702410

research-article2017
EJW0010.1177/1350506817702410European Journal of Women’s StudiesIlmonen

Article EJ WS
European Journal of Women’s Studies
1­–16
Identity politics revisited: On © The Author(s) 2017
Reprints and permissions:
Audre Lorde, intersectionality, sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/1350506817702410
https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506817702410
and mobilizing writing styles journals.sagepub.com/home/ejw

Kaisa Ilmonen
Turun yliopisto, Finland

Abstract
‘Intersectionality’ has taken on a complex position in the field of feminist scholarship
over the last decade. Debate on the concept has swung back and forth, from buzzword
to harsh critique. Amid these discussions, many feminist scholars have thought about
Audre Lorde and the role of her writings in the debates over intersectionality. Lorde’s
radical literary feminism has often been seen both as reflecting a politics of identity, on
the one hand, and as shifting and situational, on the other. Intersectionality has also
been claimed either to be recycling the ideas of identity politics or to be forging new
ways to grasp decentered identity positions and power structures. This article aims to
tell a story about the roots of intersectionality through – and alongside – the legacy
of Lorde’s feminism, by revisiting certain identity-political ideas. The radical nature of
Lorde’s thinking is in many ways connected to politicized writing styles and rebellious
literary forms. The main focus in this article is therefore extended to cover the role
and implications of radical writing styles for intersectionality. The article argues that the
oeuvre of telling the story of intersectionality through Lorde’s feminism opens up a new
perspective on the genealogy of intersectionality.

Keywords
Audre Lorde, genealogy of intersectionality, identity poetics, identity politics,
intersectionality, writing

I kept thinking of Audre Lorde and how I wished she were here to help us
describe the moment.

(Sara Ahmed, On Being Included)

Corresponding author:
Kaisa Ilmonen, Turun yliopisto, Turku, 20014, Finland.
Email: kailmo@utu.fi
2 European Journal of Women’s Studies 00(0) 

Introduction
During the last decade, ‘intersectionality’ has taken on a complex position in the field of
feminist scholarship. The concept has been debated back and forth, from buzzword to
harsh critique. In the midst of these discussions, I too, like so many other feminist schol-
ars, have kept thinking about Audre Lorde and the role of her writings in the debates over
intersectionality. Lorde’s radical literary feminism has often been seen as both: on the
one hand as reflecting a politics of identity, on the other as shifting and situational.
Intersectionality too has been claimed either to be recycling the ideas of identity politics
or to be creating new ways of grasping decentered identity positions and power struc-
tures. My purpose in this article is to tell a story about the roots of intersectionality
through – and in tandem with – the legacy of Lorde’s feminism, by revisiting certain
identity-political ideas. The radical nature of Audre Lorde’s thinking is in many ways
connected to politicized writing styles and rebellious literary forms. My focus in the
article is therefore extended to cover the role and implications of radical writing styles
for intersectionality. I argue that the oeuvre of telling the story of intersectionality through
Lorde’s feminism opens up a new perspective on the genealogy of intersectionality.
The contemporary debates over intersectionality have many different genealogies,
and each scholar maps them a bit differently. Ann Phoenix and Pamela Pattyama, for
instance, distinguish between US-based systemic intersectionality and more UK-based
constructionist work – while also referring to ‘the burgeoning Scandinavian work’ (2006:
188).1 However, questions of experience, systems of oppression, and multiple identities
– often derived from Lorde’s arguments – remain the common ground of intersectional
debates. This article is an attempt to examine this common ground, from three points of
view: those of Audre Lorde, of the politics of writing, and of the legacy of identity poli-
tics. In so doing, I am also able to address Lorde’s role as an ‘exception’ in telling stories
about feminism: her trickster-like, ‘exceptional’ legacy seems to feature in several femi-
nist epistemologies beyond intersectionality.
This article has been written at two Nordic universities, those of Turku and Uppsala, and
as a Nordic-educated feminist my training has taken place within the European debates on
intersectionality. Nevertheless, for more than 15 years I have been working in the field of
US-based Caribbean studies and feminisms of color. From this partial and situated perspec-
tive, I am particularly interested in Audre Lorde’s role in the discussion of genealogies of
intersectionality, and in the politics of writing style in the feminist theoretical debate on
intersectionality. My aim is to identify and accredit uses of poetry in the corpus of writings
presaging intersectional modes of theorizing identities and systems of oppression. My case
study in this article involves Lorde’s well-known essay, published in Sister Outsider in
1984 under the title ‘Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference’, and com-
bining both poetic and manifesto-like writing styles, along with two of her poems,
‘Recreation’ and ‘Between Ourselves’, from the collection The Black Unicorn (1978) and
her novel Zami: The New Spelling of My Name (1982). The larger frame of reference here
is one of a feminist ‘identity poetics’ dating back to the late 1970s and early 1980s, the
period of so-called essentialist, identity-political writings by feminists of color.
The turn of the 1980s and 1990s came to be a time of heated debate between essential-
ist identity politics and postmodern constructivism (see e.g. Alcoff, 1988; Fuss, 1989).
Ilmonen 3

Audre Lorde held a strangely dual position in this debate. For some scholars she is
recalled as an essentialist feminist in her search for the mythic woman warrior: for others
she presages postmodernism – and intersectionality – in her emphasis on positionality
(see e.g. Carr, 1993; Chancy, 1997; Garber, 2001; Smith, 1991 [1989]). However, femi-
nist scholars have drawn on Lorde’s poetic thinking time and again, in various contem-
porary contexts. Sara Ahmed, for one, is inspired by Lorde’s thinking in many of her
books (Ahmed, 2004, 2010, 2012). Here, my purpose is to mobilize the poetic legacy of
Audre Lorde and its varying role in the process of articulating the theory of intersection-
ality. I revisit identity politics, to see whether its supposedly stable legacy might be
activated anew. I first say a little more about identity politics in Lorde’s novel Zami; I
then try to envision the identity-poetical and political roots of intersectionality. Finally, I
discuss the politics of writing style, using Lorde’s essay and poetry as my primary
examples.

