Grace Kyungwon Hong
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816695263
- eISBN:
- 9781452952352
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816695263.003.0003
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
This chapter analyses works by Audre Lorde and Cherríe Moraga, which interrogate the moralism that infuses those aspects of social movements that become invested in respectability and legibility. ...
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This chapter analyses works by Audre Lorde and Cherríe Moraga, which interrogate the moralism that infuses those aspects of social movements that become invested in respectability and legibility. Since neoliberal disavowal of gendered, sexual, and racialized precarity is so centrally predicated on respectability as the only avenue to security, a refusal of respectability is a powerful repudiation of neoliberal modes of power. This chapter posits Lorde and Moraga as paradigmatic of woman of color feminist / queer of color theories of the onset of neoliberalism in the 1980s, which it argues is marked by the exacerbated extraction of surplus value from populations, modes of surplus value based not only on the economic but also the affective. It examines several essays from Sister Outsider to highlight that an economy dependent on devalued people uses affects like terror and loathing to create them. This chapter connects Lorde’s politics of affect with Moraga’s refusal to be morally defensible on any terms as a means of critiquing respectability and legibility. It explores two of Moraga’s texts—The Last Generation, a collection of poetry and prose, and Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood—for how they engage with generationality and reproduction.Less
This chapter analyses works by Audre Lorde and Cherríe Moraga, which interrogate the moralism that infuses those aspects of social movements that become invested in respectability and legibility. Since neoliberal disavowal of gendered, sexual, and racialized precarity is so centrally predicated on respectability as the only avenue to security, a refusal of respectability is a powerful repudiation of neoliberal modes of power. This chapter posits Lorde and Moraga as paradigmatic of woman of color feminist / queer of color theories of the onset of neoliberalism in the 1980s, which it argues is marked by the exacerbated extraction of surplus value from populations, modes of surplus value based not only on the economic but also the affective. It examines several essays from Sister Outsider to highlight that an economy dependent on devalued people uses affects like terror and loathing to create them. This chapter connects Lorde’s politics of affect with Moraga’s refusal to be morally defensible on any terms as a means of critiquing respectability and legibility. It explores two of Moraga’s texts—The Last Generation, a collection of poetry and prose, and Waiting in the Wings: Portrait of a Queer Motherhood—for how they engage with generationality and reproduction.
Lana Lin
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780823277711
- eISBN:
- 9780823280568
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823277711.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
This chapter interprets Audre Lorde’s experience of cancer and racial injury through psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s theories of sadistic aggression, mourning, and psychic reparation. Drawing on ...
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This chapter interprets Audre Lorde’s experience of cancer and racial injury through psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s theories of sadistic aggression, mourning, and psychic reparation. Drawing on Klein’s theories of the maternal breast as the first part-object, the original lost object that initiates a cycle of destruction and reparation, the chapter considers the psychic consequences of losing the breast through the traumatic processes of weaning and invasive carcinoma. For Lorde, illness, racism, sexism, and homophobia are conjoined as objectifying forces. The chapter inquires into how psychoanalytic object relations theory contends with objectification—becoming the object of a fatal disease, racial hatred, or sexist assault. Indicating how destruction can play a part in reparation, Lorde described her own mastectomy as breaking off a piece of herself to make her whole. She rejects the breast prosthesis on the grounds that it enforces objectifying gender norms. Lorde’s critique of the “prosthetic pretense” is applied to contemporary breast cancer culture. The chapter proposes that one of the unconscious motivations behind the social pressure to reconstruct the breast stems from a fetishism of the first object.Less
This chapter interprets Audre Lorde’s experience of cancer and racial injury through psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s theories of sadistic aggression, mourning, and psychic reparation. Drawing on Klein’s theories of the maternal breast as the first part-object, the original lost object that initiates a cycle of destruction and reparation, the chapter considers the psychic consequences of losing the breast through the traumatic processes of weaning and invasive carcinoma. For Lorde, illness, racism, sexism, and homophobia are conjoined as objectifying forces. The chapter inquires into how psychoanalytic object relations theory contends with objectification—becoming the object of a fatal disease, racial hatred, or sexist assault. Indicating how destruction can play a part in reparation, Lorde described her own mastectomy as breaking off a piece of herself to make her whole. She rejects the breast prosthesis on the grounds that it enforces objectifying gender norms. Lorde’s critique of the “prosthetic pretense” is applied to contemporary breast cancer culture. The chapter proposes that one of the unconscious motivations behind the social pressure to reconstruct the breast stems from a fetishism of the first object.
