In an effort to record and remember the folks who have challenged, supported and caused me to migrate in a variety of ways, I offer you a page of memories. I have listed Philosophers, Cultural Theorists, Therapists, Journalists, Activists, and Feminist icons, some of them my friends and colleagues.

In Memoriam:

Lisa Tonna
10 April 1969 - 08 January 2008

Lisa Tonna, 38, Howard Brown and LCCP’s anti-tobacco advocate and more passed away this morning after an eleven month battle with lung cancer. Before Kristen Torres, Lisa ran our quit smoking groups and the Queer The Air LGBT Smoke-free Initiative. She also served as LCCP’s interim executive director. Before she joined us, she directed the Anti-Violence Project at the Center on Halsted for six years where she worked with LGBT survivors of violence. As a social worker, anti-oppression activist, and priestess, she maintained a private practice, consulted, trained, taught and created meaningful ceremonies for so many folks in Chicago and across the country to build better, more imaginative and loving worlds.As a person, Lisa was inspirational. She was empathic and warm, bringing a critical eye and tender heart to everything she did. She asked difficult questions in the most loving ways - holding everyone with grace and accountability. She built fun and loving community - opening up her and her partner Avis’ house often to celebrate many things (even pancakes were a reason :-)). Many of us attended services where Lisa officiated - be they weddings, solstice celebrations, or other events that we needed to mark. Lisa was there to imagine healing ways for us to commemorate our lives. Indeed, she was a transcendent healer. And she improved so many folk’s lives in so many different ways. She will truly be missed.

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Jean Baudrillard, born July 29 1929; died March 6 2007

Philosopher and sociologist who blurred the boundaries between reality and simulation

