Audre Research Articles

'Through the Flower': On Audre Lorde and Intersectionality

The article aims to explore the origins of intersectionality through thelegacy of Lorde's feminism and her radical thinking. The concept ofintersectionality has taken on a complex position in feminist scholarshipover the past decade. Many scholars have also considered thecontributions of Audre Lorde to the discussions around intersectionality.It draws parallels between her ideas and it shows how her ideas areinfluenced by both rebellious literary forms and political writing styles.Lorde's radical feminist works have often been regarded as both areflection of identity politics and a shift in situational perception.Intersectionality is in addition said to be a movement that is trying toreclaim the ideas of identity politics and develop new ways to understandthe decentred structures of power. The article uses historicocritical andanalytical approaches to argue that the oeuvre of Lorde's feminismprovides a new perspective on the subject. In her works, Lorde describesa world that is definable only in terms of its relational terms, a world thatis torn apart by the divisions between race, class, sexuality, and gender.She also describes a world that is capable of being understood onlythrough its destructive divisions. The world that she is talking about is aplace that needs to be changed through a process of transformation. Thisworld is also a place where history has been made through the multiplemovements and revolutions that have occurred in it. These are thecontours that define the complex ground that third world feminist politicsare based on.

‘Critical Self-Care’: Reimagining Possibilities of Self-Care as Everyday Resistance in the Context of the Neoliberal University

With the increasing neoliberalization of universities in the United States, current debates question the radical potential of self-care in higher education. Engaging with the work of Audre Lorde and James C. Scott, I argue how discounting self-care as insignificant or co-opted masks the possibilities for everyday forms of resistance through self-care. Broadening beyond a focus on simplistic binaries—individual versus collective, co-opted versus radical—this article offers a different orientation toward self-care—one that I call critical self-care—which recognizes that we can be critical of co-optation by the university, while also understanding self-care as critical to our existence within the university. I develop this conceptualization of self-care in the context of the neoliberal university, by identifying three facets of critical self-care—disruption of the hegemonic academic culture of overwork, building alternative ways of existing within the university, and allowing for the self-care of others—each of which reveals how self-care practices hold the potential for resistance and change to gendered and racialized norms of the institution, even in quiet or informal ways.

Religio-erotic Experience and Transoceanic Becoming at the Shoreline in Audre Lorde’s Zami

Abstract In her biomythographical work Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Audre Lorde’s lover Afrekete appears as a Black queer femme who alters her sense of self and her being through religio-erotic experience. After tracing the spirit who inspired Lorde’s Afrekete throughout the Americas, I propose a theory of the shoreline as a site of transoceanic becoming, or the experience of self-identification required to navigate the Western world as an African diaspora being. I focus primarily on the ontologies of Black trans and queer femmes and the unconscious yet necessary process of becoming at the intersections of existence.

Co-opting and being co-opted: on critiques of identity politics

ABSTRACT In this paper, I analyze three categories of narratives that seek to understand identity politics’ role on the American left through the lens of co-optation. The first, represented primarily by Fredric Jameson, Adolph Reed, Jr. and Walter Benn Michaels, sees identity as having always been foreign and harmful to the left. The second, represented by Asad Haider, acknowledges its original radical role in the 1970s, but sees contemporary identity politics as only a co-opting force. Despite their differences, both of these approaches consider identity politics to be the cause of the left’s decay and define anticapitalism as devoid of it. Audre Lorde, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, and Alex Charnley and Michael Richmond, representing the last category, turn the question around. They refuse a simple dichotomy between a pure political idea or movement and a co-opted one and ask not what identity politics is doing to the left, but how it works within and against capitalist co-optation. Drawing on a larger body of literature, I argue that such an understanding of co-optation as the starting point of any political theory or practice offers a more generative understanding of the possibilities of radical (identity) politics today.