From identity politics to story of intersectionality

The multiply burdened concept of ‘identity politics’ usually refers to the shared experi-
ence of oppression by certain subjugated groups, whether defined by gender, class, polit-
ical status, sexuality, ethnicity, race or some other characteristic, which provides a basis
for group politics. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ‘identity polit-
ical formations typically aim to secure the political freedom of a specific constituency
marginalized within its larger context. Members of that constituency assert or reclaim
ways of understanding their distinctiveness that challenge dominant oppressive charac-
terizations, with the goal of greater self-determination’ (SEP online). Identity politics
thus presumes a shared subjective experience of the members of the particular group, an
essence of identity. This view has been contested by more constructivist conceptions of
identity; these describe such identity-political ideas as ‘essentialist’ (cf. Hemmings,
2011: 38–42), conceptualizing identity as a kind of a ‘frozen object’ – obsolete and old
fashioned, ‘the necessary error’.2 Jennifer Nash has argued that the contemporary use of
‘intersectionality’ provides ‘a vocabulary to respond to critiques of identity politics’ and
its tendency to transcend differences (Nash, 2008: 2). In contrast, however, identity poli-
tics may also offer something germane to the discussion of intersectionality.
There is an immense corpus of research recognizing Audre Lorde’s legacy in articu-
lating multiple identities and diverse positioning, whereas Barbara Smith, for example,
values Lorde for articulating the ‘Black lesbian experience with both verisimilitude and
authenticity’ (1991 [1989]: 122). In the epilogue to her novel Zami, Lorde writes:

Recreating in words the women who helped give me substance.

Ma-Liz, DeLois, Louise Briscoe, Aunt Anni, Linda, and Genevieve; MawuLisa, thunder, sky
sun, the great mother of us all; and Afrekete, her youngest daughter, the mischievous linguist,
trickster, best-beloved, whom we must all become. (Lorde, 1982: 255)

She must embody the female heritage of her cultural herstory. In Zami, Afrekete is Kitty,
the protagonist Audre’s lover at the very end of the novel. Kitty’s character intertwines
4 European Journal of Women’s Studies 00(0) 

with Goddess Afrekete, and this wavering between the Goddess Afrekete and a lover
Afrekete is marked by the use of italics:

She brought me live things from the bush, and from her farm set out in cocoyams and cassava
– those magical fruit which Kitty brought me from the West Indian markets …

There were green plantains, which we half-peeled and then planted, fruit-deep, in each other’s
bodies until the petals of skin lay like tendrils of broad green fire upon the curly darkness
between our upspread thighs. There were ripe red finger bananas, stubby and sweet, with
which I parted your lips gently, to insert the peeled fruit into your grape-purple flower. (Lorde,
1982: 249)

Here the African heritage, female erotics, West Indian produce, and the black lesbian
body materialize the very essence of zami-identity which she must become.
Furthermore, the first section of poems in The Black Unicorn consists of poetry
emphasizing the essence of black warrior woman’s eternal soul, bearing Dahomey tradi-
tions throughout historical periods. In the poem ‘From the House of Yemanja’, the West
African heritage is needed like the consoling arms of a mother (/mother I need your
blackness now/ p. 6). In ‘125th Street and Abomey’, a city in today’s Benin and New
York are juxtaposed when the speaker finds Seboulisa, a mother of all the Youruba ori-
sha, printed inside the back of her head (p. 12). She finds /those ancient parts of me/ … /
like my warrior sisters/who rode in defense of your queendom/ (p. 12). This kind of col-
lective power within herself connects Lorde to the essentialist identity politics of black
lesbian feminism. Such features seem to be ways, in Lorde’s texts, to ‘reclaim ways of
understanding her distinctiveness’ – to quote the aforementioned definition by the SEP.
This seemingly stable position, however, is not the whole story.
There are a number of feminists who appreciate Lorde in terms of exceeding the lim-
its of identity politics. For Linda Garber, Lorde ‘draws on the poetics of lesbian feminism
and prefigures the politics of postmodernism’ by always claiming multiple self-position-
ing (2001: 97). Analouise Keating names Lorde’s work, along with that of Gloria
Anzaldùa and Paula Gunn Allen, as ‘transformational identity politics’: ‘a complex inter-
active process that displaces conventional boundaries between apparently disparate
social groups’ (1998: 35). Lorde is also discussed in terms of envisioning ‘multiple and
changing identities in the field of identity politics’ (Ryan, 2001: 5), in ‘rethinking iden-
tity politics’ (Phelan, 2001: 309), in the context of ‘coalitional differential consciousness’
(Sandoval, 2000: 61), or in picturing ‘coalitional identity politics’ (Fowlkes, 2001: 282).
Lorde has the ability to talk about identity politics while changing it – she is the sister
and an outsider. These complex processes, multiple positionings, and changing identities
do not fall too far from intersectionality.
Writing about feminist theories, particularly intersectionality, also includes storytell-
ing. Clare Hemmings (2011) has made an important contribution by mapping what kinds
of stories feminists tell, why these stories matter, and what kinds of political grammars
are inherent in our storytelling. Hemmings argues that ‘feminist theorists need to pay
attention to the amenability of our own stories … we might otherwise wish to disentangle
ourselves from if history is not simply to repeat itself’ (2011: 2). My story here is ame-
nable to stories told about intersectionality; I am referring to its ambiguity, dependence
Ilmonen 5

