Women,Gender,Sexuality Studies 393A - S- Reading Audre Lorde

Deeply committed to both embodiment and politics in her writing, Audre Lorde - self-described black lesbian feminist mother warrior poet - is among those whose work has been variously claimed as both "essentialist" and "antiessentialist" (as either supporting or challenging biologically reductionist accounts of experience). As such a border figure, she has allowed us to tend to the power of both bodies and politics without placing them in hierarchical relation as causal elements in the making of our realities. Lorde's erotic, like her anger, and her engagements with illness and pain, provide resources for holding our analyses of embodiment accountable to our critical engagements with culture and history and vice versa. Together we will read Lorde and readings of her work to explore her legacies as a scholar of bodies-in-context. What sorts of body knowledges does Lorde's writing suggest are needed and undervalued? How can Lorde's rich and diverse approaches to embodiment help us think about politics, desire, justice, health, ethics, resistance, and what it might mean to live a feminist life here and now?