The Nose at the Crossroads: An Intersectional Reading of the Pseudo-Vergilian Moretum

summary: This article provides a new interpretation of the anonymous poem Moretum as erotic satire. Mindful of Shelley Haley's invitation to read it through a Black feminist lens, this article turns to recent Black feminist scholarship on pornography to argue that the presence of sex does not automatically negate the agency of Scybale, the African woman described in the poem as Simulus's custos . Further, I review the evidence for Simulus's own identity. Through a combination of Audre Lorde's Black queer lens and Paul Preciado's trans scholarship on the dildo, I further argue that by imagining Simulus as Black, queer, and/or trans, the power imbalance between Simulus and Scybale is greatly reduced. Lastly, I heed Haley's invitation to read Black protagonists of Latin poetry through Yoruba mythology, and turn to Henry Louis Gates Jr. to argue that Simulus's Blackness brings them closest to Esu, the genderqueer trickster god, which in turn helps us identify him with the author themselves.

Parallel Posts, Tumblr, and the Necessity of Poetry in the Digital Age: 'You are starved for it and you don't even realise you're hungry'

This article explores the emergent format of ‘parallel posts’ or ‘web weaving’, a practice of literary collage on blogging website Tumblr, and argues that they represent a new wave of poetry reception, unbound to formal literary education or to conventional spheres of cultural capital. Following Audre Lorde’s ‘Poetry is not a luxury’, I discuss parallel posts as a vital component of the broader digital literary sphere, a counterpoint to Instapoetry, and as a resurgence of commonplace book-keeping. I analyse the prevalence of users positioning poetry on Tumblr as akin to or superior to school-bound English education, and parallel posts as a humanist practice. I conclude by arguing that parallel posts represent a reclamation of poetry as a common resource and an ideology.

Writing in/against the Academy: Contemporary Biomythographies by women of colour

Biomythography is a rich literary medium through which women of colour writers can simultaneously express their hopes for the future and anxieties about the injustices of the present. This essay concentrates on Western higher education as a site of oppression for multiply marginalised women of colour, analysing Audre Lorde's biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) and Jo Hamya's novel Three Rooms (2021) in dialogue with one another to highlight issues of racialisation, class, and identity in mid-twentieth-century United States and modern British society. By learning from Lorde's and Hamya's use of biomythographical narrative, we can resist the academy in generative forms through embracing nuanced, complex representations of the experiences of women of colour in contemporary literature.

Audre Lorde, Myth, and the Problem of the Other

The presence of blacks in the United States of America today constitutes one of the most peculiar phenomena in the history of modern man. Never had such a significant abduction of a people from their fatherland been recorded. Blacks were considered beasts of burden and property but did not create the language or metaphors by which they were defined. Having neither logos nor identity, they craved the motherland. To perpetuate slavery and colonialism, the white imperialists made up fallacious philosophical arguments that negated the selfhood of blacks. The white subject defined them as the “Other” and objectified them. Racist theorists like Thomas Jefferson, Friedrich Hegel, and Comte de Gobineau posited the black person as the antithesis of the white man. In “Notes on the State of Virginia”, Jefferson sets the “Negro” as an evil force within the nation. In Philosophy of History, Hegel argues that the “negro” stands outside the history of intellectual, technological, moral and cultural progress driven by reason. The history of the Negro stands outside of intellectual history, and so only by colonisation can the black be civilised. As Michelle Wright makes us understand, however, Senghor was to draw heavily from Gobineau in theorising negritude. Gobineau did concede the emotional and artistic component to blacks.

From Edmund Husserl to Audre Lorde: The Path to a Critical Phenomenology of Oppression

What corresponds, in contemporary feminist and decolonial usage, to the demand to “return to experience,” or rather “to the lived experiences” of oppression - a distant echo of Husserl’s call to return to the things themselves? Beauvoir and Fanon appear to have laid the first foundations of a critical phenomenology of oppression - or of a phenomenologization of social critique. Later, Young and Ahmed took up a similar approach, reading history and politics in bodies, and habitus and structures in intimate experience - an approach that is now discussed in the United States under the label of “Critical Phenomenology.” But is this still, really, phenomenology in the strong sense? This article contributes to an understanding of the path taken by the field of Critical Phenomenology from Husserl to Lorde, and of the shifts that can be observed both in the field and in the method that it presupposes. Finally it undertakes to clarify the horizon of this field, which is essentially concerned with the defence of a life that is both deeply corporeal and open to a total meaning.

