Audre Lorde
Despite being one of the most incisive social critics of the 20th century, Black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde has received relatively little attention from philosophy and political theory. My work on Lorde explores themes of political agency, epistemic resistance, and moral imagination across her essays, poetry, and speeches. My book project, The Unflinching Philosophy of Audre Lorde, includes chapters on survival and identity, on the role of feelings in her epistemology, on the “erotic” as a resource for coalitional politics, and on pedagogy and cross-generational change.
Photo by K. Kendall, shared under CC BY 2.0
Publications on Audre Lorde
“Audre Lorde’s Erotic as Epistemic and Political Practice”
Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 38, no. 4 (2023): 896–917
This article examines Lorde’s influential concept of the erotic in detail, identifying four integral elements: feeling, knowledge, power, and concerted action. The erotic is a way of feeling in a person’s work, which makes possible novel, politically charged knowledge about the self and their social environment. The erotic is a source of power by providing vision and energy for actions integrating a person’s many commitments and political interests. It facilitates concerted action and coalition by enhancing a person’s appreciation of their interests and values, while fostering embodied, personal connections that build trust on the basis of shared vulnerability. Thus, the erotic helps build coalitions where differences of perspective and experience can be examined, resisting an unjust society’s epistemic distortions.
Syllabus—The Philosophy of Audre Lorde: Survival and Self-Scrutiny
Developed 2022–2023 for an advanced BA/MA seminar
Through close reading and discussion of Lorde’s essays, poetry, speeches, interviews, and long-form writing, this seminar examines the cohesive philosophical commitments undergirding Lorde’s thought. Central to Lorde’s praxis are the ongoing projects of survival and self-scrutiny. Lorde articulates a dynamic account of the survival necessary for anyone living “in the teeth” of antiblackness, homophobia, and misogyny. On the other hand, facing “the cold winds of self-scrutiny”—examining deep feelings and beliefs—is a prerequisite for building coalitions for resistance, especially when we benefit from oppressive social arrangements and find ourselves seduced into complicity. Across four units, this course traces these two overarching themes through her work, while assessing how Lorde’s insights retain vitality and contemporary relevance.
“Feeling, Knowledge, Self-Preservation: Audre Lorde’s Oppositional Agency and Some Implications for Ethics”
Journal of the American Philosophical Association 6, no. 4 (2020): 463–482
Throughout her work, Audre Lorde maintains that her self-preservation in the face of oppression depends on acting from the recognition and valorization of her feelings as a deep source of knowledge. This portrayal of agency poses challenges to standard positions in ethics, epistemology, and moral psychology. This article examines the oppositional agency articulated by Lorde's thought, locating feeling, poetry, and the power she calls ‘the erotic’ within her avowed project of self-preservation. It then explores the moral and epistemological implications of taking seriously Lorde's account, examining as a case study how Lorde's account unsettles prevailing assumptions about the role of consent in responsibility between sexual partners.
“Survival and Self in Audre Lorde”
Blog of the APA, February 18, 2022
This blog post introduces Lorde’s rich conception of survival. More than merely avoiding death, survival for Lorde is survival as this one who she is: she must be able to preserve and live out her multiple identities as Black, as a woman, as a lesbian, as a mother. Lorde contrasts this idea of survival against the pursuit of security, where the latter often requires a person to give up some key aspect of self to secure the fulfillment of basic needs. Thinking survival as self-preservation, we can see the political and moral inadequacy of promises of safety tied to passing as straight, remaining silent about racist violence, or conforming to expectations of respectability.