Audre Lorde’s Intellectual Body: Scripting an Embodied Activism

Abstract

This chapter discusses the ways that Lorde repeatedly declares her multiple subjectivities as a “black lesbian feminist warrior poet.” In writing Zami and The Cancer Journals, Lorde (re)writes herself by creating a fantasy self based on the myths of her matriarchal culture and the reality of her own life where her love of women is natural and “normal.” Read together, Lorde’s autobiographical texts work to form a cultural critique that moves beyond mere resistance—they demand critical consciousness and activism from her readers. Lorde’s “activist poetics” (Carr) in these two works, particularly of her intellectual body, resist cultural inscriptions of the body and also challenge the traditional (patriarchal) genre of autobiography. As a black lesbian feminist warrior poet, Audre Lorde was used to contending with culturally constructed identity as she examined her multi-layered marginalization. But when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, Lorde became conscious of her body in yet another way. Lorde addresses difference and otherness in Zami, yet it is in The Cancer Journals, written simultaneously with Zami, where she writes as a means to reconstruct herself as a warrior against the disease and to resist the view of women with mastectomies as victims. The chapter argues that the “intellectual body,” while present in Zami, becomes active in The Cancer Journals as it resists cultural inscription by refusing the prosthesis that doctors, nurses, and other breast cancer patients encourage her to wear.