The Reversal of Negro’s Stereotype Image in Audre Lorde’s Selected Poems: A Poststructuralist Study

The present study tackles the linguistic creative ability of Audre Lorde’s poetic language to change the concepts and perceptions of Negro image signification. It is a sensitive issue that is affecting the life of African American community, namely the Blacks. The researcher in this study aims for seeking vicissitude and reverse the black image signification to indicate it as a graceful one. Besides, the researcher aims to document the black’s agony out of the dominant conceptions by the harsh white society over them during 1960 and 1970. This is done through selecting poems from Audre Lorde’s ‘’Coal’’ volume as a Data analysis under approaching the poststructuralist Susan K. Langer and her book entitled ‘’ Philosophy in a new key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art’’ (1954). Therefore, the paper discusses a rooted and renewed problem, which is judging on skin color. The researcher applies in his investigation a quantitative descriptive methodology that starts with an introduction, literature view, Theoretical background and concepts that are affecting language and black culture in addition to Lorde’s poetic language quality. The study concludes that the signifier is not a must to represent the signified. This is true with Lorde’s call of the black ‘’Coal’, which is a source of fortune and energy, despite being black. Thus, it shows the importance of the self and the black identity.

Autobiography and Audre Lorde’s Matriarchal Sphere

Audre Lorde, one of the most prominent black women poets of the 21st century, is concerned about the horrors of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and homophobia and genuinely attempts to erode them through the power of art. Audre Lorde’s life and work are inspired by an arsenal of powerful women, both cruel and kind, who give her the energy to strive in a world wrought with suffering, pain, and ostracism. Lorde celebrates women of her immediate maternal descent: her mother’s sturdy female relations; she celebrates her friends and lovers; seeks sustenance from a pantheon of mythic goddesses from West Africa; and finally celebrates legendary women who have stood for the women’s cause. This paper explores how these women influenced her poetic production. Her predominantly maternal and matriarchal influences become evident when one places her within the political and intellectual background. Her life and work are not generated by the normative patriarchy that permeates Western institutions but by a self-proclaimed matriarchy. The paper employs new historicism in investigating the impact of Lorde’s family and social heritage, a heritage that was predominantly maternal and matriarchal. Lorde’s family lineage comprises an arsenal of influential female relatives and ancestors. Lorde's family is replete with maternal influences, beginning in her immediate family, where her mother was a real matriarch, and extending to her grandmother and great-grandmother. These maternal influences will push her in the long run as she matures to research women in history and myth. Discovering that the image of powerful and assertive women met with opposition in America, Lorde discovered that the erasure and silencing of women were orchestrated by patriarchy to render women helpless and malleable. Lorde, like other radical feminists, was influenced by the powerful and creative force of the mother, and she sought throughout her struggles to re-inscribe the woman into the center of the body polity.

“My mother must have been other than woman”1: Matrophobia in Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

The mother-daughter dyad is far from simple. Adrienne Rich examines it within the parameters of matrophobia, which is not fearing the mother but fearing to become like her. In Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, Audre Lorde fluctuates between the urge to identify with her mother and the desire to break free. This essay examines Lorde’s ambivalent bond with her mother from the perspective of pre-Oedipal attachment theory and matrophobia.

