Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Audre Lorde'

Early in January 2013, whilst I was at home in the middle of the day writing this thesis, I was subjected to an armed burglary. The experience resonates with themes that preoccupy this re-reading of Audre Lorde, specifically with regards to: the timing, place and impact of ‘epistemic violence’ (Spivak, 1988:280) visited on Black feminisms; the theft of thinking; and the disregard for, and appropriation of, the temporal and spatial dimensions of historical and socio-economic contexts that constitute Black women’s lives. Armed with weapons of authenticity, historical amnesia, hierarchies of oppression, the ‘always already’ (Althusser, 1971) and categories of identity designed to suppress Black feminism, the violations of Black women are unannounced and uninvited. My starting point is that ‘[t]he shadow obscuring this complex Black women’s intellectual tradition is neither accidental nor benign’ (Hill Collins, 2000:3). This thesis picks up on the idea of the impossibility of hospitality (Derrida, 2000) and the ‘critic as host’ (Hillis Miller, 1979) to frame a critical analysis of the occupation and location of Black feminist praxis. This thesis negotiates ‘…a channel between the “high theoretical” and the “suspicious of all theories”’ (Boyce Davies, 1994:43). The challenge of ‘Re-Reading Audre Lorde: Declaring the Activism of Black Feminist Theory’ is to maintain a persistent, hypervigilant sensitivity towards the hostility of ‘epistemic violence’ (Spivak, 1988:280). I think it is possible to re-read Spivak’s (1988) question, ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ in terms of, ‘Can Black feminist theory speak?’ The question of what is read and utilised and what is not, particularly when the ‘what is not’ refers to Black feminist scholarship in general, and to the work of Lorde in particular, is fundamental to this thesis. This thesis produces new re-readings of Lorde’s work that go beyond a literary textual analysis. The Kristevan idea of intertextuality as intersubjectivity (Kristeva, 1969:37) is used to show that the space and place between the words in ‘Black feminism is not white feminism in blackface’ (Lorde, 1979a:60) function as the space and place between Black and white feminisms. The predicaments of positionality reiterated throughout this thesis mirror the predicaments within feminism. How can feminist theory present authoritative, metanarrative claims (and they need to be authoritative in the face of a racist, homophobic patriarchy that denies the legitimacy of Black women) whilst being implicated? The quandary is that of how to establish and communicate any sense of a comprehensible, coherent re-reading of Lorde when each re-reading destabilises and contests any notion of an ‘established.’ The quandary takes on particular significance in relation to Black feminist political writings and communication of political imperatives. In other words, is there a possibility of ‘the transformation of silence into language and action’ (Lorde, 1977a:40) in the condition of the impossibility of language? Re-reading Lorde is both to occupy the margin and to make use of the margin so that the impossible, the unavailable, and the fissures of re-reading Black feminist theoretical communications are the conditions of the activism of Black feminist theory. Three principles of Black feminist methodology that underpin the work of this thesis include: 1. Lorde’s Black feminist ‘uses of the erotic’ (Lorde, 1978a); 2. The dialogical and dialectical relationship between experience, practice and scholarship (Hill Collins, 2000:30); 3. That methodology is contingent upon, and constituted through, Black feminist activism. Throughout this thesis, I make a concerted effort to transfer the text of Black feminist critical theory from the page to the day-to-day struggles of Black feminist activism. For example, I demonstrate the relevance of Lorde in terms of constructing Black women-only reflective spaces and service provision, interventions to confront sexual violence against Black women and the ‘…psychological toll…’ (The Combahee River Collective, 1977:266) of ‘…learn[ing] to lie down with the different parts of ourselves…’ (Abod, 1987:158). This thesis is a work of re-membering; it is a deliberate transgression of fixed, theoretical and disciplinary borders, which reinvigorates the activism of theory.

