticulation. Although there are numerous definitions and uses of the term
The reasons for and ways of passing are abundant. Elam (2007, p. 749) described passing “as a strategy of survival, as a means to economic gain, or . . . the wicked realization of a ‘savage and diabolical desire’ to play a ‘practical joke on white society’.” Williams (1997) also described passing as a strategy, one of few available to some for escaping the detrimental impact of (racial) oppression. Investigating movement across these interstitial spaces allows us to gain a better understanding of the intersection between privileged status and marginalized status. Williams quoted Reginald (1996) in his interpretation of passing as being a form of “alchemy that seeks to best oppression at its own game by subverting the line between dominant and subordinate” (p. 62). As Williams wrote, passing can be a form of “radical resistance” to oppression. Although it can offer a pathway toward liberation, passing can be, although is not always, an act of opportunism (Elam, 2007; Williams, 1997).
Racial passing has generally been associated most with black–white racial passing, in which “an individual crossed or passed through a racial line or boundary—indeed
Gender-related passing is also a phenomenon that has been discussed and theorized at length, especially in the humanities (see Sycamore, 2006). Mallon (2009, p. 10) described gender-related passing as “the ability to be perceived and identified as a non-transgender person” and acknowledged the role of “passability” in attaining social and economic mobility, as well as perceived and actual physical safety. Similarly, sexual passing can be seen in the “closet” discourse, which focuses on masking one’s sexual orientation or desires for reasons that are parallel to gendered passing.
Much more can be said about how sexual passing is complicated by issues of homonormativity and heteronormativity, especially as racialized systems of homogenization and invisibilization. Although it is important to note the intersecting multiple ways in which passing happens, some may argue that there are important distinctions to be made between different types of passing. For example, some see racial passing as a voluntary act of selecting for white privilege and gender-related passing as stemming from dissonances of a different nature, for example, between anatomy and gender assignment at birth. Although this issue is outside the scope of this article, it introduces important issues around ideas of assumed, perceived, and ascribed ambiguity, as well as the relationship between privilege and marginality, which could determine particular experiences of community.
Occupying Borders
Borders are not only crossed and passed through, but occupied, which is a transgression as well as a resolution. For example, the growing number of multiracial people and the new ways in which they understand their racial and ethnic identities, one being identifying as “in between” races (Renn, 2008), indicate the importance of these interstitial spaces as political places that are occupied as acts of (collective) self-determination, therefore containing the potential for social change. Similarly, passing is often falsely construed as the “goal” of being transgender. Many transidentified people do not want to pass, are not trying to cross borders around gender and sexuality completely and permanently, and intentionally occupy these borders. For some transidentified and gender-nonconforming people, the gender of choice is “trans”; for others, being readily perceived and identified as male or female, man or woman, is important. These borders, whether occupied or crossed, have the capacity to challenge social norms and empower individuals and communities. Borders can be used to create new communities or to redefine existing ones in terms that more holistically reflect the community’s multidimensionality and complexity. For example, Queer of Color communities inherently challenge white homonormativity and, in so doing, redefine experiences of race, gender, and sexuality.
At the collective level, ambiguity has been used as a key strategy in suffrages, social movements, and collective action. It can be a vehicle for social change on the policy level and has been established as a viable legal strategy (Golub, 2005). For example, the landmark case of Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), in many ways, a leveraging of racial ambiguity. That Homer Plessy was “seven-eighths white” made him a prime candidate for staging the act of resistance that sought a “separate is not equal” ruling, although he ultimately failed. Although less identified as such, organized actions for racial justice–related initiatives, such as
Policing Borders
Ambiguous borders are the tenuous lines around and between us that we draw and that are drawn for us, forging communities and mediating senses of belonging. These ambiguous borders, however, are fiercely policed and patrolled (Dalmage, 2003; Hill Collins, 2010). “Because boundaries signify differences in power, boundary maintenance of physical, social, and conceptual space becomes more intense” (Pieterse, 2004, quoted in Hill Collins, 2010, p. 24). Whether this maintenance is internal or external to the community, it often requires that the ambiguous first become sorted and categorized—in other words, undone, distilled, and destroyed.
