Margaret Kissam Morris on Audre Lorde: Embodied Identity and the Power of the Erotic

Author Margaret Kissam Morris refers to the many identifying descriptors Audre Lorde claimed over the course of a prolific lifespan and likens them as having a shared unity in her article “Audre Lorde: Textual Authority and the Embodied Self.” These monikers find commonality as they share the makeup of Lorde, and Morris likens this to “Rosi Braidotti’s vision of the embodied self” and Judith Butler’s theory of indissolubility between the material and the sign (168), Morris arguing that Lorde “perceives her body as a text and is conscious of her texts as emerging from her body” (168). Morris discusses how “multiple subject positions” can function as “both experience and sign” particularly the female body, citing Jeanne Perrault. 

Morris argues that of Lorde’s facets of subject positions, when she names herself, she primarily begins with race. I found this interesting in particular to our course focus this week on the Black Arts Movement, and Lorde in particular as an example from Evie Shockley’s article for recent scholarship informing and expanding the boundaries of scholarship on the Movement geographically and periodically. 

Morris tries to capture the nuance of internal and community difficulty for Lorde to “exemplify the feeling of having black skin in a world dominated by whites” (169), highlighting the difficulty of experiencing the consequence of racism being “black women’s estrangement from each other” at the same time presenting the difficulties of representing marginalized identity: the “we” of black female identity Lorde writes cannot appease all, and Morris draws in criticism from bell hooks. Morris writes that Lorde’s purpose in the essay “Eye to Eye” is to illuminate racism’s devastating effects on one’s self-esteem, which Morris argues is paired with a destruction of the physical body, drawing examples from Lorde’s 1982 Zami, in which “oppression (masking itself as opportunity) assaults” a character’s body (169).  

However, Morris argues, there is capability for resistance to certain oppressions, as multiple intersections of oppressed identities opens a space for productive conversation to take place. Morris depicts a conversation between Lorde and black American author James Baldwin, Lorde, where Morris writes that “In response to Baldwin’s belief that black women should not blame black men for the trap that men are in, let alone make that blame public…Lorde asserts that black women and men need to acknowledge the differences in power between them” (171). Morris uses this logic to apply to intersections of shared oppressed identities, including gender and sexuality where “the active production of speech, desire, and agency by those considered Other creates resistance” (172). Morris writes that in her writing, Lorde is trying to activate a unity of collective agency amongst the communities of her “Other” identities, namely (but notably not exclusive to) African American women and lesbians through what Morris argues is a  “performance of identity as a bridge toward the possibility of organizing around difference” (173). 

I find that in our most current forms of practicing feminism, this work is essential for grounding our means of political resistance as our communities become near-infinite, and dominatingly digital. Morris turns to examine one potential force of resistance from “patriarchal domination” (173), being an embrace of the erotic’s power for change, especially by women.

Morris introduces the function of the erotic as written about by Lorde as a ”means [for] reclaiming vital energy and power…which connects the material, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual” (173), and that recognizing the power of one’s material energy, and that of an erotic, bodily experience in a world not built for it, therefore, Morris writes that Lorde affirms it must be a practiced embrace. I’m not sure I know how to live in a body so well, even passively, but it is a bit delightful to picture an  “erotic wellspring [which] provides the basis for belief in female authority” (173). Part of this, Morris argues, is because the erotic is “a vital life force” forming the “warp and woof of Lorde’s writing from the body” (174). In kind, Morris writes that mortality is just as much a concern of Lorde’s thematically and politically, and one Lorde chooses to address boldly as a sort of fear-conquering power. In a catalog of references, Morris details examples of Lorde’s appeal to vulnerabilities and oppressed humanities (175) to defy “erasure by appropriating from the dominant culture the authority to speak” and to use the poetic voice of the author to be “a performance of the embodied self” (176), both through its oral quality and activated images. 

Morris writes that Lorde “repositions marginal categories, placing them in the center of her discourse” (178), a condition necessary in Lorde’s poetics, but speaks too on the potential weaknesses of using embodiment discourses in political contexts. Despite the overwhelming support for Lorde’s writings and similar models for practicing embodiment, Morris writes that there can be an over-reliance on the elusive “authenticity” when attempting political engagement in the work (182). I find this to be an interesting weakness to surface at any school of poetry post-Confessionalism, and have to wonder if the almost disclaimer-like depiction Morris gives of it is a more reactionary tacit of its time? Or maybe this is coming to mind just because of our course schedule? Regardless, I’m still curious as to where ideas of sincerity and authenticity have come under attack.