Audre Lorde

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 the 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.

“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.

Inheriting the Poetry of Survival (online version)
The Philosopher 112, no. 2 (2024): 99–104

Through a long-form review of Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s book Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, this article identifies several points of inheritance from Lorde that become visible when one examines the particulars of her life, as Gumbs has done. This includes her theory of poetry, her coalitional praxis, and her account of the energy for political action and the work of scaling up that energy from the smallest kernel of feeling.

“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.