written by Steven Poole Wednesday March 7, 2007Guardian UnlimitedThe French philosopher and sociologist, Jean Baudrillard, at his home in Paris, in 2001. Photograph: Eric Feferberg/AFP
Jean Baudrillard’s death did not take place. “Dying is pointless,” he once wrote. “You have to know how to disappear.” The New Yorker reported a reading the French sociologist gave in a New York gallery in 2005. A man from the audience, with the recent death of Jacques Derrida in mind, mentioned obituaries and asked Baudrillard: “What would you like to be said about you? In other words, who are you?” Baudrillard replied: “What I am, I don’t know. I am the simulacrum of myself.” Baudrillard, whose simulacrum departed at the age of 77, attracted widespread notoriety for predicting that the first Gulf war, of 1991, would not take place. During the war, he said it was not really taking place. After its conclusion, he announced, imperturbably, that it had not taken place. This prompted some to characterise him as yet another continental philosopher who revelled in a disreputable contempt for truth and reality.Yet Baudrillard was pointing out that the war was conducted as a media spectacle. Rehearsed as a wargame or simulation, it was then enacted for the viewing public as a simulation: as a news event, with its paraphernalia of embedded journalists and missile’s-eye-view video cameras, it was a videogame. The real violence was thoroughly overwritten by electronic narrative: by simulation.Such had been Baudrillard’s name for the defining problem of the age since the 1970s, when he wrote that the Marxian problem of class struggle had been replaced, in the “post-industrial” era, with the problem of simulation. He thus anticipated, by a decade or two, later arguments about the nature of “virtual reality”. Pop culture paid tribute to Baudrillard’s prescience in Andy and Larry Wachowski’s 1999 film The Matrix, about a near-future Earth where human society is a simulation designed by malign machines to keep us enslaved. Hacker hero Neo (Keanu Reeves) hides his contraband software in a hollowed-out copy of one of the philosopher’s books, and rebel chief Morpheus (Laurence Fishburne) quotes Baudrillard’s most famous formula: “Welcome to the desert of the real.”Baudrillard was invited to collaborate on the sequels, but declined. He later protested wryly that The Matrix had got him wrong: “The most embarrassing part of the film is that the new problem posed by simulation is confused with its classical, Platonic treatment … The Matrix is surely the kind of film about the matrix that the matrix would have been able to produce.”Baudrillard was born in the cathedral town of Reims in north-eastern France. His grandparents were peasants and his parents became civil servants. He was the first of his family to go to university, studying German at the Sorbonne in Paris, and he later said that this led to a break with his family and cultural milieu. In 1956 he began teaching German at a French lycée, and in the early 1960s published essays on literature for the journal Les Temps Modernes, as well as translating works of Bertolt Brecht and Peter Weiss.In 1966, Baudrillard joined the University of Nanterre, a small, fiercely radical institution that was to become notable as the incubator of the Mouvement du 22 Mars and its subsequent role in the évènements of May 1968. (Baudrillard later said he “participated” in the student revolts.) That same year, his first book, The System of Objects, was published. With the sociologist Henri Lefebvre and the cultural critic Roland Barthes as his intellectual mentors, he gave sharp, ironic readings of interior-design materials, gadgets, washing powder and other everyday phenomena.In subsequent works, including The Consumer Society (1970), The Mirror of Production (1973), and Forget Foucault (1977), Baudrillard developed arguments about the increasing power of the “object” over the “subject” in modern society, and the way in which protest and resistance were increasingly absorbed and turned into fuel by the symbolic “system” of capitalism. During this period, he also wrote on art and architecture for the journal Utopie.The 1981 volume Simulacra and Simulation (the book that later appeared in The Matrix) gained a wide audience, and Baudrillard soon found himself a globetrotting academic superstar, discoursing on his themes of “seduction” (the term that escapes the binary opposition of “production” and “destruction”) and “hyper-reality” (the simulated realm that is “more real than the real”). In 1986 he moved from Nanterre, which had, he lamented, become “normalised”, to the university of Paris-IX Dauphine.Baudrillard characterised the 1990s, with its wishful illusions about the “end of history”, as a “stagnant” period in which events were on strike. Eventually the strike was broken by the attacks on the US of September 11 2001. Baudrillard called it “the ultimate event, the mother of all events”.”It is the terrorist model,” he wrote, “to bring about an excess of reality, and have the system collapse beneath that excess.”Subsequently, for Baudrillard, there was no longer any need for the media to virtualise events, as in the first Gulf war, since the war’s participants had thoroughly internalised the rules of simulation. His 2004 essay, War Porn, observed how the photographs from Abu Ghraib enacted scenes of fetishistic pornography, concluding: “It is really America that has electrocuted itself.”Baudrillard took to calling his works “theory fictions”: because the present is always more fantastical than the most lurid science fiction, “theory” must compete with it on an imaginative level. So Baudrillard offered himself as an extrapolator, a canary in the cultural coalmine. “My work is paradoxical,” he explained. “It’s surrealist like fiction.” He found a sympathetic soul in the novelist JG Ballard, who called him “the most important French thinker of the last 20 years”. (In 1974, Baudrillard had hailed Ballard’s Crash as “the first great novel of the universe of simulation”.)Baudrillard once wore a gold lamé suit with mirrored lapels while reading his poetry in a Las Vegas bar. If he didn’t take himself particularly seriously, his critics complained that he didn’t take anything else seriously either. A recurring charge was that it was politically and morally irresponsible, at the very least, to speak of the “unreality” of modern war, because to do so was to ignore the realities of killing and suffering. Baudrillard’s response, in his 2004 book The Lucidity Pact, or The Intelligence of Evil, was laconic: “The reality-fundamentalists equip themselves with a form of magical thinking that confuses message and messenger: if you speak of the simulacrum, then you are a simulator; if you speak of the virtuality of war, then you are in league with it and have no regard for the hundreds of thousands of dead … it is not we, the messengers of the simulacrum, who have plunged things into this discredit, it is the system itself that has fomented this uncertainty that affects everything today.”One sceptical British interviewer called Baudrillard a “philosopher clown”, a description to which he probably would not have objected, instead taking it as an invitation to think about the social function of clowns. As he once argued: “It is the task of radical thought, since the world is given to us in unintelligibility, to make it more unintelligible, more enigmatic, more fabulous.” He was an aphorist. “Contemporary art is contemporary only with itself,” he growled; or: “Our sentimentality towards animals is a sure sign of the disdain in which we hold them.”Baudrillard, who is survived by his wife Marine, had once written a playful account of his personal evolution, from “pataphysician” (a scientist of imaginary solutions) at 20, to “viral” at 60. When I saw him in 2000, he was 70 years old. What was he now? He chuckled. “Well, let’s see, at 70, I would say that I am … transfini. Beyond the end. It was my fateful strategy to go beyond the concept, so as to see what happens beyond.” Now, perhaps, he knows.

