HyperCultura (Apr 2022)
Women in Love: Zami and the Politics of the Black Lesbian Body in the Diaspora
Abstract
This essay focuses on the politics of the Black lesbian body in the Diaspora. Audre Lorde’s autobiographical/biomythographical novel Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), as a female künstlerromane, narrativizes her polyamorous relationships with several women and presents the body as a contact zone of conflicting forces from which negotiations of the Black lesbian body in the Diaspora emerge, discursively mapping out an emotional cartography of identity, home, and belonging. The palimpsestic female body in Zami resists monolithic interpretations—it is Black, physically challenged, it is queer. The intersectional nexus of race, class, gender, sexuality, and Diaspora informs notions of the queer body. Furthermore, by embodying otherness, the body works to negotiate alternative spaces. Lorde writes the body into Zami the text, and the act of writing becomes empowering, informing the concept of the queer diasporic body with an alternative agential potential, portraying the woman as a “house of difference.” This essay interrogates this complex intersectional milieu of the diasporic, Black, lesbian, disabled body vis-à-vis the cumulative forces of racial, sexual, and socio-political repressions in mid-twentieth-century North American society as represented in/through Zami, specifically concerning refashioning constructs of queer intimacy, belonging, and home.
