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Textual Authority and the Embodied Self
Audre Lorde likes to refer to herself as black, lesbian, feminist, mother, poet, and warrior. Later in life, she also identifies herself as a survivor of cancer. She refuses absolutely to confine herself, even temporarily, to any one aspect of her heterogeneous identity, whether to support a political program or to make others feel comfortable. And each part of the self she constructs is based on a sense of corporeal materiality that she attempts to render in both her prose and poetry. Her writing calls to mind Rosi Braidotti's vision of the embodied self. In Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy, Braidotti explains, "The body, far from being an essentialist notion, is situated at the intersection of the biological and the symbolic; as such it marks a meta-physical surface of integrated material and symbolic elements that defy separation."1 When speaking of Lorde's use of embodiment to reverse the balance of power between the oppressed body and the written text, we must ask how the body relates to a text. On the one hand, there is no way to discuss the body as prior to sign without resorting to signification. On the other hand, in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex," Judith Butler reminds us of the materiality of the signifier itself, for materiality and signification are indissoluble.2 As a writer, Lorde is acutely aware of this indissolubility. She perceives her body as a text and is conscious of her texts as emerging from her body.
Although embodying oneself and naming one's subject positions are not perfectly synonymous, they overlap in Lorde's writing because of her awareness of her presence in Western society as both experience and sign. Writing about The Cancer Journals, Jeanne Perrault applies the idea of the embodied self to Lorde's work, expressing her belief that Lorde creates "a writing of self that makes the female body a site and source of written subjectivity, yet inhabits that body with the ethics of a deeply and precisely historical, political, sexual, and racial consciousness."3 In Lorde's writing, the conjunction of body, political and spiritual convictions, and text brings interrelated topics to the foreground: race, gender, sexual identity, eroticism, and mortality.
When...