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« Return to the Molly Ivins Memorial main page

Molly Ivins, 30 August 1944 - 31 January 2007

In Loving Memory of Molly Ivins, Syndicated political columnist died of breast cancer Wednesday evening at her home in Austin. She was 62 years old, and had much, much more to give this world.

She remained cheerful despite Texas politics. She emphasized the more hilarious aspects of both state and national government, and consequently never had to write fiction. She said, “Good thing we’ve still got politics-finest form of free entertainment ever invented.”

Molly had a large family, many namesakes, hundreds of close friends, thousands of colleagues and hundreds of thousands of readers.

She and her two siblings, Sara (Ivins) Maley of Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Andy Ivins of London, Texas, grew up in Houston. Her father, James Ivins, was a corporate lawyer and a Republican, which meant she always had someone to disagree with over the dinner table. Her mother, Margot, was a homemaker with a B.A. in psychology from Smith College.

In addition to her brother and sister, Molly is survived by sister-in-law Carla Ivins, nephew Drew and niece Darby; niece Margot Hutchison and her husband, Neil, and their children Sam, Andy and Charlie of San Diego, Calif. and nephew Paul Maley and his wife, Karianna, and their children Marty, Anneli and Finnbar of Eltham, Victoria, Australia.

Molly followed her mother to Smith and received a B.A. in 1966, followed by an M.A. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and an honorary doctorate from Haverford College.

Her full list of books and awards will be abbreviated here. In addition to compilations of her brilliant, hilarious liberal columns, she wrote with Lou Dubose Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George W. Bush (Random House 2000) and Bushwhacked: Life in George W. Bush’s America (Random House 2003). She was working on a Random House book documenting the Bush administration’s assault on the Bill of Rights when she died.

Molly, being practical, used many of her most prestigious awards as trivets while serving exquisite French dishes at her dinner parties. Her awards include the William Allen White Award from the University of Kansas, the Eugene V. Debs award in the field of journalism, many awards for advocacy of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution and the David Nyhan Prize from the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School at Harvard.

Although short, Molly’s life was writ large. She was as eloquent a speaker and teacher as she was a writer, and her quips will last at least as long as Will Rogers’. She dubbed George W. Bush “Shrub” and Texas Governor Rick Perry “Good Hair.”

Molly always said in her official résumé that the two honors she valued the most were (1) when the Minneapolis Police Department named their mascot pig after her (She was covering the police beat at the time.) and (2) when she was banned from speaking on the Texas A&M University campus at least once during her years as co-editor of The Texas Observer (1970-76). However, she said with great sincerity that she would be proudest of all to die sober, and she did.

She worked as a reporter for The New York Times (1976-82) in New York and Albany and later as Rocky Mountain Bureau Chief covering nine mountain states by herself. After working for the staid Times where she was heavily edited, Molly cut loose and became a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald. When the Herald folded, she signed on as a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. In 2001, she became syndicated, eventually appearing in 400 newspapers.

She never lost her love for The Texas Observer or her conviction that a free society relies on public-interest journalism. She found that brand of journalism the most fun.

In recent years she shamelessly used her national and international contacts to raise funds for the Observer, which has always survived on a shoestring. More than $400,000 was contributed to the feisty little journal at a roast honoring Molly in Austin October 8.