Cheryl Higashida
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252036507
- eISBN:
- 9780252093548
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252036507.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature
This chapter argues that Audre Lorde's essays and poetry from the 1980s develop an overlooked yet significant strand of second-wave Black feminism that reveals continuities with postwar anticolonial ...
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This chapter argues that Audre Lorde's essays and poetry from the 1980s develop an overlooked yet significant strand of second-wave Black feminism that reveals continuities with postwar anticolonial internationalism. Lorde's poetry and prose from the mid-1980s on, after the invasion of Grenada, reveal that independent Black nationhood becomes an important political goal for her, one not yet superseded by “free” mobility or exilic diasporic communities. Moreover, it is in Lorde's post-invasion prose and poetry that she most explicitly and consistently explores a nationalist internationalism, positing that African Americans are morally and politically bound to support Third World and indigenous struggles for national sovereignty and that anticolonial struggles illuminate and impact African Americans' situation in the United States as an oppressed people.Less
This chapter argues that Audre Lorde's essays and poetry from the 1980s develop an overlooked yet significant strand of second-wave Black feminism that reveals continuities with postwar anticolonial internationalism. Lorde's poetry and prose from the mid-1980s on, after the invasion of Grenada, reveal that independent Black nationhood becomes an important political goal for her, one not yet superseded by “free” mobility or exilic diasporic communities. Moreover, it is in Lorde's post-invasion prose and poetry that she most explicitly and consistently explores a nationalist internationalism, positing that African Americans are morally and politically bound to support Third World and indigenous struggles for national sovereignty and that anticolonial struggles illuminate and impact African Americans' situation in the United States as an oppressed people.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816680894
- eISBN:
- 9781452948799
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816680894.003.0010
- Subject:
- Education, Educational Policy and Politics
This chapter considers what it means to be nobody in a university economy designed to produce somebody individuated, assimilated, and consenting to empire. It examines the complexity of the ...
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This chapter considers what it means to be nobody in a university economy designed to produce somebody individuated, assimilated, and consenting to empire. It examines the complexity of the administrative function of teaching writing in an early black studies/women’s studies context through two pieces of creative poetic and nonfiction writing by June Jordan and Audre Lorde on their own teaching in the public university system from the late 1960s through to the 1980s. Jordan creates a mutilayered pedagogical narrative on the intergenerational dispersal of love between her own generation and the generation of her students in a police state. In Disciplinary Matters, intellectual historian Nick Mitchell distinguishes between the administrative and intellectual functions of black studies as a disciplinary form.Less
This chapter considers what it means to be nobody in a university economy designed to produce somebody individuated, assimilated, and consenting to empire. It examines the complexity of the administrative function of teaching writing in an early black studies/women’s studies context through two pieces of creative poetic and nonfiction writing by June Jordan and Audre Lorde on their own teaching in the public university system from the late 1960s through to the 1980s. Jordan creates a mutilayered pedagogical narrative on the intergenerational dispersal of love between her own generation and the generation of her students in a police state. In Disciplinary Matters, intellectual historian Nick Mitchell distinguishes between the administrative and intellectual functions of black studies as a disciplinary form.
Grace Kyungwon Hong
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780816695263
- eISBN:
- 9781452952352
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816695263.003.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Race and Ethnicity
The Introduction begins by looking at the meaning of the word “difference” in relation to Audre Lorde’s essay called “Learning from the 60s,” which demanded that everyone regardless of their race ...
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The Introduction begins by looking at the meaning of the word “difference” in relation to Audre Lorde’s essay called “Learning from the 60s,” which demanded that everyone regardless of their race take into account their own complicities with power over and against others. In this book “difference” references a cultural and epistemological practice that holds in suspension (without requiring resolution) contradictory, mutually exclusive, and negating impulses. “Difference” names an epistemological position, ontological condition, and political strategy that reckon with the shift in the technologies of power that one might as well call “neoliberal.” The Introduction goes on to look at how the term “neoliberal” has been used historically and how it is used in this book. It defines neoliberalism foremost as an epistemological structure of disavowal, a means of claiming that racial and gendered violence are things of the past. It does so by affirming certain modes of racialized, gendered, and sexualized life, particularly through invitation into reproductive respectability, so as to disavow its exacerbated production of premature death. The introduction concludes by explaining that the author takes inspiration from Lorde and bends toward the project of pursuing a complex liberation without any guarantee of a certain or knowable future.Less
The Introduction begins by looking at the meaning of the word “difference” in relation to Audre Lorde’s essay called “Learning from the 60s,” which demanded that everyone regardless of their race take into account their own complicities with power over and against others. In this book “difference” references a cultural and epistemological practice that holds in suspension (without requiring resolution) contradictory, mutually exclusive, and negating impulses. “Difference” names an epistemological position, ontological condition, and political strategy that reckon with the shift in the technologies of power that one might as well call “neoliberal.” The Introduction goes on to look at how the term “neoliberal” has been used historically and how it is used in this book. It defines neoliberalism foremost as an epistemological structure of disavowal, a means of claiming that racial and gendered violence are things of the past. It does so by affirming certain modes of racialized, gendered, and sexualized life, particularly through invitation into reproductive respectability, so as to disavow its exacerbated production of premature death. The introduction concludes by explaining that the author takes inspiration from Lorde and bends toward the project of pursuing a complex liberation without any guarantee of a certain or knowable future.