on analysis of power, social constructions, and the crucial role of Black feminist thought.
However, Hemmings emphasizes that ‘we can interrupt the amenability of the narratives
that make up Western feminist stories and tell stories differently’ (2011: 2). One central
element in telling a story about intersectionality is to correct it somehow: in the titles on
the topic, terms such as ‘revisited’, ‘re-thinking’, or ‘blind spots’ often appear (see e.g.
Brah and Phoenix, 2004; Lykke, 2010; Nash, 2008; Prins, 2006, to name a few). This
pursuit of correcting must not create the illusion that intersectionality can somehow pro-
vide us with truer knowledge the more we revisit it, or the more axes of oppression we
add. However, rather than truer knowledge, intersectionality offers us more situated
knowledge, to use Donna Haraway’s term, the more we revisit it. That is why it is inter-
esting to see whether Audre Lorde can help us ‘describe the moment’ in debating
intersectionality.
As the story goes, intersectionality emerged from the critique directed at the exclud-
ing paradigms of identity politics in the late 1980s. The term was first coined by Kimberlé
Crenshaw, a law scholar who wanted to raise awareness of the pit of invisibility reserved
for black women, marginalized from critical discourses on both race and gender (see
Crenshaw, 1989). This, however, was not entirely unprecedented: a number of Black
feminist authors and activists, such as Audre Lorde, had already developed ‘intersec-
tional’ perspectives in the early 1970s by combining class interests with gender-specific
issues in racial categorizations, thus articulating the problems of multiple simultaneous
oppressions (without actually naming such combinations as intersectional). Currently,
intersectionality is a ‘vibrant’ concept in discussions of transnational feminisms, critical
race studies, disability studies, queer studies, transgender studies, and globalization stud-
ies. In the most common articulations of intersectionality identities are viewed in more
constructivist terms: they are culturally and historically constructed within the social
structures of power including a variety of positions – gendered, national, cultural, reli-
gious, and the like. These positions can be ambivalent, overlapping, or even mutually
exclusive – and the individual is forced to negotiate among them. However, as Kathy
Davis argues, intersectionality became a feminist buzzword precisely because it is
ambiguous and open-ended: on the one hand it sought to understand ‘the social and
material realities of women’s lives’, while on the other it ‘fit neatly into the postmodern
project of conceptualizing multiple and shifting identities’ (Davis, 2014: 18). In this
respect, intersectionality befits the legacy of Audre Lorde, which is always too slippery,
fluid, and ambiguous to allow it to fit neatly into one particular epistemological niche.
An analysis of Lorde’s political project casts a particularly strong light on the both
identity-political and poetical roots of intersectionality. Lorde’s seemingly essentialist
identity-political positionings also invite her readers to imagine commonalities and pos-
sible coalitions. In Keating’s words, ‘Lorde extends her experience outwards to include
all – regardless of color, sexuality, gender, age, or class – who do not fit this country’s
“mythical norm” ’ (1998: 27). Lorde turns identity politics’ project of essential difference
into a coalitional effort across the systems of domination. This same ethos is pivotal to
intersectionality, which by definition questions logics of domination and creates trans-
formative social models (see May, 2015: 4). I claim that the ‘nodal point’ of Lorde’s
project and intersectionality studies lies in their common attempt to theorize domination
rather than defining the sameness of ‘outsiders’.
6 European Journal of Women’s Studies 00(0) 

In the recent discussion of intersectionality, Lorde’s writings and activism are also
often recalled when it is felt that intersectionality has been depoliticized or to have lost
its radical coalitional potential (see e.g. Bilge, 2013). Several generations of feminist
thinkers have been inspired by Audre Lorde’s investment in creativity: as Barbara
Christiansen put it, Lorde ‘enlarged the race-feminist theory of that period [the 1980s],
so much so that the concept of difference as a creative force’ is today as natural in our
texts as the analysis of oppression (cited in Garber, 2001: 100). In the following, I situate
Audre Lorde’s poetic and creative knowledge within the field of intersectionality, with
the purpose of mapping her position in feminist storytelling – more particularly in stories
of intersectionality.