Molly’s enduring message is, “Raise more hell.”

To read more about Molly Ivins or to make a comment about her, go to www.texasobserver.org. Tax-deductible contributions in her honor may be made to The Texas Observer, 307 West Seventh Street, Austin, TX 78701 or the American Civil Liberties Union, 125 Broad Street, 18th floor, New York, NY 10004, www.aclu.org.

A memorial service for Molly will be held on Sunday, Feb. 4, 2:00 p.m. at the First United Methodist Church, 1201 Lavaca, Austin TX.

To Our Readers and Friends
Molly Ivins left her editor’s chair at The Texas Observer more than 30 years ago and went on to play a larger stage. But she never left us behind. She remained convinced that Texas needed a progressive, independent voice to call the powerful to account and to stand up for the common folk. She kept our voice alive. More than once, when the paper was on the brink of insolvency, she delivered speeches and gave us the honorariums. She donated royalties from her best-selling book Shrub to keep the doors open. Her determination and efforts sustained the Observer as a magazine, as a family, and as a community.

Molly was a hero. She was a mentor. She was a liberal. She was a patriot. She was a friend. And she always will be. With Molly’s death we have lost someone we hold dear. What she has left behind we will hold dearer still.

Despite her failing health, and an impending ice storm, Molly insisted on being driven to the Observer’s most recent public event in early January so she could thank our supporters.

Observer writers are useful, she explained to the crowd, in much the same way as good hunting dogs. Turn them loose, let them hunt. When they return with their prey, pat them on the head, say a few words of praise, and set them loose to hunt again.

For the time being, our site will be dedicated to remembering Molly, her work, her wit, her contributions to the political discourse of a nation. We invite readers to submit their own thoughts and recollections, to say a few words of praise.

Then, we will return to the hunt.

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Gloria Anzaldúa born 1942 and died May 2004

Remembering Gloria Anzaldúa (1942-2004)
As a “threshold person,” a nepantlera, Anzaldúa moved among worlds in her art, her politics, and her spirituality

By AnaLouise Keating

GLORIA EVANGELINA ANZALDÚA–internationally acclaimed feminist author, cultural theorist, and independent scholar–passed away during the week of May 15, 2004, from diabetes-related complications. One of the boldest feminist thinkers and social justice activists of our time, Anzaldúa and her writings give courage and inspiration to many. (To experience Gloria’s impact, see the July/August issue of the Esperanza Center’s La Voz at www.esperanzacenter.org and the online altar at gloria.chicanas.com.)

Although Anzaldúa had been living with diabetes for over a decade, many of her readers were unaware of the disease’s ongoing, debilitating effects on her life. Even those of us who knew her well were shocked by her sudden death. As Kit Quan, one of Anzaldúa’s oldest friends and writing comadres (in keeping with Anzaldúa’s practice, I do not italicize the Spanish words in this essay) explains, “Gloria always told me that she was going to stick around for 20 more years. She struggled with diabetes and all its complications daily… but she was so well read on the disease… and worked so hard at managing her blood sugars that I believed we still had more time.” Anzaldua took meticulous care of her health and was determined to live until she had completed many more writing projects.

It is impossible to fully describe the complex, multidimensional nature of Anzaldúa and her writings. A versatile author, she published poetry, theoretical essays, short stories, autobiographical narratives, interviews, children’s books, and anthologies. As one of the first openly queer Chicana writers, she played a major role in defining Chicana/o, queer, and female identities. And as editor or co-editor of three multicultural, multigenre feminist anthologies, she helped to develop new, inclusionary movements for social justice. Although she chose to work outside the university system (except for carefully selected teaching engagements and conference speaking gigs), her impact on many disciplines–including American studies, composition studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, feminism/feminist theory, literary studies, and women’s studies–was immense. She also played a leading, though seldom acknowledged role in developing queer theory.