Amber Jamilla Musser
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781479891818
- eISBN:
- 9781479891405
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479891818.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gay and Lesbian Studies
This chapter discusses Bob Flanagan’s sadomasochistic plays; Audre Lorde’s reflections on cancer; as well as Gilles Deleuze’s theorizations of illness and masochism, to study the notion of ...
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This chapter discusses Bob Flanagan’s sadomasochistic plays; Audre Lorde’s reflections on cancer; as well as Gilles Deleuze’s theorizations of illness and masochism, to study the notion of desubjectification. Flanagan’s plays shows how people cope with powerlessness that comes from within—when pain comes from the body because of illness. Deleuze imagines masochism as a step away from the discipline of modernity and subjectivity; hence, it allows for the opening of new possibilities for thought and life. The most developed form of this argument comes from his work with Félix Guattari on the Body without Organs (BwO). Lastly, Lorde’s reading of the erotic discusses communal self, scripting agency, and sexuality as affects of the plurality of subjectification.Less
This chapter discusses Bob Flanagan’s sadomasochistic plays; Audre Lorde’s reflections on cancer; as well as Gilles Deleuze’s theorizations of illness and masochism, to study the notion of desubjectification. Flanagan’s plays shows how people cope with powerlessness that comes from within—when pain comes from the body because of illness. Deleuze imagines masochism as a step away from the discipline of modernity and subjectivity; hence, it allows for the opening of new possibilities for thought and life. The most developed form of this argument comes from his work with Félix Guattari on the Body without Organs (BwO). Lastly, Lorde’s reading of the erotic discusses communal self, scripting agency, and sexuality as affects of the plurality of subjectification.
Angelique V. Nixon
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9781628462180
- eISBN:
- 9781626746039
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781628462180.003.0003
- Subject:
- Literature, World Literature
The Caribbean American writers examined in chapter three, Paule Marshall and Audre Lorde, seek a spiritual home in the Caribbean, the home of their parents and ancestors. More specifically, they ...
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The Caribbean American writers examined in chapter three, Paule Marshall and Audre Lorde, seek a spiritual home in the Caribbean, the home of their parents and ancestors. More specifically, they write and thereby claim multiple homes in transnational spaces through the Caribbean and an African diasporic identity. Both Marshall and Lorde directly challenge neocolonial discourse and tourism by creating alternative Black female travel narratives that represent diasporic travel, identity, and multiple homespaces. They both introduce new forms of tourism and possibilities for resistance to neocolonialism, while uncovering the strong continuities between the racial, sexual, and gender dynamics of colonialism (and slavery) and neocolonialism (and tourism).Less
The Caribbean American writers examined in chapter three, Paule Marshall and Audre Lorde, seek a spiritual home in the Caribbean, the home of their parents and ancestors. More specifically, they write and thereby claim multiple homes in transnational spaces through the Caribbean and an African diasporic identity. Both Marshall and Lorde directly challenge neocolonial discourse and tourism by creating alternative Black female travel narratives that represent diasporic travel, identity, and multiple homespaces. They both introduce new forms of tourism and possibilities for resistance to neocolonialism, while uncovering the strong continuities between the racial, sexual, and gender dynamics of colonialism (and slavery) and neocolonialism (and tourism).
Emily Anne Parker
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- October 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190275594
- eISBN:
- 9780190275624
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190275594.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Feminist Philosophy
Audre Lorde understood giving isolated conceptual attention to sexual difference to be a tool of social control. I first discuss this claim in the context of Lorde’s philosophy of difference. I argue ...
