Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

Audre Lorde explores the power of the erotic as a force of empowerment for women, challenging societal suppression and reclaiming the importance of deep, unapologetic feeling in personal and collective liberation.

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Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama

Audre Lorde. • Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

i want to teach this to others

But when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being s... See more

Audre Lorde. • Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

I love this and I have felt this feeling much more recently - pole, dancing at home like when I was a kid pretending to be in music videos, moving my body the way I want to and wearing clothes that help me show my highest self

There are frequent attempts to equate pornography and eroticism, two diametrically opposed uses of the sexual .

Audre Lorde. • Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

eroticism to serve men and eroticism for self empowerment

Of course, women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to separate the erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex. And the lack of concern for the erotic root and satisfactions of our work is felt in our disaffection from so much of what we do

Audre Lorde. • Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But porno... See more

Audre Lorde. • Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational 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 i... See more

Audre Lorde. • Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

we have narrowed feminism and femininity through the lens of the male gaze and male expectations

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.

Audre Lorde. • Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

Femininity and power - Audre Lorde

When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individua... See more

Audre Lorde. • Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

Audre Lorde: Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

self-connection shared is a measure of the joy which know myself to be capable of feeling, a reminder of my capacity for feeling. And that deep and irreplaceable knowledge of our capacity for joy comes to demand from all of my life that it b lived within the knowledge that such satisfaction is possible and does not have to be called marriage, nor g... See more

Audre Lorde. • Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power

Audre Lorde, Uses of the Erotic: Erotic as Power