Identity poetics of intersectionality

During the early 1980s, many US-based or Caribbean feminists of color, such as Audre
Lorde, Gloria Anzaldùa, Paula Gunn Allen, Michelle Cliff, Barbara Smith, or Alice
Walker, started to conceptualize expressions which would more comprehensively capture
the experiences and lived realities of women of color. It was felt that neither critical race
studies nor the mainly white feminist criticism could provide an adequate means of self-
expression for those encountering multiple simultaneous oppressions. The writers and
artists belonging to the literary movement following these conceptualizations, the Black
Feminist Aesthetics, included a group of activists called the Combahee River Collective,
who claimed in their statement that it was ‘difficult to separate race from class from sex
oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously’ (1982
[1977]: 16); they were thus articulating, as early as 1977, the principles of the intersec-
tional ethos. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, a wide corpus of fiction – essays,
novels, manifestos, short stories, poetry – began to emerge, with Alice Walker and Toni
Morrison in the forefront, in an attempt to express the forms of multiple oppression expe-
rienced by women of color. Even before the 1980s, several women authors of color, such
as Nella Larson, Zora Neale Hurston, Una Marson, Lorraine Hansberry, or Rosa Guy to
name a few, were exploring complicated intersectional themes. This plethora of Black
feminist fiction is reminiscent of Giovanna Covi’s view that feminist discourse enables
forms of literature and philosophy to mix in a way which pushes language to the very
limit, ‘attempting to utter what so far has remained unnamed, but not for this reason non-
existent’ (Covi, 1997: 26).
The writers of Black feminist aesthetics invite us ‘to discover “theory” in “poetry” ’
and vice versa (Covi, 1997: 26), emphasizing both a fiction and a theory in seeking new
intellectual realms. Such intertwining of intellectual and creative discourses was used for
example by Alice Walker, who declared her principles of Womanism in her collection of
short fiction called In Search of our Mother’s Gardens (1983); by Michelle Cliff, in
Claiming an Identity They Taught Me to Despise (1980), and by Audre Lorde, who spoke
of a ‘Zami-consciousness’ in addressing the particular experience of women-loving-
women-of-color in her aforementioned novel; they needed art to articulate intersecting
identity positions. This corpus of literature provided an intertext for theory which has too
rarely been recognized as one of the routes3 leading to subsequent academic intersection-
ality. Linda Garber, in her influential study, refers to such identity-political literary
Ilmonen 7

writings as ‘identity poetics’. Garber views identity poetics as a third term, arising out of
the texts of working-class/lesbians of color and situated between ‘grounded identity poli-
tics and fluid positionality’ (Garber, 2001: 1).
While Garber has demanded the full recognition of identity poetics as the root of
later constructivist queer theory, I am interested in its role in auguring intersectionality.
Identity poetics, she argues, consists of pivotal identity-political writings which articu-
late ‘multiple, simultaneous identity positions and activist politics’, belonging to les-
bian feminism as well as presaging queer theory (Garber, 2001: 8). One of the problems,
for Garber, was queer’s theoretical commitment to poststructural philosophy. It is not
approachable by an activist readership, and its textuality is inaccessible for those with-
out academic credentials. Thus queer theory marginalizes activist and other radical
writings, which opened up ‘free spaces’ for queer theory in the first place (Garber,
2001: 197). Similar problems have been located in the recent debate on intersectional-
ity. It has been said to face trends that neutralize its political potential, making it an
academic exercise of metatheoretical musings (see Bilge, 2013). While scholars of
intersectionality have made serious attempts through the politics of positioning and
situating knowledge to criticize all forms of universalizing tendencies and historical
vacuums,4 the prevailing claims regarding intersectional methodology and its more
discipline-centered use have nevertheless pushed intersectionality in more academic
directions. The inaccessibility of some of this theory, which has been disciplined out
of its radicality, might therefore be redressed if the politics of writing styles and iden-
tity poetics is taken into consideration. In this sense, the rethinking of intersectionality
might incline us toward the use of poetry.

The politics of writing style in studies of intersectionality

The genealogy of intersectionality brings to the fore the issue of politics embedded in
writing styles. If we are open to accepting the invitation by the writers of Black feminist
aesthetics ‘to discover “theory” in “poetry” ’, we must also acknowledge a variety of
writing styles – such as fiction, essay, poetry, and manifesto – so as to avoid the ivory
tower of academically validated discourse. After all, even in the case of intersectionality,
which is seen as an ethical tool for the study of those who are multiply marginalized, it
comes down to the question of what kinds of epistemic knowledge are favored and what
is ignored, what kinds of writings are being taken into account in academic knowledge
production (see e.g. Hornscheidt, 2009: 40).
Sometimes radical yet visionary literary texts come to be overshadowed by the disci-
plinary demands of academic writing. Even feminist scholars are sometimes so ‘disci-
plined’ by our own disciplines, under so much pressure to formulate the standardized
kind of impeccable journal article, that these radical texts become hard to accept. Antje
Hornscheidt, for one, has noted that intersectionality needs to be established as a master
concept by situating earlier traces and ideas in the background rather than foregrounding
them. Hornscheidt asks: why has identity-political Black feminist knowledge been
excluded from academia even within feminist studies? Radical Black feminist thinking
has become an appropriated knowledge, obscured in the background of academic inter-
sectionality. In other words, intersectionality has been established as a ‘Master concept’,
8 European Journal of Women’s Studies 00(0) 