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Audre Lorde understood giving isolated conceptual attention to sexual difference to be a tool of social control. I first discuss this claim in the context of Lorde’s philosophy of difference. I argue that Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity and All Men Are Mortal offer in the figure of ambiguity a philosophy of difference that anticipates important aspects of that of Lorde: in these Beauvoirian texts ambiguity articulates an approach which is simultaneously ecological and political. However, to find this thread in Beauvoir’s oeuvre, it is necessary to read against images that she uses in both books to index ambiguity: Marianne de Sinclair (in All Men are Mortal) and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse (in The Ethics of Ambiguity). These images suggest the conceptual reduction of difference to sexual difference that Lorde warns against. I argue that Beauvoirian ambiguity has a power that can override the two figures that she uses to represent it.Less
Audre Lorde understood giving isolated conceptual attention to sexual difference to be a tool of social control. I first discuss this claim in the context of Lorde’s philosophy of difference. I argue that Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity and All Men Are Mortal offer in the figure of ambiguity a philosophy of difference that anticipates important aspects of that of Lorde: in these Beauvoirian texts ambiguity articulates an approach which is simultaneously ecological and political. However, to find this thread in Beauvoir’s oeuvre, it is necessary to read against images that she uses in both books to index ambiguity: Marianne de Sinclair (in All Men are Mortal) and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse (in The Ethics of Ambiguity). These images suggest the conceptual reduction of difference to sexual difference that Lorde warns against. I argue that Beauvoirian ambiguity has a power that can override the two figures that she uses to represent it.
Stella Bolaki
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- September 2016
- ISBN:
- 9781474402422
- eISBN:
- 9781474418591
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474402422.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter stages a conversation between the work of two British photographers who have explored breast cancer, Jo Spence and Sam Taylor-Wood, and the responses to mastectomy and prosthesis/breast ...
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This chapter stages a conversation between the work of two British photographers who have explored breast cancer, Jo Spence and Sam Taylor-Wood, and the responses to mastectomy and prosthesis/breast reconstruction of two American feminist critics/activists, Audre Lorde and Diane Price Herndl. The analysis particularly focuses on photographs from Spence’s touring exhibition The Picture of Health? (1985) and Taylor-Wood’s ‘Self Portrait in a Single Breasted Suit with Hare’ (2001). Reading the photographs in the context of Herndl’s response to Lorde and in relation to other breast cancer representations, the chapter shows how despite their (national and generic) differences, these narratives mark important stages in the representation of breast cancer and of the post-operative body during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Discussing the tension between visible self/image and voice/caption in the texts and photographs the chapter addresses: the relation between visibility and concealment in representations of the scarred body; the (de)politicisation of patienthood; feminist responses to breast cancer culture; and the conditions under which photography can successfully usurp the power of the medical gaze to re-imagine or re-cover bodies.Less
This chapter stages a conversation between the work of two British photographers who have explored breast cancer, Jo Spence and Sam Taylor-Wood, and the responses to mastectomy and prosthesis/breast reconstruction of two American feminist critics/activists, Audre Lorde and Diane Price Herndl. The analysis particularly focuses on photographs from Spence’s touring exhibition The Picture of Health? (1985) and Taylor-Wood’s ‘Self Portrait in a Single Breasted Suit with Hare’ (2001). Reading the photographs in the context of Herndl’s response to Lorde and in relation to other breast cancer representations, the chapter shows how despite their (national and generic) differences, these narratives mark important stages in the representation of breast cancer and of the post-operative body during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Discussing the tension between visible self/image and voice/caption in the texts and photographs the chapter addresses: the relation between visibility and concealment in representations of the scarred body; the (de)politicisation of patienthood; feminist responses to breast cancer culture; and the conditions under which photography can successfully usurp the power of the medical gaze to re-imagine or re-cover bodies.
Amber Jamilla Musser
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781479807031
- eISBN:
- 9781479845491
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479807031.003.0008
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gay and Lesbian Studies
This coda provides a meditation on the brown and black mother and her role in producing brown jouissance. Rather than a working through of any particular work of art, the discussion here involves a ...
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This coda provides a meditation on the brown and black mother and her role in producing brown jouissance. Rather than a working through of any particular work of art, the discussion here involves a theoretical meditation on her estrangement from the familial. While this distention might result in mourning, we might also locate non-Oedipal possibilities for relationality that center a queer (and black and brown) femininity. This chapter orients that conversation around Audre Lorde’s Zami and her discussion of the mother in relation to geography and her own identity as a black lesbian.Less
This coda provides a meditation on the brown and black mother and her role in producing brown jouissance. Rather than a working through of any particular work of art, the discussion here involves a theoretical meditation on her estrangement from the familial. While this distention might result in mourning, we might also locate non-Oedipal possibilities for relationality that center a queer (and black and brown) femininity. This chapter orients that conversation around Audre Lorde’s Zami and her discussion of the mother in relation to geography and her own identity as a black lesbian.
