“Metabolize Hate or Die of It”: Lorde, Labor, and Affect Theory

Abstract: While the accepted cannon of affect theory does not adequately address issues of colonization, enslavement, and race, an affect theory traced through a genealogy of women and queer of color scholars and theorists centers the body and lived experience in its analysis of affects. Utilizing this critical affect theory, this paper begins with a rereading of Audre Lorde’s “Eye to Eye” and her experiences working at Keystone Electronics narrated in Zami . Lorde’s theory of metabolization is put in conversation with Judith Butler’s theory of performativity to analyze “the affects of labor”—the stress, trauma, and emotions—experienced through the work one does and how these affects of labor produce and reproduce workers emotionally, socially, and physically. This ethnographic and autoethnographic work centers the experiences of queer and trans LGBTQ+ trades workers and specifically in this paper the case of Jae, a mixed-Black, trans, trades worker to interrogate the ways work works on laborers, how it forms and transforms them, and the complex ways that workers negotiate and resist the affects of labor. This paper looks specifically at the oppressive affects of labor and offers the affects of labor as an analytic to think through how work within a capitalist system continuously produces and reproduces workers, their families, and communities to benefit and uphold capitalist demands.