The erotic is dangerous, rape controls it

When reading Audre Lorde's "The Uses of the Erotic" essay, I was particularly struck by her assertion that women empowered by the erotic are "dangerous." I think this point resonated with me because there are so many ways to apply to this statement when considering sexual violence as a means of social control.

Female erotic power, Lorde says, is typically relegated to the sexual, or appropriated by the pornographic. I read this to mean that the erotic must be imprinted with heteropatriarchial meaning to be considered "safe." That is, connecting with an inner power is dangerous, but a woman "connecting" with a man through sex is acceptable

Admittedly, I get my guard up when I read anything that has to do with the "essence" of a gender. Naturally, I felt my hostile gender studies senses tingling when I read Lorde's line that the erotic is "an assertion of the lifeforce of women." But upon reading this line a couple more times (and realizing that duh, she's Audre Lorde and she knows what she's doing), I came to read the words "female" and "woman" in this text in the existentialist, Simone de Beauvoir-ian kind of way — that is, what makes me a woman is that I am not a man by virtue of my social standing (we all remember the phrase "one is not born but becomes a woman," right?).

So, I think it's fair to apply Lorde's assertion to people occupying varying faces of oppression. Take men of colour for example, who are often emasculated, or non-binary folks, who are often neither sexualized in mainstream discourses but also rendered "dangerous" in the same way Lorde describes. Angelique Nixon amplifies this point in a blog post, where she states that Lorde's assertion is "perhaps calling for all of us (all genders and sexes) to embrace our inner feminine and love female energy." Again, by "female energy," I think Nixon means "non-male," or against the masculinity bolstered by white heteropatriarchy.

This strongly parallels with Audra Simpson's point that indigenous women challenge the white heteropatriarchy of the Canadian government. Embracing a lifeworld contrary to the dominant norm challenges that dominate norm, and, in effect, serves to threaten its sovereignty (or as Foucault would put it, its ability to "make live and let die"). After all, how can the dominant norm make us die (socially, or physically) when we are "creating life" within ourselves?

From here, I can see the dangerousness of erotic power's connection to sexual violence, as this amplifies the point that rape is a form of social control. Connecting with and expressing our intentions is a powerful, radical act and inherently threaten the systems that dominate us. Sexual violence is one way to appropriate the erotic against those who seek it.

The erotic truly is a force to be reckoned with, and I'm excited to have learned about it in the context of sexual violence.

(P.S. If you're interested, you can listen to Lorde read The Uses of the Erotic on YouTube. She was a great speaker, and I find it lends a powerful energy to this reading.)