The Erotic as a Site of Survival

As a senior in high school, I wrote an English paper that filled me with pride. It was a moment of finding my voice, free of artifice and self-consciousness. The piece was inspired by a classmate who had come forward to say she’d been raped by three older players on the football team. I had heard about it through friends – half gossip, half warning. I wrote the narrative from her perspective but the knowledge was from my bones. I recognized a part of myself for the first time on those pages. Maybe it’s no coincidence that I had recently read Audre Lorde’s paper on the erotic (Lorde, 1978) – to her, the erotic is the space of “our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling. In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed that can provide energy for change.” Finding language to describe the shadow of this sexual violence as it was cast across my classmate’s body led me back to my own body’s complicated, violent and tragically normal relationship to heteropatriarchy. The process was both grief-ridden and revealing. In Lorde’s sense, the experience of writing that paper was itself deeply erotic; an awakening, an enlivenment of my own capacity to find language to describe an unrecognized feeling.

My teacher gave me an F. He said the assignment was to write about something that had actually happened to someone, and since I couldn’t be sure she had been raped, I’d not completed the assignment correctly. This teacher’s reaction was gendered, but his violence wasn’t uniquely about gender. This was not what a good white girl was supposed to write. He was quick to remind me of white womanhood’s loyalty to patriarchy; that my social currency at 17, to be desirable to white men, depended upon prioritizing his reality and erasing my own.

We are living in a time of rampant and desperate erasure. Lorde sees the erotic as a space where the self can survive these attempts of erasure. The aliveness withi