Cherrie Moraga's The Bridge Called My Back

The Bridge called my Back is an anthology that focuses on the lives of feminist women of color from different racial groups: Blacks, Chicana, Native Americans, Asians, and etc. In this anthology, Moraga brings up the term “theory in the flesh” when she talks about entering the lives others. According to Cherrie Moraga, a theory in the flesh is the physical realities of a person’s live such as skin color, place of birth, sexual desires, and etc (19). The theory is developed using the female writers’ “flesh and blood experiences to concretize a vision that can begin to heal our wounds” (19). Moraga saw this theory as a way to help bridge some of the contradictions that women of color felt about themselves and about being colored women in a white …show more content…
This theory departure from traditional objectivity is rationally justified because women of color are often viewed with preconceived ideas about the meanings that they bodies convey and often, these are a painful and have a detrimental on women of color. Their bodies can affect where they live, who they marry, and what career paths they can go into. Their body determined their entire life. This is evident in Mitsuye Yamada’s essay “Asian Pacific American Women and Feminism”, in which she mentions her experiences as an Asian American activist. At one point she says “everytime [she] read or speak to a group of people about the condition of [her] life as an Asian American woman, it is as if [she] had never spoken before, as if [she] were speaking to a brand new audience of people who had never known an Asian Pacific woman who is other than the passive, sweet etc. stereotype of the ‘Oriental’ woman” (68). Yamada’s race made others think she was a passive and obedient individual, thus, even when she filed a report on the violations of her rights, the administrators of the college assumed that someone else had pushed her to file the report …show more content…
In “La Güera”, Moraga writes, “The danger lies in failing to acknowledge the specificity of the oppression. The danger lies in attempting to deal with oppression purely from a theoretical base. Without emotional, heartfelt grappling with the source of our own oppression, without naming the enemy within ourselves and outside of us, no authentic, non-hierarchical connections among oppressed groups can take place” (24). Moraga emphasizes that in order for oppressed individuals to find common ground with other oppressed group, she would have to deal first with our her oppression that she had internalized in herself. For example, Moraga talks about her own homophobia and fear of coming out as a lesbian. In order to radicalize women of color, they have to come to term with their own experiences and understand how it shaped their bodies and their experience cannot be theorized. Oppressed groups should do this to avoid forgetting and discounting the oppression of others, which is what Moraga says happens all the