Journal Article — Social Justice Movements as Border Thinking: An Anzaldúan Meditation — by Steve Martinot

The theme of this article is the implicit and inherent sovereignty that existentially accrues to social justice movements. I argue that movements naturally point to where society or social institutions are undemocratic, and that the resistance to this fact by institutions, their exclusion of movements and the political demands made on them, produce an integrity in movements that they don’t always recognize. As excluded yet interior to the functioning of institutions, and included in the social domain of institutions yet external to them, movements appear as border regions, or border thinking, with respect to social institutionality. Using a homological approach to the works of Gloria Anzaldúa, I investigate what this sovereignty that underlies the existence of movements entails, and signifies. Through that homology as a lens, I look at the various inherent dimensions of social justice movements, their ability to ground alternate political structures, their natural ability to produce pro-democratic operations, and their possibility of bringing together varying strategies that are often held to be incommensurable ideologically.