Audre Lorde and Radical Ownership

Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider doesn't read like feminist theory for one big reason: it isn't feminist theory, or at least not in the sense that we're used to thinking about theory. Lorde is primarily a poet, and one of the guiding rules of writing contemporary poetry--or at least as far as I can discern from having taken a grand total of two poetry-writing classes at MSU--is to use concrete imagery rather than abstraction, to favor vivid example over general description; Lorde does this with her prose, drawing on personal (sometimes shocking) personal experience to discuss such broad issues as sexism, racism, and homophobia. Rather than get lost in theoretical speculation, she consistently grounds herself in first-person testimony; she forces herself as well as her audience to deal with the world as it is--not as it should be in theory--and in privileging the empirical over the theoretical, she radically takes ownership of ways of knowing (and creating) that are often discounted by more academic feminism.

The two most prominent and unconventional sources of knowledge, power, and creativity that Lorde radically owns are the concepts of anger--or more broadly emotion and affect--and the erotic. Her validation of anger as a creative force goes hand in hand with her (and many other black feminists') belief in the generative power of dialectics: like bell hooks, she believes that progress comes from the acknowledgment and celebration of difference, and angry responses to injustice or oppression or the refusal of difference should not be discounted. Lorde values emotion as an important source of power and knowledge, and although one might read this embrace of affect over logic as playing into traditional and oppressive views of gender as dichotomous--men are logical and women emotional, a distinction that Lorde herself sometimes owns--such a validation of emotion refuses to divide and compartmentalize aspects of the self and gestures toward a more holistic concept of knowledge. Lorde also owns and redefines the erotic as a source of power, but rather than create through dialectical opposition, the erotic is an entirely self-centered source of power. It is for Lorde a type of brutal honesty, a refusal to be circumscribed by external forces and to be true to oneself and one's capacity for joy.

Almost as important as what Lorde owns is what she refuses to own. She refuses guilt, as guilt is an unproductive feeling that takes the place of action as effected by anger. She refuses the pornographic as a perverted, objectifying manifestation of the erotic that stems from the shame and the cultural guilt--again, an unproductive feeling--surrounding sexuality.

To be completely honest, I don't see Lorde's ideas about feminism and racism and homophobia playing a huge role in my academic study of gender, but I have already seen their effect on my everyday life. Her writing has made me re-examine my own fear of difference and encouraged me to be more open to varied views and cultural customs and even ways of knowing. Her refusal of guilt and her assertion that silence (particularly suffering in silence) is counterproductive resonate deeply with me and have made me try to be more honest with myself. I think that Lorde provides a beautiful example of living feminism rather than practicing it; from what I can gather from her personal testimony as a black lesbian feminist mother, she was not simply politically active (fighting for black/gay/women's rights), she rather lived a life critical of oppression in all its forms and in all aspects of her life. This represents the practical realization of hooks's call to examine the interpenetrating nature of racial/sexual/gender/cass oppression, the true transition from the objectification of feminism as "women's studies" to the active "femininely studying", the practice rather than the theorization of an anti-oppression philosophical paradigm. Reading Lorde has helped me to do the same: to own my own difference, to be more respectful of others' difference, and to hold myself to a certain level of honesty about my own complicity in contemporary systems of oppression.

Looking back over this post, I realize that things got a bit awkwardly gushy and personal, so I apologize for that. I just really dig Audre Lorde.