26 pages • 52 minutes read
Gloria AnzalduaHow to Tame a Wild Tongue
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1987A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Philosophical Context: Feminist Theory
The title “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” inserts Anzaldúa into conversation with other writers affiliated with French feminist theory. Writers like Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva ("Powers of Horror"), and Luce Irigaray have written extensively on the topic of women and language, exploring the challenges that women face in overcoming the culture of silence that patriarchy enforces.
This branch of feminist theory engages with Jacques Lacan’s interpretations of Sigmund Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams, The Future of an Illusion, Civilization and its Discontents) from a feminist perspective. French feminist thinkers tend to distinguish the masculine and feminine, defining masculine as the discourse of language and philosophy, and feminine as that which is beyond language—the nonlinguistic, bodily, intuitive, and untamed.
Anzaldúa explicitly joins this conversation when she asserts that “[l]anguage is a male discourse” (35). She distinguishes herself from these French theorists, however, by defining the “wild tongue” as a “mother tongue.” She concludes the first paragraph with the sentence, “My mouth is a motherlode” (33), illustrating the connection between language and gender. Her emphasis on the sensuality, folk traditions, and counterculture of her people illustrates how Anzaldúa comes to understand her “mother tongue” as a language that writes and speaks against the predominant patriarchal discourse. She views her native language as a feminine language.
Cultural Context: Cultural Studies
The interdisciplinary field of cultural studies, which combines theoretical lenses, relies heavily on Marxism and examines aspects of identity (including race, gender, and class) that became popular in the US in the 1980s and 1990s. Anzaldúa’s essay takes a cultural studies approach to culture and language. She focuses on folk music, movies, food, colloquial language, and other elements of popular culture rather than “canonical” literature. She argues that together these elements represent a specific Chicano identity. This essay is one of the first cultural studies essays on Chicano life, articulating the formation of Chicano identity to a scholarly audience.
Because US culture oppressed Chicano culture, including banning Spanish-language curricula in schools, Chicanos have a difficult time articulating their identity. Anzaldúa employs the interdisciplinarity nature of cultural studies to weave analyses of race, class, and colonization into her essay. Attempting to silence her by censoring her language is one of the powerful ways that oppressors reinforce control. Language is used to inhibit the organization of a people and to keep them economically marginalized. When Chicanos internalize shame, they internalize oppression and thus contribute to their subordination. Through language, however, identities can be articulated; moreover, when people identify with a self-chosen label, they become organized into a coherent group. This is why the Chicano movement is important to Anzaldúa’s essay. It mobilized Chicano people, leading them to organize around a cultural and ethnic identity.
