Content area
Full text
In her classic essay, "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," Audre Lorde challenged the Western masculinist characterization of the erotic as an element of human debasement, as well as its use as a tool of oppression. She argued that this framing of the erotic had ghettoized women's sensuality - a means by which we know and orient ourselves to the world - thereby erasing a significant form of our liberating power. To confront this erasure, Lorde offered a view of the erotic as an episteme, a critical mode through which we may attain excellence. While viewed in some feminist circles as overly reductionist and even anachronistic, Lorde s erotic innovation has established itself as a political, social, and academic tool of deconstruction, subversion, and imagination.
As a scholar-teacher, I view my queer studies course - any course, really - as a space built on possibilities, grounded by collective potentialities, and filled with bodies that are materializing sensibilities. One of the most important processes in engaging students on the subject of queerness, then, is developing their willingness to critically frame the self as a sensual entity. This kind of framing calls for at least three things: ( 1 ) a willingness to testify to a truth about the self - even when that truth (or our assessment ofthat self) is nonnormative; (2) a commitment to challenge the policing of self-perceptions; and (3) the employment of counterhegemonic epistemologica! frameworks to dismantle oppression. By resurrecting the power of the erotic, Lorde affirms our simultaneity as selves who exist in individual potentiality and selves whose connectivity is based on the freedoms of our sensuality. For this reason, "Uses of the Erotic" is always welcome in my classroom.
Students in my courses often understand power in dichotomous terms. It is either a forceful means of having self-control or control over others. Situated in a Western framework of individuality and independence, power represents the means by which one can differentiate from community and, perhaps, even gain authority. What is missing from their notions of power is the possibility of self-actualization as something linked with community. That is, students are often missing the idea that power can be a liberating source - one that connects people to themselves and to...