Hello and welcome to Overthink.

The podcast where two philosophers show you that things that society often deems bad are actually maybe not so bad, or at least more complicated.

In this case, less bad.

Sure. I am Dr. David Pena-Gusman.

Sure. David's looking at me like you went on way too long.

And I am Ellie Anderson. I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson. Hello.

From a young age, the 20th century Chicana feminist philosopher Gloria Anseldua was a friend of

the darkness. As a young girl growing up in the borderlands of Texas, Anseldua would walk around

with books by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard in her backpack. Honestly, so cute., my God. She was the ideal student, the student that we all want to have.

Well, I'm not so sure about that because she also described herself as an alien from another planet.

Part of the reason that Anselduo was carrying Nietzsche and Kirkegaard around is because she was from a young age, very interested in philosophy.

No wonder then that she became an extremely prominent thinker.

And I would say now somebody that you basically can't go to a philosophy conference or a feminist conference today without somebody mentioning Anseldua's work.

But where I'm going with this is that she wasn't just carrying around those thinkers because she was a nerdy little budding philosopher. She was also carrying them around because from a young age, she felt

like she was an alien from another planet in the sense that she was a lot darker, mood-wise,

than her peers. Unsleduah struggled a lot with depression and found only in Kierkegaard what she described as a despair equaling her own.

When she became an adult, she pushed against the idea of seeing it as a disease, as designating something wrong with her,

and saw it more as something to lean into when it emerged.

And that makes perfect sense because the borderlands that she talks about in borderlands

La Frontera are, of course, literal borderlands between countries, but also emotional borderline.

She talks a lot about the difference between the emotions that we recognize versus the

emotions that we repress between the conscious and

...