In a comparative analysis of three texts in which the narrators question and revise the dominant cultural discourses of the countries in which they are born, this thesis investigates contemporary women's autobiographical negotiations with 'history' (a Foucauldian sense) and sexual, racial and national identities. Concentrating on the works of Maxine Hong Kingston, Jeanette Winterson and Audre Lorde, this dissertation is concerned with the difficulty of theorising women's autobiography as a radical imaginative space. Utilising the term the 'autobiographical novel', this work traces how the authors' deployment of fantasy, myth and desire in ways that are politically radical, destabilise conventional notions of the self and hegemonic historical narratives. As such, this thesis develops a new paradigm within which to explore autobiography. It utilises poststructuralist theory, whilst confronting the paradox of how one argues for the validity of identity within this framework. Rethinking the relationship between autobiography and the 'indifferent' subject position associated with poststructuralism, this thesis argues that the relationship between black Women critics and deconstructionism offers a path in which to subvert dominant paradigms of subjectivity, identity and expression. By challenging the conventional distinctions between the tenns 'writer', 'critic' and 'theorist', black writers create an autobiographical space which challenges categories of the 'writing I'. Experience and theory can, therefore, become conflated as the generic constraints of writing associated with the autobiographical self are subvel1ed. Kingston, Winterson and Lorde, it is argued, problematise cultural and representational hegemonies through their postmoden narratives. (Continues...).

Em um mundo cada vez mais transnacional e multicultural, a identidade cultural é formada por meio de um processo constante de mobilidade e deslocamentos, resultando na formação de identidades culturais diaspóricas. Tais identidades culturais híbridas e heterogêneas se caracterizam por travessias de fronteiras e limitações impostas à construção da subjetividade. O presente estudo consiste em uma análise interpretativa de representações de identidades culturais diaspóricas em dois escritos autobiográficos ficcionais: Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), de Gloria Anzaldúa e Zami A New Spelling of my Name, a biomythography (1982), de Audre Lorde. As representações de identidades culturais diaspóricas desenvolvidas em ambos os textos produzem efeitos que desestabilizam a política de representação da identidade cultural articulando identificações e desejos informados por hibridismo e diferença bem como reconstruindo a categoria da experiência e a produção do conhecimento através da ficcionalização da construção da identidade. O objetivo é investigar como as vozes narrativas projetam representações de identidades culturais diaspóricas simultaneamente resistentes e marginais em relação à cultura hegemônica. Tais representações são analisadas à luz do seguinte referencial teórico: a reconstrução da categoria da experiência de Joan Scott; a teoria dos conhecimentos situados de Donna Haraway; e uma estratégia crítica que propõe uma intersecção entre argumentos advindos do pensamento feminista e pós-moderno, que postulam a identidade como um constructo fluído, múltiplo, e instável, sustentada em The Politics of Postmodernism, de Linda Hutcheon; a coleção de ensaios editada por Linda Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism; e The Postmodern Condition, de Jean-François Lyotard. O referencial teórico oferece uma perspectiva privilegiada para a investigação de representações de identidades culturais que questionam a concepção de identidade como fixa autônoma e anterior ao contexto sócio-histórico no qual a identidade e sua representação são formadas.
In an increasingly transnational and multicultural world, cultural identities are shaped through a constant process of mobility and displacements, resulting in the formation of diasporic cultural identities. These hybrid heterogeneous cultural identities are characterized by multiple crossings of borders and limitations imposed on the construction of a sense of subjectivity. The present study consists of an interpretative analysis of representations of diasporic cultural identities in two fictional autobiographical writings: Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) and Audre Lorde’s Zami A New Spelling of my Name, a biomythography (1982). The representations of diasporic cultural identities developed in both texts produce disruptive effects on the politics of representation of cultural identity by articulating identifications and desires informed by hybridity and difference as well as reconstructing the category of experience and the production of knowledge through the fictionalization of the construction of identity. The objective is to investigate how the narrative voices project representations of diasporic cultural identities simultaneously resistant and “marginal” to the hegemonic culture. These representations are analyzed under the following theoretical framework: Joan Scott’s reconceptualization of the category of experience; Donna Haraway’s theory of situated knowledges; and a critical strategy that proposes an intersection of arguments derived from feminist and postmodern thinking, which posit identity as a fluid, multiple, and unstable construct, supported on Linda Hutcheon’s The Politics of Postmodernism; the collection of essays edited by Linda Nicholson, Feminism/Postmodernism; and Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition. The theoretical framework provides a privileged perspective to investigate representations of cultural identity that question the conception of identity as fixed, autonomous, and prior to the social-historical context in which identity and its representation are shaped.

