Abstract
This article asks how interracial sex and/or sexual attraction might be an integral part of cross-racial feminist work. Focusing on the work of black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde, I argue that for some black women sex and intimate relationships with white women during the Women’s Movement were an important part of their survival and their feminist and anti-racist praxis. Drawing on recent black feminist scholarship, I read Lorde’s work against the grain of the anti-pornography feminist movement contemporaneous with her career and suggest that sex with white women was often a productive, enriching and necessary experience for her as she worked to build cross-racial political alliances.
… the erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply a pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference. (Lorde, 1984c: 56) When women make love beyond the first exploration we meet each other’s knowing in a landscape the rest of our lives attempts to understand. (Lorde, 1997: 364)
I have chosen the two epigraphs for this article because their juxtaposition illustrates an underexplored facet of black lesbian feminist poet Audre Lorde’s politics of difference. Although Lorde’s essay ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’ has become an essential feminist text, many readings of it have focused only on the intrapersonal aspect of the erotic that Lorde outlines (1984c). What these two quotes demonstrate is how Lorde’s theory of the erotic also comments on interpersonal relationships. According to Lorde, the erotic enables a deep connection between two individuals. Although that connection is not necessarily sexual in nature nor always produced by sexual activity, I am interested in exploring how Lorde’s repeated assertions about the profound imbrication of sexuality and difference can help us to think about black women’s racialised sexuality and, in particular, how she deploys what Mireille Miller-Young calls ‘erotic sovereignty’ in her erotic relationships (2014: 39).
As with the epigraphs, in this article I put Lorde’s ‘Uses of the Erotic’ and her other theoretical work in conversation with her personal letters and her poetry. Specifically, I examine her poem ‘Outlines’ from her 1986 poetry collection Our Dead Behind Us, which was first published as ‘Notes About Us’ in the Winter 1979–1980 issue of Azalea: A Magazine by Third World Lesbians. In its first iteration, the poem was a meditation on the challenges of building relationships between black and white women, largely inspired by Lorde and lesbian poet Adrienne Rich’s struggle to navigate racial difference and sexual desire in their relationship and in the Women’s Liberation Movement at large. The final form of the poem maintains this central theme but also becomes an exploration of Lorde’s relationship with her longtime lover and ‘wife’, Frances Clayton.
Both versions of the poem begin with a four-line stanza: ‘What hue lies in the slit of anger/ ample and pure as night/ what color the channel/ that blood comes through?’. These lines reference the vagina and the various types of blood that flow through it, which is a common theme in feminist poetry and artwork. Here Lorde deploys the ‘central core imagery’ that was popular among feminist artists in the 1960s and 1970s (Schapiro and Chicago, 1973). But rather than using it to assert a universal female experience, as Judy Chicago (1975) and other white women artists had done, Lorde mobilises the imagery to trouble both the assumed fixity of racial difference and the assertion of the sameness of gendered experience. In doing so, she challenges feminist discourses that minimised differences between women in the name of unity and proposes an alternative mode of sisterhood that reckons with difference. Both versions of the poem outline the parameters of such a reckoning at the group and individual level and argue for its necessity. Although the question that opens both poems remains unanswered, it is clear that Lorde believes the erotic is a tool that can enable the reconciliation of the similarities and divergences in black and white women’s experiences and politics.
What Lorde proposes both in this poem and elsewhere is that the erotic is a crucial tool for negotiating differences between women, and racial differences in particular. She deploys the erotic as a tool in her own life to form cross-racial alliances. Within this framework, sex is a pathway to transcending the distrust that has historically haunted personal and political relationships between black and white women. I look to the moments in Lorde’s work where she articulates this connection between sex and racial difference to examine how race shapes her theory of black female sexuality. I argue that her poems about race and her other writing about interracial relationships – professional, friendships and romantic or sexual – help us to think about how black women’s sexuality can be simultaneously fraught and troubled with the weight of historical trauma and a productive site for political and personal growth and coalition building. What, I ask, can Lorde’s intimate relationships with white women and her thinking about these relationships tell us about black women’s sexuality during the Women’s Liberation Movement and, more broadly, how black women related to white women and understood how interracial sex shaped those relationships?
I begin this article by outlining the contributions of recent scholarship to the theorisation of black women’s sexuality and how my work contributes to this field. Then I discuss the political and social context in which Lorde produced her poetry and her well-known political essays. Finally, I examine how Lorde’s beliefs about sex and difference shaped her friendship with fellow lesbian feminist poet Adrienne Rich. By analysing selections of their extensive correspondence, as well the two versions of the poem discussed above, I reveal how Lorde’s theories about difference and the erotic operate in her personal life and illuminate how interracial sex in the context of lesbian feminism and the Women’s Liberation Movement can be understood as enabling cross-racial empathy and political coalition building.
