Political Love?

Posted: Tue, Dec 10, 2024

In-Class Activity

Each of our authors today—Audre Lorde, Julia Serano, and Amy Marvin—considers love beyond sexual and romantic love. In your group, focus on one of them and try to figure out:

  1. What does your chosen author understand love to be?
  2. And what does she think love can do?

Lorde on the Erotic

Eros is …

  • “deeply female and spiritual” (Lorde 1984, 53), “an assertion of the life-force of women,” “of that creative energy empowered” (55);
    • Is love sexed female or gendered woman? Can men love as men?
    • Is this meant as a factual assertion? a deliberate provocation?
  • not restricted to the sexual or even romantic but extending to “our language, our history, our dancing, our work, our lives” (55);
    • “And yes, there is a hierarchy. There is a difference between painting a back fence and writing a poem, but only one of quantity. And therefore, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love” (58).
  • a source of “true knowledge,” “the first and most powerful guiding light toward any understanding” with others (56);
  • “a source of power” (54).
    • This requires making a tricky distinction: the erotic vs. the pornographic (54, 58–59).
    • The power gained from being sexualized via pornography is “illusory, for it is fashioned within the context of male modes of power” (53), whereas the power gained from pursuing previously suppressed inner erotic desires is genuine.
    • But aren’t our erotic desires also importantly created by “male modes of power”?
    • What if one’s inner erotic desires call for pornography?

Cautionary tales from history:

  • ~Political lesbianism/lesbian vanguardism: “Woman-Identified Woman” (1970) by the Lavender Menace/Radicalesbians.
  • ~Lesbian separatism: casts men as categorically dangerous and women as categorically safe.

t4t

t4t: originated as a tag for Craigslist personals, extended to mean “a politicized, often eroticized, and contingent separatist space that offers care, love, and healing while resisting cissexist assimilation” (Marvin 2022, 18).

  • torrin a. greathouse’s poem
  • This is a characteristically political and communal vision of love: it is explicitly concerned with harm reduction and collective liberation.

The tension:

  • t4t is a source of self-, mutual-, and community-recognition, -love, -care, and -healing.

  • However, “t4t as an idealized ethos risks making trans people feel crazy interpersonally and at the level of participation in cultural production. It risks producing a ‘we’ that then gets imposed, glossing over the many wrongs trans people enact against each other. It risks covering over sexual harassment and assault, and it risks stifling dissent even as it claims to welcome dissent. It risks the irony of projecting care and community while disposing of trans people who are ‘divisive,’ perhaps even under the guise of protecting that person. It risks presenting a standpoint of marginalization that erases intracommunity marginalization and hierarchy. In so doing, t4t as cultural production produces the very dissent that it rejects while attempting to project an idealized, even if tumultuous, vision of community” (Marvin 2022, 20–21).