Stéphane Robolin
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- April 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780252039478
- eISBN:
- 9780252097584
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Illinois Press
- DOI:
- 10.5406/illinois/9780252039478.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter considers the outcomes of some interactions among black South African and African American writers discussed in preceding chapters, but “updated” here in the context of the 1980s. It ...
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This chapter considers the outcomes of some interactions among black South African and African American writers discussed in preceding chapters, but “updated” here in the context of the 1980s. It explores how earlier transnational engagements led to a series of subsequent texts and interpersonal relationships as the global antiapartheid movement began to reach its apex. Those works—by Richard Rive, Michelle Cliff, Audre Lorde, and Gwendolyn Brooks—attest to the impress of earlier writers (Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Keorapetse Kgositsile, and Bessie Head) and, by returning us to the matter of cultural influence, point to the considerable role South Africa and its writers played in shaping African American writerly imaginations. Furthermore, it is argued that Cliff's poem “Constructive Engagement” plays with the name of the Reagan-era U.S. foreign policy toward South Africa to powerful effect.Less
This chapter considers the outcomes of some interactions among black South African and African American writers discussed in preceding chapters, but “updated” here in the context of the 1980s. It explores how earlier transnational engagements led to a series of subsequent texts and interpersonal relationships as the global antiapartheid movement began to reach its apex. Those works—by Richard Rive, Michelle Cliff, Audre Lorde, and Gwendolyn Brooks—attest to the impress of earlier writers (Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Keorapetse Kgositsile, and Bessie Head) and, by returning us to the matter of cultural influence, point to the considerable role South Africa and its writers played in shaping African American writerly imaginations. Furthermore, it is argued that Cliff's poem “Constructive Engagement” plays with the name of the Reagan-era U.S. foreign policy toward South Africa to powerful effect.
Fatima El-Tayeb
- Published in print:
- 2011
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816670154
- eISBN:
- 9781452947242
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816670154.003.0002
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Cultural Studies
This chapter examines how African activists apply the notion of African diaspora within their European minority community. The studies of African diaspora are vital in order to strengthen the African ...
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This chapter examines how African activists apply the notion of African diaspora within their European minority community. The studies of African diaspora are vital in order to strengthen the African diasporic subjectivity. This subjectivity is then used to impose the significance of the African identity to the marginalization of their communities in Europe. In addition, this African diasporic subjectivity is initially attributable to men only; however, theorists argue that the question in race does not cover questions in gender and sexuality; from there evolved diasporic intersubjectivity. Diasporic intersubjectivity became evident when African feminist poets Gwendolyn Rodgers and Audre Lorde pioneered the liberation movements of 1970 through poetry. This chapter explores the transnational community of Europe segregating the population of the African minority, through the use of intersubjective models of diaspora identity.Less
This chapter examines how African activists apply the notion of African diaspora within their European minority community. The studies of African diaspora are vital in order to strengthen the African diasporic subjectivity. This subjectivity is then used to impose the significance of the African identity to the marginalization of their communities in Europe. In addition, this African diasporic subjectivity is initially attributable to men only; however, theorists argue that the question in race does not cover questions in gender and sexuality; from there evolved diasporic intersubjectivity. Diasporic intersubjectivity became evident when African feminist poets Gwendolyn Rodgers and Audre Lorde pioneered the liberation movements of 1970 through poetry. This chapter explores the transnational community of Europe segregating the population of the African minority, through the use of intersubjective models of diaspora identity.
Amber Jamilla Musser
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781479807031
- eISBN:
- 9781479845491
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479807031.003.0003
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gay and Lesbian Studies
This chapter delves more deeply into the matter of the black vulva in arguing for a revaluation of narcissism, friction, and superficiality by dwelling on Mickalene Thomas’s use of rhinestones as ...
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This chapter delves more deeply into the matter of the black vulva in arguing for a revaluation of narcissism, friction, and superficiality by dwelling on Mickalene Thomas’s use of rhinestones as excessive decorations in The Origin of the Universe (2012). A reimagining of Gustave Courbet’s infamous headless, nude portrait of a woman, Origin of the World (1866), Thomas’s work positions rhinestone-embellished genitals in the center of the frame. This chapter argues that Thomas’s painting offers a meditation on Audre Lorde’s matrilineal womanism while also allowing us to think with the idea of surface within the medium of painting. Both this calling forth of 1970s- 1980s black lesbian feminism and the textures of the surface bring forth friction as a form of relationality and narcissism as a necessary form of self-creation. Brown jouissance, this chapter argues, inheres in the excesses of surface that the painting presents.Less
This chapter delves more deeply into the matter of the black vulva in arguing for a revaluation of narcissism, friction, and superficiality by dwelling on Mickalene Thomas’s use of rhinestones as excessive decorations in The Origin of the Universe (2012). A reimagining of Gustave Courbet’s infamous headless, nude portrait of a woman, Origin of the World (1866), Thomas’s work positions rhinestone-embellished genitals in the center of the frame. This chapter argues that Thomas’s painting offers a meditation on Audre Lorde’s matrilineal womanism while also allowing us to think with the idea of surface within the medium of painting. Both this calling forth of 1970s- 1980s black lesbian feminism and the textures of the surface bring forth friction as a form of relationality and narcissism as a necessary form of self-creation. Brown jouissance, this chapter argues, inheres in the excesses of surface that the painting presents.