The last twenty-five years has seen an explosion of scholarly work on black women’s history. Much of this literature has sought to recover previously lost or ignored stories of black women’s labour, political work, activism and lived experience. The majority of this scholarship has taken up or responded to Evelyn Higginbotham’s ‘politics of respectability’ as a hermeneutic for understanding black women’s lives (1993). This body of scholarship includes excellent studies of black women’s lives at the turn of and during the first quarter of the twentieth century, as well as revisionist works about black women’s involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, both in its traditional and its ‘long’ iteration (Wolcott, 2001; Ransby, 2003; Greene, 2005; McDuffie, 2011; McGuire, 2011; Gore, 2012; Robnett, 2014; Theoharis, 2014). But less work has been done on black women’s activism during or in relation to the rise of second wave feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. Works on the rise of black and Third World Feminism have also been published, but little on the interracial aspects of the feminist movement (Springer, 2005; Breines, 2006). What has been written has focused on the conflict between black and white women within such organisations (Breines, 2006). Some scholarship, notably Ann Valk’s (2007) study of black and white women’s activism in Washington, DC, has detailed the successful interracial organising and coalition building that took place around women’s issues in the 1970s and 1980s. Valk explicitly rejects the framing of ‘sisterhood’ as an explanation for black and white women working together, instead arguing that these temporary coalitions were born out of necessity in relation to specific issues and dissolved once their usefulness ceased.
In this article, I take a different approach to the racial politics of black women’s sexuality, drawing on recent theoretical work by Jennifer Nash (2014), Mireille Miller-Young (2014) and Ariane Cruz (2016). Rather than focusing solely on how others’ racialised beliefs affect black women’s experiences of their own sexuality, I use Lorde’s work to explore how black women understand the power of their sexuality to shape their experiences as racialised subjects. In doing so, I attempt to answer the call of recent black feminist scholarship to broaden our theorisation of black female sexuality.
Cruz, Nash and Miller-Young seek to read racialised sexuality outside of a black feminist intellectual tradition that has relied on a framework of harm and considered any and all representation of black female sexuality as harmful because it is steeped in stereotypes. Instead they argue that the racialisation of sexuality or the incorporation of racialised elements and imagery in black women’s sexual play can be an important component of their sexual lives and fantasies rather than simply or only expressive of oppressive white, heteropatriarchal ideology. Across different eras and in different media, all three scholars argue that black women’s performance of their sexuality, including racial stereotypes and tropes, can be purposeful and even empowering. For example, Nash pushes back against the black feminist tradition of reading depictions of black female sexuality as inherently harmful, instead locating moments of the pleasure produced by racialisation. Nash, Miller-Young and Cruz challenge us to embrace more complicated visions of the role of race and racialisation in black women’s sexualities and, in particular, to make space in our analyses for the possibility of pleasure rather than only woundedness.
Of particular relevance to my argument is what Miller-Young calls ‘erotic sovereignty’. Miller-Young defines erotic sovereignty as ‘a process’ by which black women’s ‘performance [of their sexuality] attempts to reterritorialize the always already exploitable Black female body as a potential site of self-governing desire, subjectivity, dependence and relation with others, and erotic pleasure’ (2014: 39). ‘Erotic sovereignty’, she writes, ‘is part of an ongoing ontological process that uses racialized sexuality to assert complex subjecthood, inside of the overwhelming constraints of social stigma, stereotype, structural inequality, policing, and exploitation under the neoliberal state’ (Miller-Young, 2014: 39). Miller-Young uses erotic sovereignty to theorise how the black women performers and sex workers she studies consciously utilise their bodies and sexuality for pleasure and profit. For my argument about Lorde’s use of the erotic to navigate racial difference, I use erotic sovereignty to mark this purposeful deployment of racialised sexuality that is part of the ‘ongoing process’ of navigating racial difference within the feminist movements of the 1970s and 1980s.
Miller-Young, Cruz and Nash’s work is largely focused on pornography and grounded in the problematic of the visual, which poetry as a form sidesteps. I argue, however, that looking to poetry for discussion of black female sexuality in the 1970s and 1980s is both appropriate and essential. Poetry was a central form and site of feminist theorising during this period. Poetry, especially the lyric poem, facilitated exploration of the self as well as larger, even universal, issues. Poetry was preferred by women, especially women of colour, because it was quick to produce and cheap to disseminate, unlike film, visual art and longer written pieces (Lorde, 1984a; Short, 1994). As such, the poem was a necessary corollary to theoretical writings and activism for many second wave feminists (Clausen, 1975). Thus I draw upon the emphasis on the politics of embodied eroticism and performance in Miller-Young, Cruz and Nash’s scholarship to read Lorde’s depiction of these same issues in her poetry.
Although Lorde’s poetry is divorced from the visual, her work is in conversation with feminist debates concerning sexism, racism and pornography that are ongoing while she is writing. That is to say that debates about pornography, race and sexual violence also influenced Lorde’s thinking and writing about sex. This era, which critics call the ‘Sex Wars’, stretched from the late 1970s to the 1980s, peaking with the conflicts during the 1982 Barnard Conference on Sexuality. I suggest that we must read Lorde’s ‘Uses of the Erotic’ in the context of the feminist debates about s/m and pornography to which it is responding. As such, it is worth briefly sketching the contours of this debate.