situating itself ‘above’ the more radical textual corpus and integrating it into ‘white
knowledge production on intersectionality’ (Hornscheidt, 2009: 39).
One such radical writer has been Audre Lorde, self-acclaimed ‘Lesbian, Mother, Poet,
Warrior’ of Caribbean origin. The politics of writing style is a focal issue for Lorde, who in
her essay ‘Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference’ articulated several
kinds of ‘Interlocking systems of power’ and many of the basic goals of intersectionality as
early as 1980.5 While this visionary piece of writing is often cited by scholars applying
intersectionality as a methodological apparatus, its radical theoretical implications are sel-
dom analyzed at length. This may be because in the context of traditional academic con-
straints her text is not ‘good’: one might say that its argumentation is not coherent as it
jumps about and avoids making connections, ignoring the Aristotelian ideals of a begin-
ning, a middle, and a conclusion. Its arguments are not founded on scholarly studies but on
personal experience. Furthermore, it is a manifesto-like text, addressing the reader directly
and with the purpose of appealing to the latter’s emotions. It uses polemical language,
dismissing the demands of objectivity and utilizes colorful metaphors and poetic language,
mixing genres and co-opting styles, thus politicizing the academic writing form.
In her essay, Lorde gives expression to the experience of the multiply oppressed. To
achieve this goal, she had to ‘transform the silence into language’ as she puts it (Lorde,
2007 [1984]: 40). Throughout her writing, Lorde has tried to find new tools to express her
political vision – for example, in the subtitle of her aforementioned ground-breaking novel
Zami: The New Spelling of My Name – A Biomythography. The subtitle foregrounds the
cultural framing of the biographical elements of her novel, always already imbued with
localized mythic narrative features. It can thus be argued that the genre chosen by a writer
is as plausible a way of doing politics as the content itself. It is no coincidence that in the
essay ‘Age, Race, Class, and Sex’ too she is taking a poetic stand in order to illustrate her
intersectional vision of class. Lorde explains that ‘even the form our creativity takes is
often a class issue’ (p. 116). For her, it is prose which appears as a middle-class art form,
demanding ‘a room of one’s own, reams of paper, a typewriter and plenty of time’ (p. 116);
poetry is the genre accessible for example to working-class mothers, who have very little
time and only the corner of a kitchen table. Thus Lorde intersectionalizes the genre of writ-
ing itself, harnessing style to carry her emancipatory visions. Lorde argues that ‘we have,
built into all of us, old blueprints of expectations and response, old structures of oppression,
and these must be altered at the same time as we alter the living conditions which are a
result of those structures. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house’
(2007 [1984]: 123). This much-quoted argument also provides the background for claims
regarding poetic routes for contemporary intersectionality. Poetry and more artistic forms
of writing were used by the Black Feminist Aesthetics movement to dismantle the blue-
prints of academic feminism of the time to ‘transform the silence into language’.
It is interesting to consider radical poetry as a means of opening up a way to grasp the
level of experience in intersectional analyses. According to Elizabeth Grosz, the unwill-
ingness to theorize the role of the concretely embodied knower in scholarly knowledge
production constitutes a blind spot in the epistemology of traditional science (1993: 192).
In the history of feminism, the creative force of artistic language has sketched the revo-
lutionary ideas of the women’s movement, and the dualism between ‘creative’ and ‘criti-
cal’ has long been challenged. For example, both Virginia Woolf and Simone de Beauvoir
Ilmonen 9

wrote fiction along with more philosophical work. Women poets have also utilized the
bodily and material qualities of poetry – rhythm, speech-sounds, onomatopoesis, and the
kinesthetic qualities of rhythmic language – to incorporate the materiality of the female
body in the text (see Stevenson, 2000). The embodied way of knowing and creating in
feminist writing is graspable in Audre Lorde’s poem ‘Recreation’, from the collection
The Black Unicorn (1995 [1978]). Here the bodily experience of women-loving-women
becomes the site of textual (re)creation:

Coming together
it is easier to work
after our bodies
meet
paper and pen
neither care nor profit
whether we write or not
but as your body moves
under my hands
charged and waiting
we cut the leash
you create me against your thighs
hilly with images
moving through our word countries
my body
writes into your flesh
the poem
you make of me.
Touching you I catch midnight
as moon fires set in my throat
I love you flesh into blossom
I made you
and take you made
into me.

Here ‘my body’ is concretely transformed into a poem, as ‘I’ am created ‘against your
thighs’. In ‘Recreation’, poetic language is needed to express the corporeal experience of
10 European Journal of Women’s Studies 00(0) 

black lesbian women, which had little expression in the theorizing feminist knowledge
of 1978.
What is interesting in Audre Lorde’s use of language is in particular her unique, situ-
ated, and embodied textuality, mobilizing the poetic truth about the experienced particu-
larities of multiple oppressions – something which was only later given the name in
academic discourse of ‘Intersectionality’. Nina Lykke has included the issue of shifting
boundaries between academic and creative writing practices in questions of ideologies,
intersectionalities, and situated knowledges (2010: 163–183). For Lykke, feminists need
to challenge the perspective of traditional academic knowledge by committing ourselves
in our academic texts, by shifting narrator’s position and perspective, by making our-
selves accountable ‘in terms of partial perspectives’ (2010: 165) and by giving our
‘objects’ voice and agency on their own terms (2010: 167). In her own work, Lykke has
drawn on Laurel Richardson’s books Writing Strategies (1990) and Fields of Play (1997).
For both Lykke and Richardson, ‘a poetic representation makes it possible to get closer
to the embodied, individually specific and unique dimensions of the research partici-
pants’ speech act’; Lykke concludes that ‘the poem mobilizes a “poetic truth” ’ (Lykke,
2010: 175).

