"No, just an alien": disability, sexuality, and the extraterrestrial in Gloria Anzaldúa's "Interface"

In this article, we read the Borderlands poem, "Interface," about a relationship between the speaker and an extraterrestrial being named Leyla. For Gloria Anzaldúa, the extraterrestrial foregrounds the spiritual, linguistic, gender, racial, and ethnic otherness that are key features of her works. Through an embrace of the alien, Leyla, Anzaldúa refuses to treat such categories as neatly separated or truly knowable. The poem's narrator vacillates between instructing her lover in the ways of human norms and celebrating her unique alienness. This back and forth reflects Anzaldúa's own statements about sexuality and disability. In our reading of the poetics of "Interface," the extraterrestrial extends our understanding of how and why disability, a fraught category for the author, is essential to her body of work. The figure of the alien engages the lived realities of queerness and disability, and challenges readers to reconsider human connection, capacity, and intelligibility. Counter to phobic representations, human-alien encounters produce knowledge, erotic pleasure, and companionship in Anzaldúa's world. Leyla's trajectory in the poem offers an entrada into her life as a misfit - vulnerable and powerful, apprenticing in the ways of humans while refusing to fully conform to our norms. Through its form and content, the poem provides an account of a struggle with a desire for alien difference and pressures to conform as Leyla becomes embodied.