2025 Summer Research Symposium • Amely Logan • July 9, 2025

Amely Logan

she/her/hers

Class of 2026

Major: Philosophy 

Mentor: Erika Grimm, PhD (she/her/hers), St. Mary’s University

Resisting “Chicana and Latina Syndrome”: Preserving Difference across Feminist Accounts of the Self

This paper considers feminist Chicanx and Latinx philosophers’ theories of the self and takes up the call that we must resist the tendency to clump Chicanx and Latinx identity together. In this paper, I respond to the work of Latina feminist theorist, Carmen Lugo-Lugo, in which she addresses the dangers of homogenizing Chicanx and Latinx identity and insists that we must take seriously the differences between the two identities. While more attention has been given to Chicanx and Latinx work in recent philosophical literature, little has been done to track distinctions between Chicanx and Latinx theories of the self. I consult the works of Latinx and Chicanx feminist philosophers, including Mariana Ortega, María Lugones, Gloria Anzaldúa, Jacqueline Martinez, Norma Alarcón, and Linda M. Alcoff, in order to demonstrate the differences between their descriptions of lived experience and theories of the self. My account reveals that Chicanx and Latinx theories of the self-differ in three major ways: (1) in the history that gave rise to the term Chicanx, (2) in the differences between Latinx and Chicanx lived experience, and (3) in the worlds that Chicanxs and Latinxs belong to. This paper thus illustrates how, by failing to take seriously these differences, we risk further homogenization and/or erasure of multiply-marginalized selves.

Keywords: mestizaje, multiplicity, “world”-traveling, nepantla, hometactics