“Beyond Bread or Oblivion”: Reimagining a Progressive Moral Language Through the Political and Spiritual Theorizing of Audre Lorde

Abstract

Though Black Studies has long worked to disentangle the interests of the powerful from genuine moral insight, conservative white evangelicals still maintain a rhetorical monopoly on morality. In response to this reality, my project attempts to trouble this monopoly by applying Audre Lorde’s conceptualization of the erotic to mainstream contestations around moral languages. Lorde frames the erotic as a resource within all people that, when engaged, allows us to mobilize the fullness of who we are toward progressive action and seek presence in all areas of our life. The erotic is rooted in the sensual and embodied but has implications for the political, spiritual, and individual, paralleling the expansive reach of moral frameworks. My project is interested in how the erotic restructures our concept of morality and suggests that Lorde’s conceptualization may have great potential for expanding the contemporary progressive moral imagination. Drawing from a black and queer feminist lens, Lorde’s political theorizing around difference and the erotic has always had a strong moral vision, but little scholarship has explored the use that the erotic could have for our very understanding of morality today. Responding to this gap in the literature, the central claim of my thesis is that Lorde’s frame of the erotic expands our conception of what morality can be. By pushing against Western frames that propose a “looking away from the self,” extending the source of moral insight beyond religious prescription by centering the body and the senses as a tool for moral development and asserting the integrity of the individual as a crucial moral priority, Lorde offers an embodied-relational approach to morality that values the person and asks us to do the difficult reflective work needed to engage across difference.