Audre Lorde Revisited
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Both Lana Lin and I have been interested in Audre Lorde's work for many years. As a scholar who works at the intersections of sexuality, aesthetics, and race, I was initially drawn to Lorde's writings on the erotic because they offered a unique perspective on how structural problems such as racism, sexism, and homophobia operate on individual people. In addition to offering illumination and critique, however, I like the way Lorde offered the possibility of political collaboration, community, and joy in her idea of the erotic. Since these early encounters with her essays, most notably "Uses of the Erotic," "Eye to Eye," and those collected in The Cancer Journals (1980), I have enjoyed seeing the way that her ideas are encompassed in her poetics—especially in their expansion of diasporic blackness and sensuality in The Black Unicorn (1978). Lorde's breadth of writing and thinking has meant that I have drawn on her oeuvre throughout my own work. First, discussing her investigations of how Black women are embedded in various hierarchies of power in Sensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism (New York University Press, 2014), and later, I used her concept of the erotic—both as aesthetic practice and as attachment to the mother—as one of the theoretical spines for Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Brown Jouissance (New York University Press, 2018). In between and since, I've returned to Lorde in various essays to think about affect, sexuality, femininity, and plural subjectivity.
Since I was already familiar with Lana's wonderful analysis of Lorde in Freud's Jaw (2017) and her expansion of Lorde's theorizing in The Cancer Journals Revisited (2018), I knew that we shared an investment in working to understand our contemporary moment, riven as it is with the COVID pandemic and reckonings with racial injustice.1 Turning to Lorde collectively, we attempt to make sense of what it is to be a person now, what are the intimacies that we endeavor to hold, how do we grapple with these multiple forms of vulnerability, what might a just world look like and how might we endeavor to create it. And so, in June and July 2020, we exchanged questions and comments on a shared Google Doc; the edited result is this interview.
I am an artist, filmmaker, and writer who has made experimental films since the early 1990s and collaborative mixed media [End Page 1] projects as "Lin + Lam" since 2001. I often make work that revisits a specific text and speaks to a historical moment. My 2018 film, The Cancer Journals Revisited (TCJR), is such a work; yet sometimes a work comes into its meaning as real time events unfold. This may be true of TCJR.
Between 2016 and 2018, I invited twenty-seven artists, activists, scholars, and health care and disability advocates from a range of backgrounds, ages, ethnicities, and sexual and gender identities to read aloud excerpts from Lorde's The Cancer Journals (1980) on camera, and to reflect upon what Lorde's words mean to them. These voices form a kind of prism that refracts the biomedical/biopolitical regime in which most of us in the US are unwillingly embedded. Each reader offers a distinct angle from which to view the impacts of a disease that raises provocations around race, gender, class, environment, and ability, such as why Black women in the US die of breast cancer at higher rates than any other group, and how breast cancer and its treatment fosters an image of femininity that disallows gender variance and nonconformity. The chorus of voices gathered in TCJR reverberates with and against the voice of Audre Lorde, producing, I hope, a kind of multitemporal, polyvocal harmonics.
Aesthetically, I see TCJR as giving expression to celluloid film's and the archive's material character, revealing their vulnerability to suffer harm. A cinematic documentation of everyday urban life, TCJR is partially shot on expired Super 8mm and 16mm film stock that I had been carrying around unrefrigerated and unexposed for over twenty years. The survival of this raw stock under precarious conditions bespeaks the...