To readers of The Women’s Review of Books, Anzaldúa is perhaps best known for This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, co-edited with Cherríe Moraga. First published in 1981, this ground-breaking collection of essays, letters, and poems is widely recognized as one of the first multicultural feminist texts. This Bridge served as a crucial reminder that US feminism is not and never has been a white, middle-class women’s movement. It sounded an urgent call for new kinds of feminist communities, theories, and practices and invited women of color to develop a transformative, coalitional consciousness. At the same time, it challenged white middle-class feminists to acknowledge and begin working through their racism, classism, and other biases.

In her later anthologies Anzaldúa expanded her challenges to feminism and other social justice movements. Making Face, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Feminists-of-Color (1990) builds on the women-of-color feminisms found in This Bridge and is part of Anzaldúa’s ongoing effort to create coalitions between social activists inside and outside the academy. In her preface, she rejects the inaccessible, elitist nature of academic “high” theory (in reality no “higher” than any other theory) and underscores the importance of inventing new theorizing methods, what she called mestizaje theories, which “create new categories for those of us left out or pushed out of the existing ones.” Anzaldúa’s most recent anthology, this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation (2002, which she and I co-edited), takes this call for inclusive, transformative theories and tactics even further, challenging readers to re-examine existing identity categories and develop new forms of feminist theorizing and action, what Anzaldúa called “spiritual activism.” Based on the belief that each individual is radically interrelated with all that exists, this visionary, experience-based way of thinking and acting recognizes the many differences among human beings yet also insists on our commonalities and uses them as catalysts for social change.

Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) is Anzaldúa’s most widely read book and was named one of the 100 Best Books of the Century by both Hungry Mind Review and Utne Reader. Although scholars often describe Borderlands as an innovative autobiography that builds on and expands previous uses of the genre, Anzaldúa herself described it as a new genre: autohistoria-teoría, life-story and reflection on this story. In autohistoria-teoría, women of color intervene into and transform traditional Western autobiographical forms. Creating interwoven individual and collective identities, writers of autohistoria-teoría blend personal and cultural biographies with memoir, history, storytelling, myth, and other forms.

Anzaldúa’s published works also include two bilingual children’s books with strong female protagonists: Friends from the Other Side/Amigos del otro lado (1993) and Prietita and the Ghost Woman/ Prietita y la Llorona (1995); a memoir-like collection of interviews, Interviews/Entrevistas (2000); and several essays. She was within weeks of completing her dissertation (at the University of California, Santa Cruz) and planned to publish volumes of poetry, theory, and fiction in the near future. She won numerous awards, including the Before Columbus Foundation American Book Award, the Lambda Lesbian Small Book Press Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fiction Award, the Lesbian Rights Award, the Sappho Award of Distinction, and the American Studies Association Lifetime Achievement Award.

While US feminists have for many years insisted that “the personal is political,” Gloria gave new depth to this phrase, delving into her own life experiences with a rare, unflinching integrity and raw honesty. Her painful monthly menstruation, a rare condition that began in infancy; her campesino background; her childhood in the Rio Grande Valley of South Texas; her experiences as a brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking girl in a dominant culture that values light-skinned, English-speaking boys; her ongoing battles with diabetes; and her “outlaw” sexual and spiritual desires are only a few of the private issues she wove into her words. She used this intense self-reflection and self-exposure in the service of social justice, drawing connections between personal and systemic issues.

Anzaldúa’s willingness to risk the personal–to disclose and analyze intimate details, beliefs, and emotions despite the potential for ridicule, misunderstanding, or rejection–is crucial to her power as a writer. As Jamie Lee Evans, one of Gloria’s writing assistants during the 1990s, asserts, “She reached in and grabbed our hearts because she was not afraid of being intimate or loving freely–in her work, her words, her actions, her body.” As Anzaldúa incorporated her experiences into her writing, she transformed herself into a bridge, establishing potential identifications with readers from diverse backgrounds.

