Feeling Her Way: Audre Lorde and the Power of Touch

The Problem of Skin

How can we talk about how lesbians have sex with each other? This is no trivial question: if sexual connection with other women is at the core of lesbian identity, then accurately representing our sexuality in some way is as close to a culture-making activity as we can get. ¹ That is not to say that there are not pages and pages of descriptions of lesbian sex, from the "wave upon wave" vanilla of Naiad paperbacks to the hardcore daddy fantasies of S/M. ² But little of it is compelling, not because it is not sufficiently explicit but because it rarely gets under the reader's skin.

Perhaps the skin itself is the problem, or perhaps how to describe what sexuality does to it is. In a related vein Elaine Scarry argues that there is no language for pain, no way of representing it. In language that strongly resembles the way we might think about sexuality, she argues that in the description of physical pain, "the events happening within the interior of [another] person's body may seem to have the remote character of some deep subterranean fact, belonging to an invisible geography that, however portentous, has no reality because it has not yet manifested itself on the visible surface of the earth." ³ Sexual desire and the sensation of sexual contact seem part of that subterranean world, outside our abilities to express ourselves. After all, how do we describe the electricity of lovemaking, the loss of self in concert with (indeed, dependent on) an intense sensory awareness of self? As Elizabeth Grosz points out, "The most intense moments of pleasure and the force of their materiality cannot be reduced to terms that capture their force and intensity." ⁴

Needless to say, this problem is hardly unique to lesbian sexuality; it is characteristic of sexual experience between people of any gender, or alone. In this essay I tackle this conundrum by working with Audre Lorde's representations of lesbian sexuality, both in her "biomythography" Zami and in some of her theoretical work. While I do not think that Lorde gives us all the answers (or even that "answers" are necessarily what we need to explore how sexuality shapes us and our approach to the world), I do think that Zami comprises a series of experiments in representing lesbian sexuality and human interconnection from which we as readers, lesbian or not, can learn. Consequently, my focus on lesbian sexuality here does not preclude analogy to other kinds of sexual practice; indeed, my larger argument is that Lorde's representations of lesbianism can provide a key to thinking about sexuality and bodily experience more generally.

The sense on which most people primarily rely for information about the world around them—vision—is virtually useless when it comes to figuring out and describing the experience of sexual pleasure. Despite innumerable attempts to the contrary (as the well-stocked shelves of "adult films" in video stores attest), visual representations of sexual pleasure inevitably fall short of showing what desire feels like inside our bodies. ⁵ Indeed, the sighted often block out the visual during sexual intimacy: we turn off lights or close our eyes, both to connect with our partner(s) and to retreat from the regime of the visible. In fact, a representative schema that imagined the visible as only one source among many (and not necessarily the most informative), that relied more heavily on other senses, might get closer to communicating the textures of sexuality. ⁶

For this reason, S/M pornography comes the closest to capturing what sex feels like, since it so often works outside the limits of what is in front of the participants' eyes and instead heavily depends on sensation and the sublimity of sensory extremes. Writing about S/M means paying minute, exquisite...