The Sex Wars is generally understood as a conflict between feminists who were against pornography and certain sexual practices, e.g. s/m, and ‘sex radical’ feminists. Anti-pornography feminists argued that pornography was inherently sexist and promoted violence against women. They also believed that pornography condoned ‘deviant’ sexual practices like sadomasochism, role-playing and other power-inflected sexual practices, which had the additional danger of further cementing patriarchal power relations and sometimes perpetuating racist ideologies, making them especially pernicious for women of colour. In contrast, sex radical feminists, including members of the lesbian s/m group Samois, argued that women had the right to engage in any consensual sexual practices they chose. Sex radical feminists also believed that so-called ‘deviant’ sexual behaviours could be liberatory and empowering.
Interestingly, anti-pornography feminists included explicit appeals to what feminists at the time termed ‘Third World’ women, i.e. women of colour, women from the Global South, etc, and black women in their writings and campaigns. As Nash has noted, anti-pornography feminists argued that the racial elements in pornography compounded or ‘intensifie[d]’ its gendered harms for women of colour (2008: 54). Thus they represented pornography as especially harmful to non-white women, bolstering their claims about the inherent harmfulness of pornography and enabling them to enroll women of colour as potential allies in their efforts (Nash, 2008). As a result of this attempt to engage women of colour, anti-pornography and anti-s/m anthologies published in the 1980s and 1990s contain contributions from prominent black feminists like bell hooks and Alice Walker.
Walker’s short story ‘A Letter of the Times, or Should This Sado-Masochism Be Saved?’, which appeared in the 1982 anthology Against Sadomasochism: A Radical Feminist Analysis, illustrates how anti-pornography feminists linked their position to anti-racist organising. Walker’s short story centres on two incidents. The first is the narrator’s white friend Lucy’s decision to dress as the Gone With the Wind heroine Scarlett O’Hara at a costume party for which guests were instructed to ‘[c]ome as the feminist you most admire’ (Walker, 1982: 205). The story frames Lucy’s inability to understand that her admiration for O’Hara, a slave owner and symbol of the antebellum South, would be upsetting to the narrator, a black woman, as illustrative of the divide between black and white feminists and women in general, which are often caused by misunderstandings rather than animus.
The second troubling incident in the short story takes place in the university class the narrator is teaching. The narrator has attempted to push her students to think deeply about what it meant to be an enslaved woman, to imagine that experience. But a discussion about a documentary on couples who practice s/m, which several in the class had viewed, threatens to undermine her entire mission. The documentary included an interracial lesbian couple who practiced s/m, with the white woman playing the role of master and the black woman playing the role of slave. Their roleplay is horrifying to the narrator and many of her students. This sex game that eroticises slavery ‘mocked’ and ‘trivialized’ the actual struggles of enslaved people, a history ‘that still strikes terror in Black women’s hearts’ (Walker, 1982: 207). The narrator is appalled by the transformation of historical horror into ‘fantasy’ and the potential for the existence and depiction of such practices to harm black women. Furthermore, she believes that the dissemination of such sexual practices has the potential to hinder political alliances between black and white women.
The narrator believes that, like pornography, the documentary will have real effects on how black and white women relate to one another. She writes, ‘What of the women who will never come together because of what they saw in the relationship between “mistress” and “slave” on TV? Many Black women fear it is as slaves white women want them; no doubt many white women think some amount of servitude from Black women is their due’ (Walker, 1982: 208). Walker’s story models both the potential conflicts between black and white feminists and the controversy within the feminist community about s/m, especially s/m play structured around racist or anti-Semitic dynamics. As anti-pornography feminists argue, here certain sexual practices are depicted as having the power to wound even those not involved in them and to perpetuate racist beliefs within society. Taken to the extreme, anti-pornography feminists’ arguments depict any engagement with racial difference in a sexual relationship as inherently problematic and harmful. This refusal to acknowledge how black women can exert erotic sovereignty, choosing to use their bodies and their sexuality however they see fit, forecloses what Lorde sees as a politically productive practice between black and white women that can in fact work to lessen the divisions between black and white women created by misunderstandings like the ones Walker’s protagonist laments.
Lorde was not only aware of but actually participated in Sex Wars era debates about s/m. An interview she did with Susan Leigh Star about sadomasochism and feminism appeared in the same anti-s/m anthology as Walker’s short story. ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’ was presented as a speech at Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media’s (WAVPM) Feminist Perspectives on Pornography Conference in 1978, approximately six months after it was first presented at the Berkshire Conference on Women’s History at Mount Holyoke College. Subsequently, it was published as a pamphlet by Out and Out Books and then, in 1980, as part of Take Back the Night, the Feminist Perspectives on Pornography Conference anthology (Lorde, 1980). Thus Lorde’s theory of black female sexuality is inextricably linked to these debates about sex, race, pleasure and power.