Audre Lorde and the Archetypal Back to Africa Movement

Purpose: This paper examines how Audre Lorde, one of the most prominent black woman poets of the 21st century, is concerned about the horrors of racism and attempts to erode it through her poetry. As a black, she is excluded from the dominant white society. As a black woman, she is "other" in a patriarchal culture.
 Methodology: The paper employs the Myth and Archetypal Approach propounded by Carl Jung, Northrop Frye, and Mircea Eliade to examine how Lorde seeks to create a community among blacks using African archetypes. In this regard, Lorde uses a pantheon of mythological and legendary archetypes from the ancient Kingdoms of Dahomey, Ashanti, and Benin to create self-esteem and unity in her people. These archetypes can serve as sources of intellectual enlightenment and models for ritual and cultural behavior.
 Findings: Lorde sees mythical archetypes as an authentic form of ancestral worship more accommodating than the Christian culture of the West. Such archetypes allow blacks to understand identifiers that contravene Western culture's xenophobia and create unity among blacks across the world. She invokes primordial history to show that blackness and femaleness are not "other" but affirming qualities. Recognizing that blacks had assumed the polarised dialectics of Western culture, Lorde tries to reconnect them to their lost spiritual cord. The archetypes she invokes would appeal to blacks because archetypes are innate.
 Unique contributor to theory, policy and practice: Thus, by invoking African mythic archetypes, she brings the black community into contact with their lost spiritual history. The paper ends with the caveat that the Back to Africa movement, which has seen a boost in momentum in the last two decades, is a result of the work of poets like Lorde, who, through their poetry, triggered the search for the lost link between blacks in the diaspora and the African continent.

Reading a legacy of black gay literature in/to Disability Studies and a Crip-of-Color Theory: Exploring the work of Joseph Beam, Essex Hemphill and Audre Lorde

This article reads works of Audre Lorde, Essex Hemphill, Joseph Beam, and other writers through what I name a palimpsestic practice of crip reading . The very way in which we must find and read the voices of Black gay men is by locating anthologies and reading those contributors in palimpsestic relationship to one another and to Black feminist writers and organizers. Although Black gay men and Black feminists of the 1980’s and 1990’s engaged with cancer and HIV in their writings, they are often considered as part of different political, cultural, and intellectual legacies than is often included in the field of Disability Studies. A palimpsestic reading of their works as entangled with each other reveals new genealogies of crip activist and cultural work. By this I mean that Black queer and/or feminist writing exist in a palimpsest relationship with Disability Studies; one can read the layers of thought through one another.  A palimpsestic reading also proposes that cultural workers presumed to be outside the sphere of Disability Studies are, in fact, central to creating a crip-of-color theory.

Beauvoir and Lorde confront the honorary man trope: Toward a feminist theory of political resistance

Feminist historians of political resistance have drawn attention to the ‘honorary man’ tradition—the belief women resisters must overcome their feminine bodies and act like their male counterparts to be taken seriously in resistance movements. Yet they have not fully explored the resources of feminist theory to counter it. Building a bridge between history and theory, we address this gap by turning to the work of Simone de Beauvoir and Audre Lorde. We highlight their shared understanding that resistance is embodied and situated in social contexts shot through by oppressive gender, race, and class norms. We sketch out a view of feminist resistance that reveals that women resisters have novel possibilities for action, confront gendered vulnerabilities, and encounter difficult dilemmas that have no easy answers. Our paper deepens our understanding of the failures of the honorary man tradition, and it offers conceptual tools for scholars and activists to think beyond it.

Climate Rage

“Climate Rage: Extractivism and Dispossession in The Olive Tree” is a video essay analyzing the film El Olivo (The Olive Tree, 2016) to explore anger as a response to ecological degradation. The video essay examines the anger of a young, female protagonist in response to the sale of her grandfather’s olive tree within the context of Spain’s ongoing economic and environmental crisis. The essay considers the impacts of environmental violence on human bodies, particularly women and marginalized groups, and emphasizes the interdependence of self and environment. Introducing the term “ecopathy” to refer to the awareness of being embedded in the environment and the range of emotions it evokes, the essay draws from the foundational work of Black feminist authors like Audre Lorde, who study rage as a transformative emotion and applies this methodology to environmental studies, embracing rage’s potential to mobilize communities and challenge the status quo.

