Audre Lorde, Labor Theorist: Rethinking Integrity within Late Capitalism

Abstract

Abstract: Audre Lorde’s work is most often read for her insights in the fields of gender, sexuality, and critical race theory, and while her work certainly merits close attention for its groundbreaking contributions to these fields, I will suggest here that her work can also be productively read as a significant contribution to literary labor theory. Reading Lorde as a labor theorist enables a holistic understanding of the complete nexus of race, gender, sexuality, and class as the materialist manifestation of the underlying capitalistic abstraction of the self of the worker. I will argue that for Lorde, ultimately, woman is one who works, and this underlies her overarching conceptualization of integrity, a radical notion of wholeness that is based in the fullness of women’s labor (often social justice labor). This materialist idea functions as a radical alternative to capitalist alienation, and specifically combats the privilege of white feminism, and other bourgeois power inequalities. Lorde’s conceptualization of the working woman of color is truly world-making. It is sensuous and holistic (in a way that the abstraction of capitalism is demonstratively not), and it is a specifically non-white, lesbian labor that effects this. Lorde’s “integrity” is a way of reuniting the subject and object (à la Marx’s “species being”) within the figure of the woman who works. What that looks like, in our political reality, is active social justice work, done—and lived—with integrity.