The Uses of the Erotic
May Reading Group discussion pt. 1
For our Reading Group this month, we’re turning our attention to Audre Lorde’s famous essay, “The Uses of the Erotic.” Each week, we’ll look at one section or concept from Lorde’s essay, which you can download below, and we’ll discuss how the ideas show up today in feminism, politics, culture, literature, our own writing, and our everyday lives. Later this month, we’ll vote on our next essay.
We’ll also have a private (not recorded) Zoom discussion on Wednesday May 28 at 12pm PT/3pm ET to dig further into how this essay connects to our own lived experiences. I’m trying out this midday time to see how that works for everyone. Last month’s discussion so so well attended, and SO GOOD. I really hope to see many of you there.
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Some context to get us started: Audre Lorde was a poet, essayist, activist, and feminist philosopher. “The Uses of the Erotic” was published in her collection, Sister Outsider, in 1984, but like our last essay, it was first delivered as a paper to a group of women. The essay was also written as a response to second wave porn wars, which have recently come up in the discourse again.
We’ll get to some of the anti-porn sentiments in the essay soon, but for this week, I want to focus on a section of the essay that jumped out at me. It’s a section about work as an erotic pursuit.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the luxury of critiques of feminine ambition, and about how trad ideology presupposes the notion of public work as a drag, while domestic life is positioned as meaningful, natural, and fulfilling (only for women though!).
Certainly, capitalist work is a drag— but so is domestic work under capitalism. As Lorde points out, the systems in which we live seek to rob all parts of our lives, including the meaningful work we might do in the public sphere, of pleasure.