This paper discusses the poetry of Audre Lorde and Natasha Trethewey, and the ways in which they bring to attention the often-silenced histories of African American females. Through close readings of Lorde’s poems “Call” and “Coal,” and Trethewey’s “Three Photographs,” these histories are brought to the present with the framework of the words “call” and “re-call.” The paper explores the ways in which Lorde creates a new mythology for understanding her identity as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet” in her innovative, intersectional feminist poetry. This is used as the framework for understanding modern poets like Trethewey, whose identity as a biracial black woman from the American South colors her lyric, more formal work. Lorde uses the vocal, oral tradition of calling as Trethewey relies on visual, gaze-focused recall. Recall is memory and re-call means bringing the hidden past into the future. The paper concludes by saying that all black female writers may participate in their own ways of calling out the truth and remembering what should be forgotten.

Silence, voice and power are the main themes in this essay. The purpose is to analyze how the silence is used as an instrument for control, and how it can be used strategically to take power, but also as a resistance against the power. The novel The Vegetarian by Han Kang and the autobiography novel on verse, brown girl dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson are the core of this essay. This essay focuses on how the characters break the silence, and how they use the silence strategically to find their voice in a society that systematically works to keep women, children and men silent.      The silence works in specific ways in all kinds of situations, to explore the complexity of the power dimensions a comparative analysis allows the themes to emerge and enlighten each other’s diversity. With help from Rebecca Solnit in Alla frågors moder, Audre Lorde in Your silence will not protect you and Michel Foucault’s Diskursens ordning, among other voices, the essay aims to search for how the silence can work as a strategy and what it means to speak. The essay shows how the oppressing silence is broken in brown girl dreaming, and how the voice becomes the power, but also how the silence was used in the African-American Civil Rights Movement as an act of resistance. The essays also analyze the female main character in The Vegetarian, who makes a journey from an oppressed woman where the patriarchal men violate her silence and forcing her to speak, to an existence where silence, life and growth thrives.     The silence has its own language and sometimes, it’s louder than words.

This thesis seeks to bridge feminist and environmental justice movements through the literature of black women writers. These writers create an archive that contribute towards the liberation of queer, black, and transgender peoples. In the novel Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler constructs a world that highlights the pervasive effects of climate change. As climate change expedites poverty, Americans begin to blame others, such as queer people, for the destruction of their country. Butler depicts the dangers of fundamentalism as a response to climate change, highlighting an imperative for a movement that does not romanticize the environment as heteronormative, but a space where queers can flourish. Just as queer and environmental justice movements are codependent on one another, feminist movements cannot be separate from black and transgender liberation. This thesis will demonstrate how writers, such as Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Angela Davis, and Janet Mock, help establish a feminism that resists the erasure of black and transgender people.

La présente thèse constitue le compte rendu de l'analyse menée auprès du détecteur ATLAS du LHC et concernant la recherche de processus de création résonante de nouvelles particules se désintégrant en une paire de quarks top. Elle s'articule principalement autour de la notion de jet de hadrons, dont l'identification et la reconstruction est un enjeu capital pour toute mesure essayant de signer l'apparition de quarks top lors de processus de collisions proton-proton. Après une mise en contexte portant sur une description générale des caractéristiques théoriques et expérimentales que présente la thématique de la détection de jets de hadrons dans le détecteur ATLAS, nous présentons une première tentative de validation de la méthode d'étalonnage hadronique local, dont le but est de corriger ces jets des imprécisions de mesure engendrées par le détecteur. Dans la deuxième partie du document figure l'analyse menée sur les 14~fb$^{-1}$ de données de collisions proton-proton à $sqrt{s} = 8$~TeV, récoltées lors de l'année 2012, à la recherche de l'apparition de processus de création résonante de nouvelle particules extit{lourdes} dans le spectre de masse invariante top-antitop. Pour des particules lourdes, les quarks tops produits lors de la désintégration de ces dernières possèdent une impulsion très grande par rapport à leur masse et la désintégration de tels quarks top conduit souvent à une topologie dans l'état final dite og boostée fg, où le quark top, s'il se désintègre de manière hadronique, est très souvent reconstruit comme un seul jet, de large paramètre de rayon. Le présent travail de thèse propose ainsi une étude préliminaire pour reconstruire et identifier le plus précisément possible ce type de signal, en se basant sur l'étude de la sous-structure des jets de hadrons.

