Mothering Herself: Manifesto of the Erotic Mother in Audre Lorde’sZami: A New Spelling of My Name

Abstract

In the wake of the mid-twentieth century Women’s Liberation Movement, US women’s literature often responds to the subject of motherhood by stressing how oppressive patriarchal institutions leave mothers powerless and undervalued. Mothers in this literature are often unhappy, disenfranchised, and even pathetic figures. Audre Lorde’s 1982 biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name resists this figure by positing motherhood as an erotically powerful subject position rather than a position of servility. Eschewing simplistic binaries of good or bad mothering, Lorde refuses to treat mothers primarily as resources for others, as women who constantly give of themselves. Rather, Lorde’s Erotic Mother (a figure or essence rather than a strictly literal person) is a resource to herself, able to draw on her own creative “lifeforce” (Lorde, “Uses” 55) for sustenance and joy in an oppressive world. Celebrating the erotic is a particularly radical intervention for a black author given the historical demonization of black women and black sexuality as inherently over-eroticized and salacious. 1 Resisting a culture that often reduces black women to sexless maternal tropes such as the mammy, Lorde’s Erotic Mother embraces sex and nurturance in equal measure.

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