(Re)sounding Audre Lorde: Queer Crip Chorus in Lana Lin’s Experimental Documentary

This article discusses the artist, filmmaker, and writer Lana Lin’s “revisioning” of Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals (1980) to consider how the poetic encounter between two artists from different generations exemplifies the relational praxis that Lorde pursued throughout her life. In revealing the ways in which Lorde opens acoustic sensory spaces for contemporary readers and listeners of her work, I specifically focus on the political and aesthetic dynamic of recitation in Lin’s experimental documentary The Cancer Journals Revisited (2018). I trace how recitation becomes a coalitional practice of feminist chorus through which readers and listeners embody the sonorous space they co-create through and with Lorde. The article further looks into the ways Lin pairs recitation performance with visceral images of body parts on the screen to argue that the film’s visuals dwell in and extend the form of the chorus; which is to say, the film expands the meaning and practice of chorus beyond the realm of the sonic. The bodies on the screen extend the chorus, immersing the audience in a participatory rethinking of the experience of cancer (particularly breast cancer) not merely as an individual misfortune or an aesthetic concern. In adjoining textual, visual, and acoustic elements, Lin’s film provides a powerful transformative sensory environment, reverberating through the reciters and the audience.

Pandemic reflections on the Care and Control exhibition: refusals, contracts and publics

This article presents reflections on our pre-Covid-19 exhibition Care and Control, and our interdisciplinary collaboration between artist Alice Tatton Brown and social scientists Maud Perrier and Junko Yamashita. The reflections expand current feminist debates about self-care and collective care by centring the importance of public space, refusals and contracts. Care and Control was designed as both an exhibition and a meeting place, created through our ongoing collaboration. It took place in a shopping centre in Bristol (UK) in June 2019. The exhibition was a collage of feminist archival objects and print, contemporary installation and community engagement. Care and Control began broadly as an experiment to seek out alternatives to an individualist approach to self-care, by researching how Women's Liberation Activists practised self-care and collective care beyond the household, and within protest, friendship and public space. In this article, we make a methodological contribution to feminist discussions of collective care by showing how our strategy of a) making a public exhibition and b) writing a Contract of Care is a significant technique for enacting some of the promise of Audre Lorde’s ‘self-care as warfare’. We show how Care and Control, drawing from the legacy of the Women's Liberation Movement, generated resources for countering definitions of self-care that predominate. Reflecting on how the Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated classed, racialised and gendered divisions in reproductive labour, our article suggests that self-care and collective care need to be conceptualised drawing on social reproduction.

The question of feminist critique

This article engages the contested question of feminist critique, suggesting that reflecting on how we ‘do’ critique as feminist scholars is integral to the work of examining the broader politics of feminist worldmaking and knowledge production. Building on the work of Rosalyn Diprose and Audre Lorde, I suggest that the concept of ‘epistemic generosity’ opens space for the development of a lexicon in which the nuances of an open and receptive attitude to feminist critique can be explored. As a stance of open receptivity, epistemic generosity is associated with waiting, slowness and listening, rather than pursuit, suspicion, vigilance and self-affirmation. Furthermore, as a non-directive mode of relating, epistemic generosity does not presume to know. Open to surprise, wonder and connection, it is fundamentally an orientation to thinking and knowing rooted in hopefulness. At the same time, epistemic generosity is not without risks. What thinking generously means, its risks and its costs, differs according to social positioning. For those located in privileged positions, epistemic generosity is only possible in conjunction with constant practices of self-critique that involve attending to friction, discomfort, difference and difficulty.

A Structural Analysis of Audre Lorde’s Racism Poetry: Its Intrinsic and Extrinsic Elements

This research aims to analyze and identify intrinsic elements in the form of theme, figurative language, and diction, then analyze extrinsic elements in the form of social elements in poetry making and analyze racism reflected in Audre Lorde's poems entitled Power (1978), Who Said It Was Simple (1973) and A Woman Speaks (1984). The method use in this research was a qualitative method. Reading the poem in order to comprehend its overall meaning and discover the meaning which was primarily the essence related to the topic was how the data was collected. This research, there were found 16 data from three themes, 42 figurative languages, 38 dictions, and 17 racism data from three Audre Lorde poems. In addition, There were various manifestations of racism in the poem "Power," including skin color, injustice, segregation, and racial prejudice. The poem "Who Said It Was Simple" has elements of racism related to homophobia, gender, and skin color. The poem "A woman speaks" contains multiple instances of racism, including prejudice based on race, gender, and skin tone. This research is recommended for someone who is interested in literary works, especially poetry, but further research can analyze more broadly in other literary works such as novels, short stories and, songs.