It's taken all of my Sunday afternoon, but at last I have generated some kind of memory map. The first question was what kind of data do I want to map? How do I want to construct my memory map? How, in fact, does one construct a map of one's own past in a way that generates numbers for an Excel spreadsheet? Thus, the real question became, what numbers will chart the course of my memory? And what part of that memory do I want to chart? I was very mortified that all of the tutorials on YouTube were clearly directed at an insider audience, or at least, someone whose eyes didn't glaze over at the first mention of a filter or a data set! But because I am a Leo Dog, I persisted. And it came to me that one way to chart my memory map was to integrate the names of the different universities I've studied and/or worked at. Universities are places, after all, and can be mapped with a latitude and longitude. What years did I attend these schools? Yay: another column. What work did I publish? I had to limit that just to books or else I'd still be plugging away at all the different individual things I've published over the last 40 years. None of it was very interesting to me, until I thought of another important variable that would help me offset the severe left-brained approach of this memory map. Relationships. There was the Humanities angle. What relationship(s) did I have at each of these places in my educational trajectory? And how did these relationships provide me with an education of the heart? That might be interesting to somebody. So using the latitude and longitude tool that Sarah provided, I was able to chart the different universities I wanted to include, and then I thought it would be important to broaden that to Schools, and add in the names of the high school and grade school I attended. The problem with adding these other schools is that the El Paso marker has three layers to it, but you can only see one, my high school. Maybe I should just stick to universities. I suppose it does matter in terms of understanding the broader compass of my life that I attended an all-girls Catholic school for all 8 years of elementary, and that my one and only male love was my high school boyfriend, whom I ended up marrying (and divorcing once I saw the lesbian light). So now my first attempt at a memory map is done, and the cards list all this either trivial or interesting data for each marker. Now what?
Reading Thirdspace has been a good experience in mind-bending. I feel especially attracted to this notion of "thirding" or seeing from three different perspectives. It's interesting to me that Soja would use bell hooks as a good example of what he calls Thirdspace thinking, when Chicana feminist theorists, particularly lesbian theorists like Anzaldúa, Sandoval, and Pérez have been writing about this kind of alter-Native space for 40 years. Differential consciousness, mestiza consciousness, the decolonial imaginary--these are all synonyms for what Soja is calling Thirdspace, or the confluence of the real and the imagined, or the inflection of the spatial on the historical and the social. When he writes that we are all always simultaneously historical, social, and spatial--that you can't be in the world, that is, exist, without this simultaneity, he reminds me very much of how, as Emma Perez writes, "the decolonial is the time lag between the colonial and the postcolonial." Those of us invested in working with the decolonial imaginary cannot do so without also engaging the colonial and the postcolonial at the same time. But we go further than Thirdspace. What about the sexual? Wouldn't that constitute a Fourthspace?
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