Uses of the Erotic: Audre Lorde on the Relationship Between Eros, Creativity, and Power

“There is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.”

To be a complete human being, to fully inhabit your own vitality, is to live undivided within your own nature. No part of us is more habitually exiled, caged, and crushed under the weight of millennia of cultural baggage than Eros — the part that includes sexuality but transcends it to also include our capacity for spontaneity and playfulness, our tolerance for uncertainty,...