Lana Lin
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780823277711
- eISBN:
- 9780823280568
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823277711.001.0001
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gender Studies
Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects examines the vulnerabilities of the human body, in particular how cancer disrupts feelings of bodily integrity and agency. Employing psychoanalytic and literary ...
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Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects examines the vulnerabilities of the human body, in particular how cancer disrupts feelings of bodily integrity and agency. Employing psychoanalytic and literary analysis of atypical autopathographies, the book tracks three exemplary figures, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, poet Audre Lorde, and literary and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Freud’s sixteen-year ordeal with a prosthetic jaw, the result of oral cancer, demonstrates the powers and failures of prosthetic objects in warding off physical and psychic fragmentation. Lorde’s life writing reveals how the loss of a breast to cancer is experienced as yet another attack directed toward her racially and sexually vilified body. Sedgwick’s memoir and breast cancer advice column negotiate her morbidity and mortality by disseminating a public discourse of love and pedagogy. Freud’s Jaw suggests that violences stemming from social, cultural, and biological environments condition the burden of surviving in proximity to one’s mortality. Drawing on psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s concept of “reparation,” wherein constructive forces are harnessed to repair damage to internal psychic objects, Freud’s Jaw proposes that the prospect of imminent destruction paradoxically incites creativity. The afflicted are obliged to devise means to reinstate, at least temporarily, their destabilized physical and psychic unity through creative reparative projects such as love or writing. The book concludes with an analysis of reparative efforts at the rival Freud Museums. The disassembled Freudian archive, like the subjectivities-in-dissolution upon which the book focuses, shows how the labor of integration is tethered to persistent discontinuities.Less
Freud’s Jaw and Other Lost Objects examines the vulnerabilities of the human body, in particular how cancer disrupts feelings of bodily integrity and agency. Employing psychoanalytic and literary analysis of atypical autopathographies, the book tracks three exemplary figures, psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, poet Audre Lorde, and literary and queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Freud’s sixteen-year ordeal with a prosthetic jaw, the result of oral cancer, demonstrates the powers and failures of prosthetic objects in warding off physical and psychic fragmentation. Lorde’s life writing reveals how the loss of a breast to cancer is experienced as yet another attack directed toward her racially and sexually vilified body. Sedgwick’s memoir and breast cancer advice column negotiate her morbidity and mortality by disseminating a public discourse of love and pedagogy. Freud’s Jaw suggests that violences stemming from social, cultural, and biological environments condition the burden of surviving in proximity to one’s mortality. Drawing on psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s concept of “reparation,” wherein constructive forces are harnessed to repair damage to internal psychic objects, Freud’s Jaw proposes that the prospect of imminent destruction paradoxically incites creativity. The afflicted are obliged to devise means to reinstate, at least temporarily, their destabilized physical and psychic unity through creative reparative projects such as love or writing. The book concludes with an analysis of reparative efforts at the rival Freud Museums. The disassembled Freudian archive, like the subjectivities-in-dissolution upon which the book focuses, shows how the labor of integration is tethered to persistent discontinuities.
Claudine Raynaud
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- May 2014
- ISBN:
- 9781846319389
- eISBN:
- 9781781380901
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5949/liverpool/9781846319389.003.0009
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
Writing the erotic is what Morrison has been risking throughout her output since Sula (1973) through Beloved (1986), Jazz (1992), down to A Mercy (2008). The erotic is not a theme, but part and ...
