Audre Lorde "Uses of the Erotic"

submitted by Maly_Querent from youtu.be

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[–]jkfinn 1 insightful - 1 fun1 insightful - 0 fun2 insightful - 1 fun -  (1 child)

I get a sense of unease around the concepts of internal power and internal erotic. To me power is a social phenomenon, not a spiritual one, and as to the erotic, well you can come at this word from countless angles, but the main version of it is sexual, and there’s no rescuing of this term, because it always involve objectification. If its internal, then you can give it any sense you want, but the erotic as spiritual or poetic is on a totally different plane, so it’s not really related to the normal use of “erotic.” Yeah, there’s a big difference between erotic poems and erotic pictures or photos. I also get the sense that this version of the “erotic” is queer theory influenced--it has that psychological, as opposed to political, tone to it, which again focuses too much on the individual, the power within, the subjective as in trans feelings reality, woman more like a plant, than a resistant social force. etc

[–]Maly_Querent[S] 2 insightful - 1 fun2 insightful - 0 fun3 insightful - 1 fun -  (0 children)

I mean like, i think that's the thing. It seems to me as if you are misinterpreting Lorde's definition of the erotic. Like, to her, it isn't inherently sexual. The erotic can be anything that brings intense satisfaction and pleasure. Lorde's example is of breaking a capsule of yellow dye and mixing it in with margarine. There's nothing inherently sexual about kneading margarine, but the intimacy and satisfaction of the product that you helped create, is still erotic.

There's a difderence, but because we are ruled by the pornographic, all we see imtimacy as, is an extension of sex and sexuality. This then limits what we percive as pleasurable and limits us to seeking sexual encounters as the only means of fulfilling much needed intimacy and satisfaction.