La diffusion des ions et des radionucléides au sein des matériaux cimentaires est l'un des facteurs les plus importants qui déterminent la durabilité et les propriétés de confinement de ces matériaux. Cette étude s'inscrit, en particulier, dans le domaine de confinement des déchets radioactifs de faible et moyenne activité. Elle consiste à mettre en évidence l'influence de la microstructure des mortiers, notamment la présence des granulats, sur la diffusion de l'eau tritiée au sein de ces matériaux. La démarche consiste, dans un premier temps, à sélectionner des formulations de mortiers à base de CEM I afin d'étudier l'influence de la teneur en granulats, de la granulométrie et du rapport eau/ciment sur les paramètres de diffusion. Des différentes techniques expérimentales complémentaires ont été utilisées afin de caractériser la structure poreuse : porosimétrie à l'eau, porosimétrie mercure, perte au feu et imagerie MEB associée à l'analyse d'image. Dans ce contexte, un protocole d'analyse d'images a été mis en place afin de quantifier la porosité à l'interface granulat/pâte. Le lien entre les propriétés de la microstructure et les paramètres de transport a été ensuite examiné. Pour cela, des essais de diffusion à l'eau tritiée (HTO) ont été conduits et des corrélations entre les paramètres de la microstructure et le transport ont été réalisées. Enfin, afin de mettre en avant le rôle des phases mésoscopiques (Matrice/granulats/ITZ) dans le mécanisme de diffusion un modèle 3D a été développé et des calculs de diffusivités équivalentes ont été effectués. La présente étude confirme la présence d'une interface granulat/pâte au voisinage des grains de sable siliceux. Cette auréole de transition (ITZ) se caractérise par une épaisseur qui varie entre 10 et 20 µm et une porosité environ trois fois plus grande que celle de la matrice cimentaire. En dessous de 55% de sable normalisé, l'effet de cette interface sur les propriétés macroscopiques de transport est faible. En effet, l'effet de dilution et de tortuosité liés aux granulats reste dominant. Par conséquent, les données acquises à l'échelle de pâte de ciment restent valables et sont extrapolable à l'échelle des mortiers. Ces résultats ont été confirmés par les calculs analytiques et numériques de la diffusivité homogénéisée. Au-delà de 55% de sable normalisé, d'autres effets liés au grands nombre de grains de sable rentrent en jeu comme les bulles d'air et les taches poreuses dus principalement à la difficulté d'obtenir des matériaux bien compactés. Ceci rend ces formulations extrêmes et ne permettent pas d'approfondir notre compréhension du lien entre la microstructure et les propriétés de transport au-delà de cette teneur en sable

