Erotic Themes

Audre Lorde’s The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power offers powerful new ways to think about eroticisms and how they are enacted in everyday life to empower women. She defines the erotic as a source of power, a source of knowledge, and a lens through which we can analyze aspects of our lives to evaluate the satisfaction and joy we receive and deserve. We see themes of the erotic in Sapphire’s Push through the interactions the main character, Precious, has with her social world. In Push, Sapphire presents spaces that are supposed to be designated as safe and protective as sites of physical and mental harm and exploitation for Precious. She revises historical and literary precedents around Black women erotics by showing the family, social
She discusses that the erotic as a source of power has been denied to women and instead has been used to serve men. When the erotic is defined relationally to men and it’s servitude to men, it no longer is a source of power for women. The way that women have been socialized to interact with the erotic is in limited terms of the bedroom, and even then, female erotics are “maintained at a distant/inferior position to be physically milked, much the same way ants maintain colonies of aphids to provide a life-giving substance for their masters” (Lorde 340). Lorde discusses that when the erotic is defined in terms of men, there arises the “false belief that only by the suppression of the erotic [...] can women be truly strong. But that strength is illusory, for it is fashioned within the context of male models of power” (Lorde 339). Therefore finding and utilizing the erotic as power and a source of information for women requires resistance against male models of erotics and power. This means rejecting the patriarchal ways that women have been taught to interact with their erotics. When women start to unlearn dominant relationships to the erotic,
Precious is sexually, physically, and mentally abused by her mother and father, two figures that are supposed to be sites of safety and nourishment. The abuse she faces in the home take the form of the physical, sexual, and mental exploitation of her for the pleasure of someone else. Her father and mother both take part in abusing her, and her father raping her resulted in Precious getting pregnant twice while still in high school. The power that the mother and father have over Precious seems boundless as they are able to abuse her through various ways. Sites of food and sex, which are ordinarily supposed to be objects of pleasurable consumption, are objects through which violence is enacted upon Precious throughout her life. Sapphire revises themes of sexuality around Black womanhood when writing about the exploitation of young Black girls. She describes the effects of the sexual abuse Precious endures, writing, “Precious put the book, doll jump rope, her head, self, down, very quietly, in the back of the class when she was six years old” (Sapphire 19). The sexual abuse of Precious also encompasses a traumatic disconnect between Precious and her body, in which she describes feeling physical pleasure at times when being raped by her father. This can be discussed in terms of Lorde’s definition of the pornographic as “sensation without feeling” (Lorde 340). Sexual