Happy Happy Birthday Audre Lorde!!

Happy Happy Birthday to the incredible Black Queens Audre Lorde and Toni Morrison! I will talk about Audre Lorde today, then Toni Morrison tomorrow. Ms. Lorde described herself as "Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet." We all know she was a brilliant poet, writer and activist, so I'll leave you with her words instead of mine: "THERE ARE MANY kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise. The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling.

In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppression of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within our lives. We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused, and devalued within western society. On the one hand, the superficially erotic has been encouraged as a sign of female inferiority; on the other hand, women have been made to suffer and to feel both contemptible and suspect by virtue of its existence. It is a short step from there to the false belief that only by the suppression of the erotic within our lives and consciousness can women be truly strong. But that strength is illusory, for it is fashioned within the context of male models of power.