To illustrate this point, take, for example, people who exist in ambiguous racial space, whether intentionally or not. These people may essentially have to deny parts of their racial or ethnic heritage (McNeil, 2010); conversely, they may also feel both internal and external pressure constantly to present the image and identity of the utopic mixed-race person (see Gilroy, 2000, 2010). In addition, they may be subject to, witness, or participate in racial/multiracial microaggressions—the intentional or unintentional, explicit or implicit actions and remarks that invalidate or demean one’s multiracial heritage—as forms of monoracism, or the system of oppression based on the “the assumptions and beliefs in singular, discrete racial categories” (Johnston & Nadal, 2010, p. 125). This type of hybridized oppression is not unique to race. Those who transgress gender and/or sexual borders may feel pressure to present themselves as, or identify more strongly with, one gender; conversely, the community expectation may be to reject all forms of gender or sexual normativity, which also may require constant body- or identity policing. They may also have to contend with other forms of collusion with sexism and heterosexism, male privilege, heteronormativity, or homonormativity. Gender and sexual orientation microaggressions also occur, serving to denigrate and suppress difference around sexuality and gender expression, identity, and roles (Sue, 2010).
Conceptualizing ambiguity as corresponding to borders and boundaries—which are symbolic of the management of (physical, social, and conceptual) spaces—allows us to think about the ways in which we interface with this phenomenon in light of their regulation within communities. In spite of dominant social hierarchies, many communities transgress norms and normalizing forces, even in light of policing and punishment. It is conceivable that for people who exist in ambiguous spaces and who tread lightly through or within those borders, a constant state of unverifiable surveillance is experienced as an instigation of normalization processes, and consequences exist on all sides of being (Foucault, 1977). However, not all forms of policing are unverifiable or abstract. Describing spaces that are formed and occupied by transgender people, Mallon (2009, p. 10) noted that “trans space is often subjected to police scrutiny and may close or shift its boundaries without warning.” Similarly, ambiguous bodies are always subject to identity policing and identity patrolling by other people, institutions, and policies (Dalmage, 2003). This landscape of racist, sexist, transphobic, and heterosexist/homophobic beliefs and practices has created strong legacies in our minds, bodies, families, communities, institutions, the society at large, and national or transnational policies, as well as governing, disciplinary, social, and legal systems.
The transgression of cultural and social borders has acute implications for those who have ambiguous relationships with privilege and marginalization, to a large degree determining their material reality, namely, access to political, social, civil, and economic freedoms. These implications include with whom we can display affection without fear of harm, whom we can marry or with whom we can have children and raise a family, the city block we are allowed to live on, to where we can migrate or if we are allowed to travel across national borders, the bathrooms we use, the schools we are allowed to attend, and the hospitals and social services we are allowed to access. As Williams (1997, p. 64) wrote, one day we will be able to “express the full range of our humanity in which boundaries of race, ethnicity, nation, class, gender, sexuality, body, and language can be crossed and transgressed without judgment, without scorn, and without detriment.”
Reflections for Social Welfare
My goal throughout this exploration of ambiguity/borders has been to contribute to an ongoing, collective response to recent calls to “think
Unpinning singular notions of “the” community unearths questions about community by bringing ambiguous bodies, borders, and belongingness to the attention of social welfare scholarship and practice. Considering the complex geographies of the lived experience and the spatialized knowledge generated by the body creates opportunities for liberatory social welfare research. Race, gender, and sexuality intersect with and draw borders around community and the changing landscapes that are superimposed by a globalizing, seemingly “borderless,” world. Tending to these aspatial issues by grounding research and literally respatializing the generation of knowledge challenges hegemonic norms of community within and beyond scholarship. That knowledge can be seen as place based yet not place bound means that it can and perhaps must travel; specifically, movement across borders can create channels through which power can flow and can thus be explored as sites for liberatory research and practice. Communities that are forged within and across borders challenge ideas of privilege and oppression, which will allow us to deconstruct dominant ideologies and traditional paradigms and reconstruct an alternative worldview that transgresses conventional norms in community-level research. How can we reimagine “transgressive,” in terms not only of community but of scholarship and practice?
Social welfare as a field that is committed to social change and the dissolution of social injustices globally has much to learn from ambiguity as it unfolds within particular sociohistorical, political, and geographic contexts. Ambiguity—as an always already-present social texture—amplifies geo- and body- and epistemic politics, providing fertile ground for thinking about the relationships within communities and between community and practitioner. Future work can be done within the discipline to disrupt false binaries further, particularly within community practice, namely, the insider–outsider paradigm and identity-based versus place-based community organizing models, and lead to more relevant practice. Crossing or occupying insider–outsider borders can inform the production of knowledge and social work practice.
How do we know if we are working “inside” our communities, and how does doing so inform our practice? What does it look like to research or organize around or from the borders, especially those that are born of ambiguity? What types of “spaces in between” are we creating, who is found within these borders, and why? As a matter of social justice, these questions may lead to insights into healing fractured communities and forging and fortifying alliances within and across communities.
Footnotes
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.