The Black Unicorn as situated knowledge

The epistemological key to intersectionality and intersectional ways of knowing is based
on situating both oneself and the knowledge produced: historically, spatially, and cultur-
ally. Intersectionality is about partial perspectives and culturally related epistemologies.
As Lykke argues, ‘if “we” (= white, Western, middle-class feminists) do not carefully
reflect on our positionality in an intersectional, global perspective, and revise our ways
of doing both theory and politics, “we” will end up supporting rather than breaking down
the global and local power structures against which “we” claim to fight’ (2010: 54).
Intersectionality embraces the ethos of situated knowledge and the politics of locations
for both: the researching subject and the researched ‘object’. Lorde’s poetical knowledge
as situated knowledge, as a partial perspective, challenges white feminists to understand,
negotiate, and dialogize with perspectives not personally embodied (cf. Haraway, 1988).
Lorde’s situated knowledge, her poetic partiality, provides a culturally and histori-
cally situated perspective from which to perceive the intersectional experiences of Black/
Lesbian/Women. Her poetic partiality challenges Western cultural narratives about
scholarly objectivity; transcendent perspectives and conquering gazes from nowhere
constitute a ‘God trick’, an illusion of infinitive vision (Haraway, 1988: 581–583). In The
Black Unicorn, Lorde deals with such themes as mother–daughter relationships, the
African heritage, woman-warriors, racism, lesbianism, social oppression, sacrifice, pain,
and in-betweenness. Yet the lyrical ‘I’ of the poems often finds solace in sisterhood and
remembering. The point of view, however, is always that of an ‘other’, an outsider, never
able to completely blend in. In the poem ‘Between Ourselves’, Lorde speaks of the mul-
tiple suppressions and fluid subject-positions occupied by an African-American woman.
While the title addresses people belonging a particular community, it may also be refer-
ring implicitly to the spaces within oneself, reminding us that ‘myself’ or ‘ourselves’ are
also composed of many fragments. The self, too, includes the otherness within:
Ilmonen 11

Once when I walked into a room

my eyes would seek out the one or two black faces
for contact or reassurance or a sign
I was not alone
now walking into rooms full of black faces
that would destroy me for any difference
where shall my eyes look?
Once it was easy to know
who were my people.
…
Under the sun on the shores of Elimina
a black man sold the woman who carried
my grandmother in her belly
he was paid with bright yellow coins
that shone in the evening sun
and in the faces of her sons and daughters.
When I see that brother behind my eyes
his irises are bloodless and without colour
his tongue clicks like yellow coins
tossed up on this shore
where we share the same corner
of an alien and corrupted heaven
and whenever I try to eat
the words
of easy blackness as salvation
I taste the colour
of my grandmother’s first betrayal.
…
Armed with scars
healed
in many different colors
I look in my own faces
12 European Journal of Women’s Studies 00(0) 

as Eshu’s daughter crying

if we do not stop killing
the other in ourselves
the self that we hate
in others
soon we shall all lie
in the same direction

Here the lyrical ‘I’ negotiates between the different axes of identity one carries within
oneself, including the otherness within her. She seeks to know who her people are, and
finds ‘faces that would destroy me for any difference’. She seems to be always out of
place: as a lesbian, as a woman, and as someone of African origin. She carries her
African heritage with her, her grandmother’s ‘first betrayal’ also echoing the violent
history of women. She is scarred and healed ‘in many different colors’, crying out for
respect on all sides of herself – intersectionally. Her desire to belong – or longing-to-be
– is produced in and through the narrative enactment of multiple selves (cf. Prins,
2006: 288).
For Haraway, situated knowledge requires that the object of research is always seen
as ‘an actor and agent’ (1988: 592). Haraway emphasizes the conversation with the
agent/object, which should not be seen merely as material for the scholar’s discoveries.
She refers to the agent/object as ‘Coyote’ or ‘Trickster’, enabling unsettling possibilities
(1988: 593). The interesting thing here, however, is the route Haraway takes in order to
reach the principles of world-as-actor. She bases her argument on Katie King’s study The
Passing Dreams of Choice … Once Before and After: Audre Lorde and the Literary
Apparatus (1987).6 As a poet, Lorde provides particular embodied ways to know about
the multiply marginalized perspectives and experientiality of those seen as marginal. Her
poetry unravels the ‘god-trick’ of traditional science and empowers the object as agent
by forcing the reader to engage with the poem.
In the poem above, the lyrical ‘I’ draws on African mythology, embodying the his-
tory of slavery. Such an approach might easily sound essentialist. The seemingly
essentialist and stable poem, however, may be transformed into the intersectional
negotiation of complexity and relationality by respecting its agency in creating unset-
tling possibilities. Lorde’s legacy surpasses the epistemological positions of what is
already known and superseded, whether we are concerned with her writings presaging
constructivist intersectionality or more materialist ideas of her poems being the
object/actors. What if we recall her role in predicting the ‘affective turn’ in feminist
studies, with the essays ‘Uses of the Erotic’ and ‘Uses of Anger’ in Sister Outsider
(2007 [1984])? How about her position as an identity poetical writer, anticipating
queer theory in Linda Garber’s thinking? Or the studies foregrounding the politics of
writing style in feminist studies? In analyzing feminist narratives, Hemmings com-
ments as an aside that it is frequently Lorde who is positioned as a ‘notable exception’
(Hemmings, 2011: 48).
Ilmonen 13