The interview with Star includes an epigraph taken from a letter to the editor Lorde wrote to Gay Community News in 1980. In this letter, Lorde paraphrases a section from ‘Uses of the Erotic’ and adds, ‘S/M is not the sharing of power, it is merely a depressing replay of the old and destructive dominant/subordinate mode of human relating and one-sided power, which is even now grinding our earth and our human consciousness into dust’ (1982: 66). In the body of the interview, Lorde builds upon this critique, saying, ‘Even in play, to affirm that the exertion of power over powerlessness is erotic, is empowering, is to set the emotional and social stage for the continuation of that relationship, politically, socially and economically’ (1982: 68, emphasis in original). Here she echoes other observations that s/m in the queer community was originally practiced by ‘white gay men’ who ‘[o]ften … are working not to change the [existing white patriarchal power] system’ (Lorde, 1982: 69; emphasis in original). Lorde goes on to say that ‘[t]he linkage of passion to dominance/subordination is the prototype of the heterosexual image of male-female relationships, one which justifies pornography’ (1982: 70). She refuses to equate the sexual or erotic with the pornographic, but connects the potential dangers of s/m with those of pornography. Ultimately, Lorde suggests that the issue of lesbian sadomasochism is a ‘red herring’ and is ‘perhaps being used to draw attention away from other more pressing and immediately life-threatening issues facing us [lesbians and feminists] as women in this racist, conservative, and repressive period’ (1982: 70). Rather than focusing on debates about s/m, Lorde is invested in exploring how the exercise of erotic sovereignty can create change by enabling political solidarity across difference and thus the construction of the freedom movements necessary to transform the status quo.
This divide between what Lorde believes are the useful and empowering as opposed to the dangerous functions of sexuality and eroticism is articulated fully in ‘Uses of the Erotic’. For Lorde, ‘the erotic … [is] an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives’ (1984c: 54). The erotic, which Lorde argues is inseparable from the spiritual and the political, is one of women’s greatest sources of power and, for that reason, has long been repressed by men. According to Lorde, embracing the erotic strengthens women’s will and enriches their lives. She writes: ‘In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial’ (Lorde, 1984c: 58). Lorde believes that the erotic is ‘diametrically opposed’ to pornography and sadomasochism, which encourage and eroticise unequal power relations of all kinds (1984c: 55). According to Lorde, s/m prioritises the reification of difference, thereby preventing true spiritual connections. Lorde’s erotics enables individuals to meet as equals, share their experiences and ultimately overcome the barriers to understanding created by their differences.
Although ‘Uses of the Erotic’ is widely read and much cited, Lorde’s argument that the erotic can bridge differences between individual women and encourage understanding and alliances is rarely discussed. It is this aspect of her argument that I argue illuminates her thoughts on the potential productivity of interracial sexual relationships. I return to one of the passages I chose as an epigraph in which she writes: … the erotic functions for me in several ways, and the first is in providing the power which comes from sharing deeply a pursuit with another person. The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference. (Lorde, 1984c: 56)
Lorde also describes how fear of confronting difference can impede feminist anti-racist work in her essay ‘The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism’, which was originally presented as a keynote address at the 1981 National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) conference (1984b). She argues that a lack of knowledge of the differences between each other, both in experiences and concerns, as well as the potential pitfalls of guilt and anger caused by the history of racism, and often compounded by misunderstandings, can prevent black and white women from meeting as equals and working together for change (Lorde, 1984b).
In ‘Uses of the Erotic’, Lorde presents a potential solution to this problem. She believes that the erotic, whether it is a sexual connection or merely an emotional or spiritual one, can prevent these failures of understandings between women. This position is articulated repeatedly in her personal correspondence. She writes frequently about desiring ‘openness’ and intimacy in her friendships with other women – both black and white – created by mutual vulnerability, and she laments the difficulty of achieving such relationships. Lorde frequently identifies racial difference and racism as roadblocks in achieving this emotional intimacy with white women.
