The Erotic As Power Afrobibliotherapy

"Audre Lorde died in November, 1992.
Audre Lorde was author of more than a
dozen books of poetry and prose, recipient of
national and international awards, and a
founding member of Kitchen Table: Women
of Color Press. Her most recent poetry
includes Undersongs: Chosen Poems Old and
New Revised (1992) and Our Dead Behind Us
(1986); in Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
(1982) she writes her own bio-mythography,
and her recent essays and speeches can be
found in A Burst of Light (1988) and Sister
Outsider (1984), which includes the chapter
reprinted here. Anti-ascetic in her demands
that desire be made conscious and sensuality
affirmed, Lorde responds in this 1978 essay to
Second Wave Feminists’ debates over whether
or not pornography creates and maintains sex-
ual oppression. By disentangling women’s
eroticism from its cultural misuse and calling
for a realization of the erotic as the most self-
responsible source of women’s power, Lorde,
locating that power in women’s acknowledg-
ment of desire, blurs the boundaries between
the erotic, on the one hand, and political, cre-
ative, and everyday activities, on the other.
And in issuing her call to all women, regard-
less of their sexual identity, Lorde erases erotic
differences between straight, bisexual, and les-
bian desire in order to promote such desire as
a creative force for revolutionary change.