Revisiting Audre Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic through Contemporary Film

Where would contemporary Black feminist explorations of pleasure be without Audre Lorde? Lorde’s 1978 essay on women’s pleasure, Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power, was groundbreaking in its call for women to reclaim the erotic as a source of feminine pleasure, knowledge, and power. For Lorde (2013), the erotic is “an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives” (p. 55). Lorde’s essay has become the focal point from which many Black feminist insights on the relationship between pleasure and power have evolved. There are good reasons for Black feminist author and journalist Joan Morgan’s (2015) reference to the understanding that it’s an “unwritten mandate” that all Black feminist work that explores the erotic must engage Lorde’s Uses of the Erotic. After more than 40 years, it remains necessary reading for anyone interested in understanding pleasure. As a testament to the continuing significance of Uses of the Erotic, I apply the ideas in Lorde’s pivotal treatise on the feminine power of the erotic to two contemporary films directed by Black women: Stella Meghie’s The Photograph (2020) and Radha Blank’s The Forty-Year-Old Version (2020). This commentary explores the ways that Black women filmmakers assert a creative power that is akin to Lorde’s definition of the erotic—both in their deeply engaging process of artistic creation and in the resulting films that center Black women characters’ empowering self-exploration.