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266 Chapter 18 What’s Love Got to Do with It? Life Teachings from Multiracial Feminism Kari Lerum Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken? Tina Turner Meeting Audre Ifirst “met” Audre Lorde in the late 1980s while attending a midsized liberal arts Lutheran university on the West Coast. Because I grew up in a predominately white working-class town and attended college with mostly white middle-class students and professors, Audre Lorde’s work was my introduction to multiracial feminism ; she was also one of my first loves. My love for her was abstract because I only knew her through her writing, but she danced into my life at a critical crossroads, sang to me about the “erotic as power,” and made me hungry for more. I was a senior in college, writing my thesis on what I called the “evilization of sexuality”— attempting to understand how and why religious and cultural texts so often demonized earthly and bodily matters. Why were the body and sexuality seen as evil? Why were women and people of color so often cast as the source of this evil? Why did religious and cultural texts so consistently associate mind and spirit with maleness and whiteness? In my own life, I was questioning taken-for-granted knowledge and wondering if anything I had been taught in church was true. As a child and a teenager, my (mostly white, middle-class, college-educated) church had given me a sense of identity and community: one that offered a welcoming space outside of shopping malls and the cliques of my (mostly white, working-class, non-college-bound) high school, a space where I could develop an inner sense of self, mind, and What’s Love Got to Do with It? 267 spirit. While I was a basketball and track athlete and a drum major for the school’s marching band, I kept myself planted on the sidelines of my high school’s social events, playing the role of spectator and social commentator. Tall, shy, and religious as a child, I watched the social/secular world from a distance. I had my small gang of friends—all college-bound white girls like me—but peers also told me regularly that I was too tall. (To which comment I silently wondered, “too tall for what?”) Perhaps understandably, I had little desire for dating or taking risks that involved my heart. But in college—with my expanded intellectual and social repertoire—my church community became increasingly cramped for my growing humanist, pragmatist, and feminist consciousness and my burgeoning sexual appetite for both women and men. Lorde invited me into a fresh intellectual and spiritual space, a way of thinking and living that entailed freedom, creativity, passion, and embodied feminist living. It was a place where the erotic was not a source of shame, isolation, and fear but, rather, a source of power, creativity, community, and an integrated life; a place where hierarchical dichotomies like superior/inferior, good/evil, mind/ body, man/woman, and white/black were exposed as man-made justifications for privilege and inequality. Writing Alone I went to graduate school for the same reasons many intellectual feminists do: a love of learning and a life of the mind, and a belief in social justice and the radical implications of intellectual thought. I imagined graduate school would bring me closer to purpose, love, and justice politics. My classes would be full of students and professors like Audre Lorde, with whom I would become friends (and maybe lovers ), and together we would work for a better world. Since I was going to attend a large, public university in a liberal city, I worried that I would be the most conservative , privileged, and sheltered person in the bunch but hoped that my future intellectual comrades would show me the way toward what Cornell West calls “engaged insurgent praxis” (hooks and West 1991, 144). Instead, it seemed to me that I was the most radical person in the room. I was surrounded by “cream-of-the-crop” researchers, many from even more privileged class backgrounds than mine. Some of my colleagues were interested in studying social movements but seemed completely disinterested in working for social change. I watched graduate students emulate faculty in public performances of intellectual sophistication and superiority, often, it seemed, at others’ expense. My skills in statistics and high theory expanded, but I had to search hard for scraps of radical theory, and even harder for...

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