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Writing the erotic is what Morrison has been risking throughout her output since Sula (1973) through Beloved (1986), Jazz (1992), down to A Mercy (2008). The erotic is not a theme, but part and parcel of what writing ventures. Incest, pedophilia, rape, pornography, gang bangs — in Lorde’s words: “abuse of feeling” — and the constant probing of “love” — the title of Morrison’s eighth novel — go hand in hand with a reclaiming of the erotic, constitutive of the black subject (in writing), crucial to its survival and correlative to its freedom. Where Lorde offers a manifesto for a women-identified politics of the erotic, Morrison's fiction risks a poetics of the erotic against (and with) violence and trauma. How does her text summon up sensuality in relation to sexual difference and historical violence? How does it write “black” desire? Is there a progression throughout her oeuvre? If Jazz sets up an erotics of reading in keeping with Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text, the “lustre of poetry” must always be contained by the space(s) left for the other, encompassed by the sublimity of “word-work” that fights the death of language (Nobel Lecture, 1993). Less
Writing the erotic is what Morrison has been risking throughout her output since Sula (1973) through Beloved (1986), Jazz (1992), down to A Mercy (2008). The erotic is not a theme, but part and parcel of what writing ventures. Incest, pedophilia, rape, pornography, gang bangs — in Lorde’s words: “abuse of feeling” — and the constant probing of “love” — the title of Morrison’s eighth novel — go hand in hand with a reclaiming of the erotic, constitutive of the black subject (in writing), crucial to its survival and correlative to its freedom. Where Lorde offers a manifesto for a women-identified politics of the erotic, Morrison's fiction risks a poetics of the erotic against (and with) violence and trauma. How does her text summon up sensuality in relation to sexual difference and historical violence? How does it write “black” desire? Is there a progression throughout her oeuvre? If Jazz sets up an erotics of reading in keeping with Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text, the “lustre of poetry” must always be contained by the space(s) left for the other, encompassed by the sublimity of “word-work” that fights the death of language (Nobel Lecture, 1993).
Amber Jamilla Musser
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781479807031
- eISBN:
- 9781479845491
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479807031.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gay and Lesbian Studies
This chapter analyzes Carrie Mae Weems’s photographic installation From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–1996) as a performance of witnessing in which Weems restores voice to the archive of ...
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This chapter analyzes Carrie Mae Weems’s photographic installation From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–1996) as a performance of witnessing in which Weems restores voice to the archive of portraits that she reprints. While Weems’s installation has been read as trafficking in woundedness, this chapter argues that thinking photography as a technology of reproduction allows us to see Weems’s work as enlarging concepts of diaspora and mothering while also insisting on the opacity of interiority. This chapter positions this form of the maternal in conversation with Audre Lorde’s expansive concept of diaspora. Here, the concept of brown jouissance allows us to reimagine the work that is going on in this piece of art. It enables us to theorize witnessing and photography as fleshy enactments of spiritual resistance and to re-imagine possibilities of black gendering.Less
This chapter analyzes Carrie Mae Weems’s photographic installation From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–1996) as a performance of witnessing in which Weems restores voice to the archive of portraits that she reprints. While Weems’s installation has been read as trafficking in woundedness, this chapter argues that thinking photography as a technology of reproduction allows us to see Weems’s work as enlarging concepts of diaspora and mothering while also insisting on the opacity of interiority. This chapter positions this form of the maternal in conversation with Audre Lorde’s expansive concept of diaspora. Here, the concept of brown jouissance allows us to reimagine the work that is going on in this piece of art. It enables us to theorize witnessing and photography as fleshy enactments of spiritual resistance and to re-imagine possibilities of black gendering.
Vincent W. Lloyd
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780199362189
- eISBN:
- 9780190610593
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199362189.003.0005
- Subject:
- Political Science, American Politics, Political Theory
This chapter argues that the once-robust black natural law tradition declined at the end of the civil rights movement, and it speculates about reasons for this decline. The chapter tracks three ...
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This chapter argues that the once-robust black natural law tradition declined at the end of the civil rights movement, and it speculates about reasons for this decline. The chapter tracks three intellectual currents that pull away from the black natural law tradition while embracing fragments of that tradition. The first current, including James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks, focuses exclusively on the emotional aspect of the black natural law tradition. The second current, including Clarence Thomas, Alan Keyes, and Benjamin Carson, focuses exclusively on the rational aspect. The third current, including Barack Obama, uses parts of the black natural law tradition to advance pragmatic political ends.Less
This chapter argues that the once-robust black natural law tradition declined at the end of the civil rights movement, and it speculates about reasons for this decline. The chapter tracks three intellectual currents that pull away from the black natural law tradition while embracing fragments of that tradition. The first current, including James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks, focuses exclusively on the emotional aspect of the black natural law tradition. The second current, including Clarence Thomas, Alan Keyes, and Benjamin Carson, focuses exclusively on the rational aspect. The third current, including Barack Obama, uses parts of the black natural law tradition to advance pragmatic political ends.