WHEN I MET GLORIA ANZALDÚA IN 1991, I was struck by her vulnerability, her open-mindedness, and her sensitivity to other people’s alienation and pain. Deeply spiritual and intensely political, she believed in each human being’s basic goodness and potential wisdom, despite the racism, sexism, homophobia, and other forms of rejection she had experienced throughout her life. As I grew to know her over the past 13 years, I became increasingly impressed with the ways her faith shaped her work. She consistently challenged feminists of all colors as well as other social justice activists to recognize and work to transform their racism, homophobia, classism, and other desconocimientos (intentional and unintentional ignorance and lack of awareness). Significantly, she was able to issue her challenges without rejecting the people themselves.

Gloria’s role at the 1990 National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) conference in Akron, Ohio, illustrates her generous spirit. Fed up with the organization’s racism and other desconocimientos, many women of color and their allies walked out. Anzaldúa felt as betrayed as they did; she understood and empathized with their decision. However, she chose to remain, becoming what she would later describe as a nepantlera–a term she coined to define a unique type of visionary cultural worker. Nepantleras are threshold people; they move within and among multiple worlds, and use this movement to transform them.

Anzaldúa recounts her NWSA experience in her 2002 essay “now let us shift…. the path of conocimiento…. inner work, public acts,” in which she explains how, by listening carefully to all parties and revealing the flaws in all forms of group-thinking, she and other nepantleras attempt to create broader, more inclusive communities:

Though tempted to retreat behind racial lines and hide behind simplistic walls of identity, las nepantleras know their work lies in positioning themselves–exposed and raw–in the crack between these worlds, and in revealing current categories as unworkable. (this bridge we call home, p. 567)
Anzaldúa’s resistance to rigid categories and labels, coupled with her interest in developing new alliances and identities based on affinity (what she refers to in her most recent work as “new tribalism”), make her writings vital for 21st-century political activists, thinkers, and scholars. She challenged the conventional views that lead to stereotyping, over-generalization, and arbitrary divisions between groups.

When I was first invited to write this memorial piece, I realized that it would be difficult but believed I could accomplish the task. After all, I’d already written Gloria’s obituary; I’d known and worked with Gloria for more than a decade; and I’d read and written about her work for at least 15 years. However, writing this essay has been even more difficult than I’d anticipated, and I have agonized over this conclusion. Perhaps my resistance to writing a conclusion is tied to my belief that although Gloria Anzaldúa, the embodied, historic person, is no longer alive, Gloria Anzaldúa, the writer/theorist/philosopher/poet, lives on and indeed grows–in her published works, in her future publications, in her readers’ hearts, minds, actions, words, and ideas. So this is not a conclusion; it’s another beginning of sorts. As Gloria wrote in the 1983 preface to This Bridge, “Caminante, no hay puentes, se hace puentes al andar. Voyager, there are no bridges, one builds them as one walks.”

Some memorials from colleagues/friends of Gloria. I enjoyed reading this one.

Dear Comadres, Compadres, Friends, and Estudiantes:

I’m writing to you with sorrowful news about the passing of our querida hermana/maestra/visionary sister-writer, Gloria Anzaldúa. I am sorry to have to pass the news in this “electronic” way. Several days ago, Gloria died in her home due to, what we understand to be, complications from the diabetes she suffered for many years.

To some of you Gloria was an dear friend; to others, a teacher on the page. To all of us, she was a source of profound inspiración in the way she made writing her life’s warrior work.

Sunday night, a small group of friends gathered together in Oakland and built an altar in Gloria’s honor. We prayed for her passage…that it be full of light, that as she greets her ancestors, may it be the powerful homecoming she so deeply deserves.

What I ask, in Gloria’s name, is that where ever you are… In your home, on campus, in your organizations that you build an altar for Gloria, as well. With flores, her writings, photos, velas, the ways you wish to honor her and help her make this passage.

I’m sure as the news settles, larger memorials will be organized around the country, especially in Tejas and California…Nueva York, the places where Gloria resided. In the meantime, honor her with your prayers, as you believe.

Con todo corazón,
Cherríe Moraga