Conclusion
I conclude by claiming that the legacy of Audre Lorde is much less fixed than it seems,
and that her role as an exception deserves to be studied further. Her legacy becomes a
fluid and ambivalent, ever changing agent – Coyote, or Trickster. Or better yet, a Black
Unicorn. Feminist scholars have time and again claimed that writing style is ‘the method
of inquiry’ itself, and that ‘mainstream textual formations are often related to a system
that privileges certain kinds of knowledge over other, subjugated knowledge’ (Livholts,
2012: 3; Richardson, 2000). In her volume Emergent Writing Methodologies in Feminist
Studies (2012), Mona Livholts envisions an intersectionalized writing; this refers to
several kinds of situated knowledges and to perspectively narrated versions of the
world. Livholts amplifies this: ‘intersecting dimensions of power are intimately related
to methodologies of textual forms’, challenging ‘researchers to grasp complexity in
their studies’ (2012: 9). For me, the most interesting feature in Livholts’ intersectional-
ized writing is that once again it is Audre Lorde’s writing which is pointed to as an
example (2012: 10).
Polemical and poetic feminist writings articulating the principles of intersectionality
have been published over the last several decades. This genre of identity poetics is nev-
ertheless often insufficiently recognized in the debate over the genealogy of methodo-
logical intersectionality, probably because of its non-academic mode of argumentation. I
am tempted to ‘discover theory in poetry’, to quote Covi’s words, and to suggest that the
poetry of the Black feminist aesthetic remains insufficiently recognized in the theorizing
of contemporary European uses of intersectionality. Even though at the turn of the mil-
lennium intersectionality became ‘a trendy’ concept, it might benefit from recognizing
its own roots/routes in the corpus of poetic texts by radical feminists of color. These
routes can be traced by following Audre Lorde’s fluid and trickster-like legacy. I propose
that intersectionality is not something that came after identity politics; on the contrary,
identity politics is inherent in intersectionality. The linearity in feminist epistemological
storytelling is a narrative (and as such political) structure to which we are often amenable
without even noticing. Addressing Lorde’s multifaceted epistemological position echoes
Hemmings’ challenge that we can disrupt the amenability of the narratives that make up
Western feminist stories ‘and tell stories differently’. However, as Audre Lorde proves,
it is poetry we must turn to, in order to see what blind spots need to be illuminated. As
Hemmings claims, in feminist storytelling it is not only feminist theory that is disputed,
but also its proper subject (2011: 5). Lorde’s exceptionality makes her a proper subject
of all our stories.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this
article.
14 European Journal of Women’s Studies 00(0) 

Notes
1. It is perhaps not an overgeneralization to claim that while US-based work, from Kimberlé
Crenshaw onwards, has in many ways based its arguments on Black feminism while the
European debate has relied more on Marxist and constructionist frameworks. Another feature of
the European debate has been a claim of wider recognition of Black feminist thought as grounds
of later academic intersectionality (see e.g. Brah and Phoenix, 2004: Hornscheidt, 2009).
2. Butler (1993: 229). For more on this labeling see Hemmings (2011: 31–57). My timeline
here recalls the narrative form Hemmings refers to as ‘Progress narrative’. In her interest in
the grammars of feminists’ narratives, Hemmings considers the overall structure in feminist
storytelling: working backward, the 1990s are seen as a decade of poststructuralist advances
in feminism, the 1980s were concerned with analyzing identity-political differences, and the
1970s are seen as an era of naïve universal sisterhood.
3. Here I am referring to a widely used metaphor in Caribbean literary scholarship: addressing
routes rather than roots, in order to problematize the idea of originality and turn to movements,
processes, and mixtures. The metaphor itself, however, originates from James Clifford’s book
Routes (1997).
4. See e.g. Hill Collins (1998: 201–228), Davis (2014), Ferree (2012), Yuval-Davis (2006), and
Lykke (2010, 2014).
5. Although Sister Outsider was published in 1984, this essay is based on a paper Lorde deliv-
ered at the Copeland Colloquium at Amherst College in April 1980.
6. Haraway applies King’s idea of poems as sites of literary production to bodies, asking whether
‘biological bodies [are] “produced” or “generated” in the same strong sense as poems’, and
understanding bodies as ‘material-semiotic actors’ (1988: 595). Interestingly enough, the
‘poems’ referred to are those of Audre Lorde.

References
Ahmed S (2004) The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge.
Ahmed S (2010) The Promise of Happiness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Ahmed S (2012) On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Alcoff L (1988) Cultural feminism versus post-structuralism: The identity crisis in feminist theory.
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 13(3): 405–436.
Bilge S (2013) Intersectionality undone: Saving intersectionality from feminist intersectionality
studies. Du Bois Review 10(2): 405–424.
Brah A and Phoenix A (2004) Ain’t I a woman? Revisiting intersectionality. Journal of
International Women’s Studies 5(3): 75–86.
Butler J (1993) Bodies That Matter. New York: Routledge.
Carr B (1993) ‘A woman speaks… I am woman and not white’: Politics of voice, tactical essen-
tialism, and cultural intervention in Audre Lorde’s activist poetics and practice. College
Literature 20(2): 133–153.
Chancy MJA (1997) Searching for Safe Spaces: Afro-Caribbean Women Writers in Exile.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
Clifford J (1997) Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Combahee River Collective (1982 [1977]) A Black feminist statement. In: Hull GT, Scott PB and
Smith B (eds) All the Women are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave.
Black Women’s Studies. New York: The Feminist Press at the State University of New York,
pp. 13–22.
Ilmonen 15