In Zami: Another Spelling of My Name, her ‘biomythography’, Lorde describes how she first encountered the ways racism shaped her relationships with other women (1982). In the 1950s when she lived in downtown New York City, Lorde’s group of friends were all lesbians and almost entirely white. She and her close friend Flee were the only black members of their social circle. There were very few out black lesbians downtown so Lorde was racially isolated even though the women in her community accepted her homosexuality and provided her with the emotional and sometimes material support she needed to survive. She writes: We not only believed in the reality of sisterhood, that word which was to be so abused two decades later, but we also tried to put it into practice, with varying results. We all cared for and about each other, sometimes with more or less understanding, regardless of who was entangled with whom at any given time, and there was always a place to sleep and something to eat and a listening ear for anyone who wandered into the crew … However imperfectly, we tried to build a community of sorts where we could at the very least, survive within a world we correctly perceived to be hostile to us; we talked endlessly about how best to create that mutual support which twenty years later was being discussed in the women’s movement as a brand new concept. Lesbians were probably the only Black and white women in New York City in the fifties who were making any real attempt to communicate with each other; we learned lessons from each other, the values of which were not lessened by what we did not learn. (Lorde, 1982: 179–180)
The lesbian nightclub the Bagatelle that Lorde and her friends frequented was one such site of racial strife. Lorde rarely went to ‘the Bag’, in part because: the bouncer was always asking me for my ID to prove I was twenty-one, even though I was older than the other women with me. Of course, ‘you can never tell with Colored people’. And we would all rather die than to have to discuss the fact that it was because I was Black, since, of course gay people weren’t racists. After all, didn’t they know what it was like to be oppressed? (1982: 180)
In the 1970s and 1980s, Lorde would meet and build community with other black lesbians, some of whom also became her lovers, but she continued to be active in feminist groups that were majority white. Although Lorde wrote many love poems for Frances Clayton, few of the published poems appear to reference their racial difference, and the unpublished writings and fragments of poems in Lorde’s journals are too brief and scattered to analyse as a whole. Thus the richest archive of Lorde’s thoughts on interracial relationships and friendships can be gleaned in her correspondence. In particular, I look to a series of letters between her and Adrienne Rich and a poem that was in part inspired by that correspondence.
Lorde and Rich first met while both were working as instructors in the Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge (SEEK) program at the City College of New York during the 1960s. They eventually became close friends, travelling in the same circles, and often gave readings together (De Veaux, 2004: 103–104, 139). Lorde’s feelings for Rich extended beyond friendship. She felt there was a ‘charged sexuality’ between the two of them, and Rich frequently had to reject her advances (De Veaux, 2004: 237, 182). Lorde’s attraction to and frustration with Rich shaped their conversations about their work, feminism and racism.
Lorde’s conflict with the editorial board of Chrysalis magazine, where she served as the poetry editor from the magazine’s inception in 1976 until her resignation in January 1979, was a source of tension between her and Rich that led to a series of letters between the two discussing racism and conflicts between black and white women in the feminist community. Although the two women had discussed race and racism before, while Rich was working on her now foundational essay ‘Disloyal to Civilization’, the controversy at Chrysalis, Lorde’s subsequent resignation and its aftermath were what prompted this sustained discussion about race and racism in their relationship.
When Lorde accepted the position as poetry editor, she did so with a specific vision of the place of poetry in the magazine and with the intention to include the voices of as many women of colour poets as possible. As Chrysalis’s poetry editor, Lorde was solely responsible for evaluating submissions and choosing which poems to print in the magazine. In that capacity, she published the work of other black women poets including June Jordan and Pat Parker, who was by that point her close friend (De Veaux, 2004: 177–178). By 1978, although the list of women of colour published by Chrysalis had increased, Lorde was still frustrated by how the magazine treated poetry (De Veaux, 2004: 211). For example, the final copy of poems frequently contained typographical errors and her plan for a poetry issue was largely ignored by the rest of the editorial board. Although the magazine was struggling financially, Lorde did not see fiscal issues as an excuse for the apparent devaluation of poetry, much of it by women of colour, and of her work as poetry editor (personal communication, 1978).
Lorde officially resigned in January 1979 after the board failed to respond to her request to publish a review of her collection The Black Unicorn (De Veaux, 2004: 227). In her resignation letter, she stipulated that her selections for ‘the poetry for several future issues’ be honoured (De Veaux, 2004: 232). Rich supported Lorde’s position and corresponded with the editorial board as a group and individually about her resignation and the need for the magazine to commit more fully to including the voices of women of colour.
Discord between Lorde and the other Chrysalis editors persisted after her departure. When the magazine did not print a poem she had selected by the black poet Toi Derricote in Issue 8, Lorde was furious. The editorial board had omitted Derricote’s poem in favour of ‘a tribute to her by Mary McAnally, an Oklahoma-based poet … as a way to thank Lorde for her “priceless contribution to Chrysalis”’ (De Veaux, 2004: 245). Lorde, who had already requested that her name be removed from the masthead, wrote to the board and requested that they do so immediately (De Veaux, 2004: 246).
It was during this period that Lorde wrote her now infamous letter to the white feminist theologian Mary Daly in response to Daly’s book Gyn/Ecology. She criticised Daly for focusing her analysis primarily on ‘white, Western European, Judeo-Christian goddess images’ and for including as her only discussion of African women a critique of the practice of genital mutilation (De Veaux, 2004: 235). Lorde sent a copy of her letter to Rich, who considered Daly a close friend. The dispute with Daly further strained Lorde’s relationship with Rich, who refused to take sides in the conflict.
