Erotic Pedagogies

Abstract

This article considers the role of Audre Lorde's notion of the erotic as transformative pedagogical practices that can empower teachers and students to passionate learning and community formation. I argue that the erotic has been contained within the private sphere under neoliberalism through its articulation to heterosexuality, Whiteness, and U.S. exceptionalism. Neoliberalism contains the transformative potential of queer, feminist, and antiracist movements through circumscribing the transformative power of the erotic. When the erotic appears within the realm of the public sphere, it is articulated through the pornographic—as against the seemingly progressive agenda of neoliberalism—in order to contain its transformative effects. I then consider what it may look like, as well as what pitfalls we may face, if we engage in erotic pedagogy. I argue that the healing of the mind/body split goes beyond an intellectual exercise. Therein lies transformative power to heal both the political and the spiritual body.

Keywords:

• Audre Lorde
• erotic
• erotic pedagogies
• mind/body split
• neoliberalism
• pedagogical practices
• queer
• feminist
• and antiracist movements
• U.S. exceptionalism

Notes

1. Jean Luc Nancy (1991) distinguishes singularity from the individual as that which “lurks behind” the individual: “What is a body, a face, a voice, a death, a writing—not indivisible, but singular?” (p. 6). It is linked to both the formation of radical community—imagined through the metaphor of the “clinamen,” or a radical inclination toward the other—and to “ecstasy” as that which “happens to the singular being” (p. 7). I evoke the singular here to gesture in both of these directions: community and ecstasy. So, while my autoethnographic text may not be generalizable in a social scientific sense, it may open different passageways that incline toward community and ecstasy as moments at the limits of identity and individuality.

2. American exceptionalism is the notion that the United States is the most salient example of democracy in the world—that our nation is truly exceptional as vanguard of the realization of democratic ideals. This ideology if mobilized through the appropriation of multicultural and feminist discourses of inclusion to constitute the nation through its tolerance for difference. For instance, M. J. Alexander (2005) warns of the dangers of rescue narratives, which pose the West as progressive savior of the brown woman, in order to erase its own violent practices: “Indeed, there is the performance of a customary ideological feat that positions democracy as a set of practices devoid of the violences of capital's imperialisms, thereby underscoring a politic in which neoliberal streams of feminism succeed in melding their interests with those of the neoliberal state. This move reveals why the state can deflect radical (feminist) opposition to it by universalizing feminist political agendas that dovetail neatly with its own expansionist practices. Imperial rescue narratives are neutral neither in intent nor in design” (p. 185). Following this logic, Puar (2007) demonstrates the ways in which homonationalism gets folded into the domain of markets and the optimization of life, producing normative and sexually exceptional patriots. This process concomitantly produces a sexually and racially perverse terrorist body against properly queer subjects. “This book marks the powerful emergence of the disciplinary queer (liberal, homonormative, diasporic) subject into the bountiful market and the interstices of state benevolence—that is, into the statistical fold that produces appropriate digits and facts toward the population's optimization of life and the ascendancy of Whiteness: full-fledged regulatory queer subjects and the regularization of deviancy. Further, this sexually exceptional subject is produced against queerness, as a process intertwined with racialization, that calls into nominalization abject populations peripheral to the project of living, expendable as human waste, and shunted to the space of death” (p. xxviii).

3. The ideas contained in this article were aroused within the space of a multiracial and queer-identified group of allies from the field of communication studies, who have been meeting at our regional and national conferences over the past three years to imagine various spaces of resistance and transformation within the classroom. Bryant Alexander, Gust Yep, Karen Lovaas, John Elia, Wenshu Lee, Dreama Moon, Michelle Holling, and my dear Sheena Malhotra are just a few of the beloved allies whose thoughts and passions inspire this piece. I also draw upon my embodied and literary encounters with feminist work being done in the field of women's studies and feminist organizing, by such visionary women as Mab Segrest, Gloria Akasha Hull, Gloria Anzaldúa, Cherríe Moraga, Lisa Albrecht, Becky Thompson, Lourdes Torres, Jacqui Alexander, Audre Lorde, and others. These women are “doing their work” by navigating the boundaries between spirituality and politics, healing and social justice, and holding themselves and others accountable. Finally, I draw on the spiritual work I do with Valerie Eagle Heart and the community of Women and Men who gather at Rainbow's End for ritual and laughter. This is to say not only that I am grateful to these all of these people, but to also to emphasize that no act of writing is solitary, nor is our pedagogy. So when I speak of the erotic as an energy that drives a transformative pedagogy, I mean to evoke pedagogy of life that spills over into our writing and teaching, our love (of) life, and the filling of the cup of our souls that need not be drained by our solitude. It is also to say that “uses of the erotic” enable us to build alliances across multiple lines of difference—to see the connections of our struggles through vehicles of the erotic such as openness, humility, vulnerability, and a passion for justice that makes us diligent to know how our histories intersect.

4. As with the military, prison, and domestic violence industrial complexes (see Davis, 2003; INCITE!, n.d.), the academy is an ideological state apparatus, an integral site to neoliberalism in which corporate citizens, consumers, and the ruling elite are produced as subjects (see Spivak, 1995). It is also, however, a site in which resistive subjectivities may form, and marginalized groups can secure some degree of sociopolitical power.