Lida Maxwell
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- June 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190920029
- eISBN:
- 9780190920067
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190920029.003.0002
- Subject:
- Political Science, American Politics, Political Theory
Through discussion of feminist and queer conceptions of “the outsider,” this chapter develops a distinctive conception of outsider truth-telling as the practice of refusing the public/private divide ...
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Through discussion of feminist and queer conceptions of “the outsider,” this chapter develops a distinctive conception of outsider truth-telling as the practice of refusing the public/private divide that structures norms of proper speech and comportment. Outsider truth-telling reveals a reality of oppression and domination that productively unsettles society and enables outsider survival as flourishing. Yet this outsider practice of truth-telling is also inhabited by a dilemma: how to maintain a capacity to speak truth to the public and private realms (and be heard by them) that depends at the same time on remaining outside of those realms in some sense. The chapter suggests that the creation and imagination of tenuous outsider spaces (focusing on Virginia Woolf’s “bridge” and Anna Julia Cooper’s “corner”) offers a promising way to negotiate this dilemma and create a political imaginary where one need not be absorbed by public and private realms to speak to them.Less
Through discussion of feminist and queer conceptions of “the outsider,” this chapter develops a distinctive conception of outsider truth-telling as the practice of refusing the public/private divide that structures norms of proper speech and comportment. Outsider truth-telling reveals a reality of oppression and domination that productively unsettles society and enables outsider survival as flourishing. Yet this outsider practice of truth-telling is also inhabited by a dilemma: how to maintain a capacity to speak truth to the public and private realms (and be heard by them) that depends at the same time on remaining outside of those realms in some sense. The chapter suggests that the creation and imagination of tenuous outsider spaces (focusing on Virginia Woolf’s “bridge” and Anna Julia Cooper’s “corner”) offers a promising way to negotiate this dilemma and create a political imaginary where one need not be absorbed by public and private realms to speak to them.
Zachary Kramer
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- February 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780190682743
- eISBN:
- 9780190922948
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190682743.003.0008
- Subject:
- Law, Human Rights and Immigration, Constitutional and Administrative Law
In its current formulation, civil rights law is geared to contend with a particular flavor of discrimination. So long as the discrimination is aimed at status, so long as group membership is the ...
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In its current formulation, civil rights law is geared to contend with a particular flavor of discrimination. So long as the discrimination is aimed at status, so long as group membership is the lynchpin of the enterprise, civil rights law is well-suited to the task. But when the discrimination is about performance, when it is about self-definition or constraints on how we live our lives, when it is aimed at the one thing that sets the person apart from everyone else, civil rights law is lost at sea. The time has come to rethink the way we do equality. Difference is the path forward. Equality is a work in progress. The important thing is that we keep the conversation going. People are capable of monumental change.Less
In its current formulation, civil rights law is geared to contend with a particular flavor of discrimination. So long as the discrimination is aimed at status, so long as group membership is the lynchpin of the enterprise, civil rights law is well-suited to the task. But when the discrimination is about performance, when it is about self-definition or constraints on how we live our lives, when it is aimed at the one thing that sets the person apart from everyone else, civil rights law is lost at sea. The time has come to rethink the way we do equality. Difference is the path forward. Equality is a work in progress. The important thing is that we keep the conversation going. People are capable of monumental change.
Brooke A. Ackerly
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- February 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780190662936
- eISBN:
- 9780190662974
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780190662936.003.0005
- Subject:
- Political Science, International Relations and Politics, Political Theory
In order to take on global injustice as a problem of injustice itself, a political theory of responsibility requires a methodology for guiding the taking of responsibility for injustice. Chapter 4 ...
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In order to take on global injustice as a problem of injustice itself, a political theory of responsibility requires a methodology for guiding the taking of responsibility for injustice. Chapter 4 provides the feminist theoretical basis for the methodological approach of the book. A feminist grounded normative political theory uses a feminist critical methodology to identify differences in perspectives on injustice. These might reflect differences in how groups experience injustice. In feminist grounded political theory, we treat the space between differences as at once a space of inquiry and a site from which to gain critical purchase on previously normalized exploited power inequalities. The chapter illustrates the role of feminist social criticism in light of the limitations of injustice itself.Less
In order to take on global injustice as a problem of injustice itself, a political theory of responsibility requires a methodology for guiding the taking of responsibility for injustice. Chapter 4 provides the feminist theoretical basis for the methodological approach of the book. A feminist grounded normative political theory uses a feminist critical methodology to identify differences in perspectives on injustice. These might reflect differences in how groups experience injustice. In feminist grounded political theory, we treat the space between differences as at once a space of inquiry and a site from which to gain critical purchase on previously normalized exploited power inequalities. The chapter illustrates the role of feminist social criticism in light of the limitations of injustice itself.