In November, Lorde wrote to Rich in an attempt to repair the damage to their relationship caused by the protracted fight with the magazine, her attack on Daly and other misunderstandings, undergirded by race and racism, between the two of them. Lorde begins the letter with a wish for reconciliation. She writes, ‘I am writing to you because I don’t want to leave it where it was at parting, and because I believe there is more for each of us to learn from this bad place between us, and I am hungry for it; I need it, not merely in my head, but open between us’ (personal communication, November 1979). She asks Rich to read the letter even if ‘it is an imposition … in the name of friendship; for does it mean we never speak to each other if sometimes we say the wrong things?’ (personal communication, November 1979). Here Lorde expresses her hope for reconciliation as a physical and emotional need, a hunger. She also believes that the ‘bad place between [her and Rich]’ can be productive, something they can both learn and grow from. Confronting racism is crucial to the success of their work and their relationship.
Lorde continues her letter by describing the context in which she is writing: I am writing to you in the grip of a fear which does not diminish even as I speak. I sit in here in this peaceful and secluded haven they burned another cross in Staten Island, two nights ago, on Osgood Avenue about 5 blocks away from us, in front of an ‘interracial house’. My family is there, I am here, and the papers to do what I need are languishing in my briefcase. That fact colors my view with a particular desperate urgency that is different from the ones which color yours. I do not expect you to feel what I am feeling, but I do want you to recognize it and not dismiss it as a paranoid fantasy. (Personal communication, November 1979)
But the bulk of the letter is an attempt by Lorde to wrestle with the question that she believes governs her friendship with Rich: ‘What are the demands and the pitfalls of an open and close and direct relationship between a Black woman and a white woman who are not lovers?’ (personal communication, November 1979). The ‘not’ here signals how the stakes for Lorde are necessarily different outside of a relationship with a white woman whom she has not slept with. How, she asks, can solidarity be achieved without the bridge the exercise of erotic sovereignty creates? After thanking Rich for her friendship and support and apologising for any hurt she has caused her (personal communication, November 1979), Lorde outlines her grievances with Rich. She writes that she took Rich at ‘her word’ that the ‘Chrysalis women’ (personal communication, November 1979) were trustworthy and holds Rich somewhat accountable for her difficulties with the magazine. Lorde also complains about a recently published interview Rich had conducted with her, which she believed had failed to engage critically with her poetry. She felt this was a personal betrayal, writing, ‘when it came right down to it, you did what all the other white girls do, stick a mike in my face and say talk, and call that dealing with my WORK’ (personal communication, November 1979).
Once she has listed her complaints, Lorde embarks upon an exploration of the emotional risks and pitfalls of her friendship with Rich. As Lorde had previously told Rich, ‘she could, in principle, not trust a white woman she had not slept with’ (De Veaux, 2004: 182). Lorde elaborates upon her belief, previously expressed in ‘Uses of the Erotic’, that a sexual connection or encounter has the power to produce trust between women and overcome difference: ‘When two women make love beyond the first exploration, they meet each other’s knowing, in a way sometimes that the whole rest of their relationship attempts to understand, attempts to make clear’ (personal communication, November 1979). Here ‘meet each other’s knowing’ signifies both an exchange of inner knowledge and vulnerability and the creation of a bridge across difference. Exercising erotic sovereignty to facilitate such a connection is, Lorde suggests, perhaps a necessary part of building cross-racial political alliances.
Lorde describes the challenge of working with white women thusly: … as a Black woman dealing emotionally on any but the most superficially prescribed and defended levels, with white women who I do not know intimately, means for me to be constantly vulnerable to racial instances of varying degrees, the possibilities of racial incidents which may or may not be so. It’s like low-level radiation. Very costly, and I avoid it whenever I can … Since all of this is in addition to the difficulties we all have as women dealing with each other, that is very costly, indeed. And for me, there’s got to be a lot coming back in order to make it worthwhile. From you and Clare obviously there is. (white women I’m open to whom I haven’t slept with) From [other white women] obviously there is not. I can only remember you are not connected with Mary Daly’s ugliness that day when you recognize that it exists, and how I felt about it. And I recognize how you feel about her. Then none of that needs to lie between you and me anymore. (Personal communication, November 1979)
Rich responds to Lorde’s letter on 10 November, ‘in tears of pain and rage’. Although she reveals that she ‘can’t write at the length [she] want[s] to’ because of upcoming deadlines, she uses the letter to address Lorde’s ‘complete and total misunderstanding’ of the circumstances under which she came to conduct an interview with Lorde (personal communication, 10 November 1979). She explains the events that led to her doing the interview at the request of the editor Marilyn Hacker, and denies any attempt to use Lorde’s celebrity for her own gain. Rich asserts that Lorde has done her a great ‘injustice’ by accusing her of behaving dishonestly, like the white women that Lorde detests (personal communication, 10 November 1979).