Covi G (1997) Decolonialized feminist subject. In: Covi G (ed.) Critical Studies on the Feminist
Subject. Trento: Dipartimento di Scienze Filologische e Storiche, pp. 19–56.
Crenshaw K (1989) Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique
of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory, and antiracist politics. University of Chicago
Legal Forum 140: 139–167.
Davis K (2008) Intersectionality as buzzword: A sociology of science perspective on what makes
a feminist theory successful. Feminist Theory 9(1): 67–85.
Davis K (2014) Intersectionality as critical methodology. In: Lykke N (ed.) Writing Academic
Texts Differently: Intersectional Feminist Methodologies and Playful Art of Writing. New
York: Routledge, pp. 17–29.
Ferree MM (2012) The discursive politics of feminist intersectionality. In: Lutz H, Herrera Vivar
MT and Supik L (eds) Framing Intersectionality: Debates on a Multi-Faceted Concept in
Gender Studies. Farnham: Ashgate, pp. 55–65.
Fowlkes DL (2001) A writing spider tries again: From separatist to coalitional identity politics. In:
Ryan B (ed.) Identity Politics in the Women’s Movement. New York: New York University
Press, pp. 277–290.
Fuss D (1989) Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference. New York: Routledge.
Garber L (2001) Identity Poetics: Race, Class, and the Lesbian-Feminist Roots of Queer Theory.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Grosz E (1993) Bodies and knowledges: Feminism and the crisis of reason. In: Alcoff L and Potter
E (eds) Feminist Epistemologies. New York: Routledge, pp. 187–217.
Haraway D (1988) Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of
partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14(3): 575–599.
Hemmings C (2011) Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist Theory. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Hill Collins P (1998) Fighting Words: Black Women and the Search for Justice. Minneapolis:
Minnesota University Press.
Hornscheidt A (2009) Intersectional challenges to gender studies – Gender studies as a challenge
to intersectionality. In: Åsberg C (ed.) Gender Delight: Science, Knowledge, Culture and
Writing … for Nina Lykke. Linköping: Lingköping University Press, pp. 33–46.
Keating A (1998) (De)Centering the margins? Identity politics and tactical (re)naming. In: Stanley
SK (ed.) Other Sisterhoods: Literary Theory and U.S. Women of Color. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, pp. 23–43.
Livholts M (2012) Introduction: Contemporary untimely post/academic writings – transform-
ing the shape of knowledge in feminist studies. In: Livholts M (ed.) Emergent Writing
Methodologies in Feminist Studies. New York: Routledge, pp. 1–24.
Lorde A (1982) Zami. A New Spelling of My Name. Freedom, CA: The Crossing Press.
Lorde A (1995 [1978]) The Black Unicorn: Poems. New York: W.W. Norton.
Lorde A (2007 [1984]) Sister Outsider. Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press.
Lykke N (2010) Feminist Studies: A Guide to Intersectional Theory, Methodology and Writing.
New York: Routledge.
Lykke N (2014) Passionate disidentifications as an intersectional writing strategy. In: Lykke N
(ed.) Writing Academic Texts Differently: Intersectional Feminist Methodologies and Playful
Art of Writing. New York: Routledge, pp. 30–46.
May VM (2015) Pursuing Intersectionality, Unsettling Dominant Imaginaries. New York:
Routledge.
Nash JC (2008) Re-thinking intersectionality. Feminist Review 89: 1–15.
Phelan S (2001) Rethinking identity politics. In: Ryan B (ed.) Identity Politics in the Women’s
Movement. New York: New York University Press, pp. 307–314.
16 European Journal of Women’s Studies 00(0) 

Phoenix A and Pattyama P (2006) Intersectionality. European Journal of Women’s Studies 13(3):
187–192.
Prins B (2006) Narrative accounts of origins: A blind spot in the intersectional approach. European
Journal of Women’s Studies 13(3): 277–290.
Richardson L (1990) Writing Strategies: Reaching Diverse Audiences. Thousand Oaks, CA:
SAGE.
Richardson L (1997) Fields of Play: Constructing an Academic Life. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press.
Richardson L (2000) Writing: A method of inquiry. In: Denzin NK and Lincoln YS (eds) Handbook
of Qualitative Research. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, pp. 923–949.
Ryan B (2001) Introduction. Identity politics: the past, the present, and the future. In: Ryan B
(ed.) Identity Politics in the Women’s Movement. New York: New York University Press,
pp. 1–16.
Sandoval C (2000) Methodology of the Oppressed. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Smith B (1991 [1989]) The truth that never hurts: Black lesbians in fiction in the 1980s. In:
Mohanty CT, Russo A and Torres L (eds) Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 101–129.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Zalta E. Available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/ (accessed
26 May 2016).
Stevenson A (2000) Defending the freedom of the poet/music under the skin. In: Mark A and
Rees-Jones D (eds) Contemporary Women’s Poetry: Reading/Writing/Practice. Basingstoke:
Macmillan, pp. 1–11.
Yuval-Davis N (2006) Intersectionality and feminist politics. European Journal of Women’s
Studies 13(3): 193–209.