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- The Erotic, as defined and discussed by educator and poet, Audre Lorde, is a profound resource of feminine power housed within the spiritual plane of women's existence. This power, as she describes in her 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”, is a sense of deep satisfaction – beyond the sexual deceptively portrayed in the pornographic – elevated by a profound feeling that lives in the joy and fulfillment of a woman's being. This fulfillment becomes, as Lorde describes, the conscious decision in a woman's work, the power that embodies and manifests change in the fight against the oppression of women, especially Black women and women of color. This power of the erotic is a lifestyle, a potentiality that has been recognized as a threat, treated as suspect, and therefore suppressed out of fear, because as Lorde writes, “women so empowered are dangerous”. Lorde demonstrates in redefining and reclaiming the erotic – a profound feeling of knowing, an empowering knowledge, “a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence” – that the erotic is a critical element in dismantling the social and political hierarchy situated in a white patriarchal power structure that reproduces the erotic as pornographic. Lorde writes: “The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women…[confused] with its opposite, the pornographic…[and] pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling”. For the erotic to simply be the pornographic, would require the woman's experience to be reduced into a spiritual “world of flattened affect” thus rejecting the derivative of the very word erotic altogether, which “comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love in all its aspects” [emphasis added]. To speak of the erotic as Lorde does, is to “speak of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which [women] are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives…[and exemplify] how acutely and fully we can feel in doing” (en)
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| rdfs:comment
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- The Erotic, as defined and discussed by educator and poet, Audre Lorde, is a profound resource of feminine power housed within the spiritual plane of women's existence. This power, as she describes in her 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”, is a sense of deep satisfaction – beyond the sexual deceptively portrayed in the pornographic – elevated by a profound feeling that lives in the joy and fulfillment of a woman's being. This fulfillment becomes, as Lorde describes, the conscious decision in a woman's work, the power that embodies and manifests change in the fight against the oppression of women, especially Black women and women of color. This power of the erotic is a lifestyle, a potentiality that has been recognized as a threat, treated as suspect, and therefore suppre (en)
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