I was reading this and pondered some of the thoughts posted on the objectification of women thread. In this essay, the great feminist thinker Audre Lord writes about the power of women's eroticism:

"There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives.

We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society. On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence.

It is a short step from there to the false belief that only by the suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can women be truly strong. But that strength is illusory, for it is fashioned within the context of male models of power.

As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and non-rational knowledge. We have been warned against it all our lives by the male world, which values this depth of feeling enough to keep women around in order to exercise it in the service of men, but which fears this same depth too much to examine the possibilities of it within themselves. So women are maintained at a distant/inferior position to be psychically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters."


Read more http://www.metahistory.org/guidelines/EroticUses.php

As transwomen, how does what Lord relates apply to our won experience? How can transwomen use this power and stifle oppression?

who would want to?

the ants analogy is false too.

presumably feminists like 'great thinker' Lord function pretty much like colourless genderless shapeless robots?

Why do have an agenda against Audre Lord and presumably against African-American feminism?

well I'd never heard of Lord until I read your post but its the same sort of crap that spews from the mouths of so many other 'feminists' - it echoes Greer's crap about women being unable to paint great pictures because of male suppression etc etc.

Lord et all may have had a little truth back in 1900 when the high point of a fronteirswomen's life was the arrival of the Mongomery Ward catalogue but even now most women would prefer to spend time in a quilting bee than in a laboratory.

When we know that Lorde was brought up with tales of old West Indies life - planatations and the white bossmen taking the rpetty black fillies to their beds and maybe being responsible for the fact Lorde's mother was almost white being a sign of some of this benevolent paternalism - and then was a confirmed lesbian by her late teens and immersed in lesbian culture it isn't surprising she trotted out the old feminist rubbish as BRSS altered her brain and thinking.

The real problem is that no amount of Lord-like crap will ever alter the simple fact that men just aren't domestic so it will always be the woman's lot to do the housekeeping while their men lounge around drinking and being male.

I like to surf around the internet checking on old and new soaps especially from USA and unfortunately the amount of mysogyny and gender stereotyping on them ensures that  feminists will be trotting out their nonsense for decades to come so why isn't American womenhood petitioning the Prez to ban all this mysogyny?

Audre Lorde is nothing like Greer or the other 2nd Wave Feminists,  Lilacwoman.  Germaine Greer, Janice Raymond and their ilk are not fit to take out her garbage.
We studied this particular reading in my Gender Studies class last Semester and the complete piece is extremely insightful.  "The Erotic"  is a term that is greatly misunderstood, and stands directly opposite to the mentality that produces pornography.  It would be more correct to call Lorde a "Humanist" rather than a Feminist, but the term is already taken.

Karen.

I dont get it..
Sorry if im being stupid but can someone explain this in simple terms?

Quote from: justmeinoz on July 06, 2012, 06:03:01 AM
Audre Lorde is nothing like Greer or the other 2nd Wave Feminists,  Lilacwoman.  Germaine Greer, Janice Raymond and their ilk are not fit to take out her garbage.

Nonsense.  It's practically word for word pure Bindel, Greer, Raymond et al.

Quote from: Siobhan on July 06, 2012, 03:08:29 PM
I dont get it..
Sorry if im being stupid but can someone explain this in simple terms?

Did you walk into the world of having no idea? Me too. Looks like we may need to read up on who they are talking about to get some sense of it.

I am an honors student at UC Berkeley and one of the reasons I posted this is that did not fully get it and I am not sure how it relates to me as a transwoman.  Keep in mind that this is an excerpt so you might need to read the full text to get an appreciation of what she is saying. So no one is stupid for not getting it. On the other hand, knowledge of feminist and queer theory only helps us in our journey.

I have never liked the idea that eroticism is a particularly female thing, corrupted by men.  No, it strikes me that it's a cultural concept that derives from a history of interrelation between men and women, that grows and shifts as those relationships change and it becomes more obvious the vast number of players actually involved (different types and castes of men and women with different interests and power dynamics, but also those of different sexual orientations and genders or lack thereof).  Eroticism also takes two to tango; if a woman has the power of attraction, it follows that someone finds her attractive (andwight is being ignored about her capacity to find things attractive too?).  On the other sides, I don't think this woman been given her power of attraction by the person attracted to her--Rather, I like to think of these power dynamics as communicative links between people, links that just are and that we can make as we will.  If a man wants to find it bad that a particular person attracts him, he can, but he might find it more healthy to acknowledge the attraction and decide what to do about that in a rational way.  Generally men are pretty good at making these choices individually--it's when it comes to larger traditional groupings, based around rules that only made sense when life was far more brutal, that erotic communication becomes one-sided and it can appear from some angles as if men are corrupting an essentially female eroticism.  Or so I'd argue (or I guess I just did! ).

What does this mean for us?  Well, like everyone we have what we're attracted to and people attracted to us.  To the extent that we can act on these things ourselves, and to the extent that we can let others act on these things in ways we enjoy, we are powerful participants in these communication channels.  To the extent that we are forced not to act on them, and forced to accept others acting on them, we are powerless participants.  What can we do about it?  Try to make sure people see us as we see us, first of all.  Otherwise they're attracted to the wrong things for the wrong reasons, and that sort of communication will be inherently one-sided no matter what.  And protest our exploitation whenever it happens, since the abilities to act and to say no are intrinsic to any form of power at all.

Did Lord pee on your Wheaties or what, Lilac?

It appears that Lilac wants to dismiss Lord a just another separatist. I do not agree with everything Lord writes but she certainly write4s with her own unique voice and much of her writing could be called poetic.



Art is not living. It is the use of living.
Audre Lorde

Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away.
Audre Lorde

Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.
Audre Lorde

Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.
Audre Lorde

Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.
Audre Lorde

But the question is a matter of the survival and the teaching. That's what our work comes down to. No matter where we key into it, it's the same work, just different pieces of ourselves doing it.
Audre Lorde

But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.
Audre Lorde

But, on the other hand, I get bored with racism too and recognize that there are still many things to be said about a Black person and a White person loving each other in a racist society.
Audre Lorde

Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever.
Audre Lorde

I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/audre_lorde.html#4WjOMlGIlFQ49LWu.99

Quote from: lilacwoman on July 07, 2012, 12:55:47 AM
Nonsense.  It's practically word for word pure Bindel, Greer, Raymond et al.

Did Lord pee on your Wheaties or what, Lilac?

It appears that Lilac wants to dismiss Lord as just another separatist. I do not agree with everything Lord writes but she certainly writes with her own unique voice and much of her writing could even be called poetic.



Art is not living. It is the use of living.
Audre Lorde

Attend me, hold me in your muscular flowering arms, protect me from throwing any part of myself away.
Audre Lorde

Black women are programmed to define ourselves within this male attention and to compete with each other for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests.
Audre Lorde

Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically or emotionally, are not the enemies of Black men.
Audre Lorde

Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.
Audre Lorde

But the question is a matter of the survival and the teaching. That's what our work comes down to. No matter where we key into it, it's the same work, just different pieces of ourselves doing it.
Audre Lorde

But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women.
Audre Lorde

But, on the other hand, I get bored with racism too and recognize that there are still many things to be said about a Black person and a White person loving each other in a racist society.
Audre Lorde

Each time you love, love as deeply as if it were forever.
Audre Lorde

I am deliberate and afraid of nothing.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/a/audre_lorde.html#4WjOMlGIlFQ49LWu.99