Rich also denies Lorde’s claim ‘that [she] could take your feelings about what’s been happening on Staten Island as a paranoid fantasy’ (personal communication, 10 November 1979). She writes: ‘It is real to me: not just the fact … but all of it together for you, the inability to get away, to avail yourself of that “haven”, the urgency you really are feeling around your work, and the lives of those you love, your own life threatened from within and from without’. Rich ‘believe[s she] can understand all this enough to take it seriously, [even if she] can feel it as Adrienne though not as Audre. Can this be enough?’ (personal communication, 10 November 1979). At the same time that she expresses concern and empathy for Lorde’s situation, Rich acknowledges that, as a white woman, she will never truly understand exactly how Lorde feels. Promising to address Lorde’s other claims in the future, Rich ends the letter, ‘I am frighting [sic] angry with you, but I love you, and I care more than you believe about creating justice between us’ (personal communication, 10 November 1979). Indeed, this letter does not mark the end of Rich’s engagement with issues of racism in the Women’s Movement and at large, both with Lorde and elsewhere in her work. At the same time, she is continuing her correspondence with the Chrysalis women, especially Susan Griffin, and taking them to task around ‘the issue of racism’ in relation to the magazine’s editorial process (personal communication, 1979).
Later that month, on 22 November, Rich writes another letter to Lorde. In it she writes at length about how she must address conflicts between herself and others, such as with the Chrysalis women and Daly, according to her own desires and feelings, not necessarily how Lorde would have her address them. She also refuses to completely cut these other white women out of her life. She writes: ‘What I have to do with/among white women around our various and differing racism is something I have to find out for myself and with other white women who are trying to do some of the same kinds of work’ (personal communication, 22 November 1979). Rich believes this work is as important as that she does as ‘part of a growing community of women of color as well as white women – women trying desperately to find ways of acting together, mak[ing] coalitions, be[ing] mutually heard – [and] this gives me strength and challenges [me] to do what I see as necessary for me to do vis-à-vis women who are not even making that effort’ (personal communication, 22 November 1979). She asks Lorde to consider her partial response to Lorde’s letter as not ‘an answer, but rather a continuation’ of their ongoing engagement with issues of race and racism, and re-affirms her love for Lorde and her desire to ‘struggle with [her]’ (personal communication, 22 November 1979).
Towards the end of the letter, Rich references a new poem Lorde is working on about white women. She encourages Lorde ‘to ask many more questions of yourself about the meaning of white women in your life (and the meaning of Black women in your life) and that [their] friendship, our intricate connectedness, is also going to be affected by how you ask those questions and what answers you come to’ (personal communication, 22 November, 1979). In a letter dated January of the next year, Rich responds to a draft of this poem that Lorde has evidently shared with her. She praises the draft and encourages Lorde to include ‘more of why [she] and F[rances] are doing this together at all’ (personal communication, 11 January 1980). Rich tells Lorde that the poem, which addresses the question of ‘how do a Black woman and a white woman who are not lovers meet, try to found a justice between them’, ‘has the potential of becoming a kind of broadside sweeping us all into a new recognition of necessity and battle’ (personal communication, 11 January 1980).
Lorde’s poem, originally titled ‘Notes About Us’ and then later revised and retitled ‘Outlines’, was first drafted in 1979 and reveals how Lorde understands relationships with white women, specifically her partner Frances Clayton. In ‘Notes About Us’ and ‘Outlines’, Lorde explores how the exercise of erotic sovereignty enables the difficult work of building connection and solidarity between white and black women. All of the struggle and potential victories the poem describes are enabled and set in motion by the intimate, erotic relationship between the black and white women at the centre of its narrative.
The two poems are quite similar and share many lines, even, as noted earlier, entire stanzas, although the revised version is longer and divided into five sections. Both poems begin with the four-line stanza of vaginal imagery, which establishes the poem’s parameters, and go on to repeat the same imagery of ‘A Black woman and a white woman’ struggling to love one another in a hostile environment (Lorde, 1979). That some phrases are lifted almost verbatim from Lorde’s letters to Rich indicates how heavily their conversations and Lorde’s personal experiences influenced the poem.
Another stanza that appears in both versions of the poem, although in slightly different forms, is one of the epigraphs, and is drawn directly from Lorde’s letters to Rich: ‘When women first make love/ beyond the first exploration/ we meet each other knowing/ in a landscape/ the rest of our lives/ attempts to understand’ (Lorde, 1979: 34).
In this stanza, Lorde depicts lovemaking between two women as the beginning of an ongoing ontological and philosophical exploration. In the context of the poem, this erotic encounter between a black woman and a white woman is the inciting incident for a necessary feminist and anti-racist reckoning with the status quo and the legacies of the past. Sex, the exercise and acknowledgement of erotic sovereignty, is a gateway to the deeper engagement with the intersections of race and gender within the second wave feminist movement that is required to build a successful cross-racial feminist movement.