Este Trabalho de Projeto reflete sobre o processo de tradução, de inglês para português, de dois textos de Audre Lorde (1934-1992) inseridos no livro Sister Outsider, de 1984. Realizado no âmbito da componente não letiva do Mestrado em Tradução da NOVA FCSH, pretende questionar a linguagem binária, o racismo, o sexismo, o classismo e a dimensão da interseccionalidade e propor uma solução, a da inclusividade. A presente tradução foi feita de um ponto de vista feminista, com a intenção de dar visibilidade a autoras negras, no caso específico Audre Lorde, negra, lésbica, feminista, poeta, guerreira. Em termos de contextualização, são focados os estudos de tradução feminista, através da visão de teóricas que discutem esta matéria desde que começou a ser encarada como uma ferramenta de empoderamento por via da apropriação da linguagem.
This Project reflects on the translation process, from English into Portuguese, of two texts by Audre Lorde (1934-1992) included in her book Sister Outsider and published in 1984. Carried out within the scope of the non-teaching component of the Master in Translation at NOVA FCSH, it sets out to question binary language, racism, sexism, classism and the dimension of intersectionality and proposes a solution, that of inclusiveness. The present translation was made from a feminist point of view, with the intention of giving visibility to black authors, in this specific case Audre Lorde, black, lesbian, feminist, poet, warrior. In terms of contextualization, the focus isthat of feminist translation studies, through the vision of theorists who have discussed this matter since it began to be seen as tool for empowerment through language appropriation.

Thesis (M.S.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 2002.
Typescript. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 96-100).

"We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves": The Queer Survival of Black Feminism 1968-1996 addresses the questions of mothering and survival from a queer, diasporic literary perspective, arguing that the literary practices of Black feminists Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Alexis De Veaux and Barbara Smith enable a counternarrative to a neoliberal logic that criminalizes Black mothering and the survival of Black people outside and after their utility to capital. Treating Audre Lorde and June Jordan as primary theorists of mothering and survival, and Alexis De Veaux and Barbara Smith as key literary historical figures in the queer manifestation of Black feminist modes of literary production, this dissertation uses previously unavailable archival material, and queer of color critique and critical Black diasporic theoretical approaches to create an intergenerative reading practice. An intergenerative reading practice interrupts the social reproduction of meaning and value across time, and places untimely literary moments and products in poetic relationship to each other in order to reveal the possibility of another meaning of life. Ultimately this dissertation functions as a sample narrative towards the alternate meaning of life that the poetic breaks of Black feminist literary production in the queer spaces of counter-cultural markets, classrooms, autonomous publishing collectives make possible, concluding that mothering is indeed a reflexive and queer way of reading the present in the service of a substantively different future in which our outlawed love survives.

Dissertation

Studies of women’s experimental narrative in the twentieth century have often been fixed to political interests in the recovery of women’s artistic practices for inclusion in the canons of literary modernism and formal postmodernism. Concurrent trends in philosophy and critical theory, however, propose the interrogation of the limits of subjectivity itself, suggesting that the most provocative assertions about human experience eschew the very categorical delimitations, like gender, on which such recovery projects depend. This dissertation traces the literary investments of women, particularly queer women, whose experiments in life-writing reconfigure the boundaries of human subjects without relinquishing claims to the material or political conditions that shape their lives. “Rough Text” examines writing that queers or complicates autobiography by featuring self-referential protagonists whose lives illustrate the explosive consequences of both gender and genre manipulation. Writing themselves by unfastening themselves textually, temporally, and spatially, these authors do a liberating violence to their own coherence that shakes, and then rethinks, the grounds of their ontologies in ways that offer alternatives to the “psychological squalor” Fredric Jameson describes as the postmodern condition.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI)
For women in patriarchal societies, life is stitched with silence and violence. This is especially true for women of color. In a world that has cast women as invisible and voiceless, to create from the margins is to demand to be seen and heard. Thus, women’s art has never had the privilege of being art for art’s sake and instead is necessarily involved in the work of articulating and (re)writing female experience. When women seek, through their work and art, to feel deeply and connect with other women, they tap into what Audre Lorde has famously termed “the power of the erotic.” Lorde suggests that to acknowledge and trust those deepest feelings within our bodies is a subversive power that spurs social change. In the following work, novels by Kate Chopin, Gayl Jones, and Edwidge Danticat are linked by their female characters who seek the erotic via their art of choice and, in doing so, resist disempowerment and explore the life-giving nature of female connection. Furthermore, because the authors themselves are engaged in rendering the female experience visible, the novels discussed actively converse with their respective waves of feminism and propel social activism and feminist discourse. Hence, this project provides both a close reading of The Awakening, Corregidora, and The Dew Breaker, and a broader contention on the role of women’s literature in social justice.