The 20th and 21st Century Cultures Series is pleased to welcome

Leland Jasperse

Teaching Fellow in English, University of Chicago

Audre Lorde’s Queer Anaesthetic

Wednesday, May 21, from 5–6:30pm

Rosenwald 432

This paper examines how numbness, incommunicability, and erotic depletion—what Audre Lorde refers to as “the anesthetic”—shape her account of cancer in The Cancer Journals. While Lorde’s earlier essay, “The Uses of the Erotic,” written before her breast cancer diagnosis, celebrates the erotic as a universal source of empowerment, The Cancer Journals rethinks this perspective, highlighting the unavoidable presence of the anaesthetic in experiences of illness, cancer especially. Instead of rejecting the anaesthetic as just another “suppression of the erotic” to be overcome, this paper argues that losing access to the erotic—or becoming a body without it—is what makes illness queer in The Cancer Journals, as well as what makes the text a “queer” exemplar of disability life writing. This analysis focuses on moments of silence, fragmentation, and negative space—what Lorde refers to as “language crazure”—that resist reintegrative frameworks of healing and the text’s own attempts to eroticize illness. Finally, this paper ekes out space for the anaesthetic within the field of crip theory, which has predominantly focused on eroticizing disability in the face of de-eroticizing stereotypes of disability. While important, this focus has neglected anaphrodisiac experiences of disease that are no less queer a mode of disabled embodiment than the ecstatic erotic body typically at the center of queer/crip theory.

Lee’s paper (to be read in advance) can be found here. The password will be distributed to our listserv. Click here to join.

Our meetings are open to the University of Chicago community and visitors who comply with University of Chicago vaccination requirements. We are committed to making our workshop fully accessible for people with disabilities. Please direct any questions or concerns to the series coordinators, Bradford Case (bkcase@uchicago.edu) and Tyler Lutz (tyler.lutz@uchicago.edu).