The poems portray this necessary reckoning as profoundly difficult. Much of both iterations catalogues the threats to a relationship between a black woman and a white woman. A stanza in ‘Outlines’ lists these dangers thusly: ‘A Black woman and a white woman/ in the open fact of our loving/ with not only our enemies’ hands/ raised against us/ means a gradual sacrifice/ of all that is simple’ (Lorde, 1979: 33). Here the lovers are depicted as endangered not only by their ‘enemies’ but also by their supposed allies, those who share their identities and may object to their interracial relationship. In such a situation, it is necessary to ‘sacrifice’ ‘all that is simple’. This rejection of simple solutions to the problem of difference echoes Lorde’s refusal to jettison any of her identities, what she had earlier termed in one form as ‘easy Blackness as salvation’. A union between a black and a white woman necessitates an engagement with the complex power relations that govern their multiple identities. A slightly different, longer version of this stanza appears in ‘Notes About Us’ (Lorde, 1979). The lines describing the complex struggles brought on by this interracial union are followed by the lines: ‘we cannot conquer history by ignoring it/ so much has been eradicated/ that could tell us were not the first/ black woman white woman’ (Lorde, 1979: 33). These lines are a call to reckon with the long history of enmity between black and white women in the United States instead of ignoring it as Lorde’s white friend Muriel had.
In both versions, a stanza is devoted to outlining how the two lovers’ mothers raised them in similar class circumstances, but ‘they only taught us to understand/ the strangeness of men’ (Lorde, 1997: 362). This section unpacks the illusion of sameness belied by the opening stanza’s vaginal imagery. Although the two women share much, there are profound differences between them and their experiences. These differences are not only individual but also systemic and historical. Another section in ‘Notes About Us’ expands upon this historical dimension: ‘once our foremothers followed the hunt/ In differen[t] directions/ now what we share/ must illuminate what we do not’ (Lorde, 1979). Here, as in the section about their mothers, the poem draws a line between the past and present. Although previous generations have been separate – physically, politically and personally – now the two lovers are constructing a different paradigm, in which their similarities and their differences must be confronted. These lines in ‘Notes About Us’ are followed immediately by a repetition of ‘what color the channel/ blood comes through?’ (Lorde, 1979: 33), thus underscoring the tension between gendered sameness and racial difference, the past and the present, that runs throughout the poem.
The poems are filled with contrasts. Striking violent imagery – ‘your arms are lined with scalpels’ (Lorde, 1997: 362); ‘carving an agenda with tempered lightning’ (Lorde, 1997: 363) – that underscores the difficulty of building cross-racial alliance abuts sentimental vignettes from the lovers’ life together: ‘One straight light hair on the washbasin’s rim/ difference/ innate as a borrowed scarf’ (Lorde, 1997: 365). The racial terrorism that Lorde’s family experienced in their neighbourhood and that she describes to Rich in her letters is also recounted: ‘Ten blocks down the street/ a cross is burning’ (Lorde, 1997: 364); ‘We rise to dogshit dumped on our front porch/ the brass windchimes from Sundance stolen’ (Lorde, 1997: 364).
Both poems end similarly on a note of cautious hope. I quote from ‘Outlines’ because the lines are collected into a single stanza: I trace the curve of your jaw with a lover’s finger knowing the hardest battle is only the first how to do what we need for our living with honor and in love we have chosen each other and the edge of each other’s battles the war is the same if we lose someday women’s blood will congeal upon a dead planet if we win there is no telling. (Lorde, 1997: 365)
Although the work of maintaining their relationship is hard, a ‘battle’, besieged by the differences between them and the external forces of homophobia, racism and sexism, it is worth the struggle on multiple fronts: ‘[T]he war is the same’ because both women seek to create a more just world (Lorde, 1997: 365).
Interestingly, Lorde suggests that such a union between black and white women is necessary for the survival of the planet, of the human race, that without it there is no hope. Conversely, a world in which women work together, across difference, is one of infinite possibility: ‘if we win/ there is no telling’ (Lorde, 1997: 365). The stakes are apocalyptic in scale both because the second wave feminist movement will not survive the continuing strife between black and white women and because, as Lorde believed, feminist, anti-racist and other leftist movements were crucial to preventing war, imperialism and other forms of violence that may lead to the end of the world. As she articulates in several of her essays, in this poem Lorde asserts that alliances across difference are crucial to successful political organising, especially within the feminist movement.
In 1981, when Lorde co-keynoted the NWSA conference themed ‘Women Confronting Racism’ with Rich, she built upon her existing theories of difference and sexuality, advocating for renewed engagement with difference among feminists in the interests of successful organising.
Lorde’s work depicts intimate relationships with white women as both difficult and potentially rewarding. As a black lesbian feminist, she was a critic of the racism in feminist communities but also believed that cross-racial understanding and cooperation was necessary for overcoming this racism and for the success of the Women’s Liberation Movement. This article highlights Lorde’s understanding of interracial sexuality and her belief that intimate, sexual relationships with white women could actually lead to better cooperation across difference. In doing so, it contributes to the literature on black female sexuality by continuing the recent push to resist the tradition of reading taboo instances of black female sexuality as innately oppressive or harmful, instead placing these complex instances in processes of generative struggle around how black women experience their sexuality and how they use it to shape their relationship to their worlds.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the Audre Lorde Literary Trust and the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust for permission to quote from unpublished personal correspondence. The letters cited in this article are part of the Audre Lorde Papers at the Spelman College Archives, USA.