Thurs. 3/24
On Tuesday, we discussed the connections between Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name and the other feminist texts we’ve read over the past two weeks. Today, we’ll be wrapping up our discussion of Lorde’s text by revisiting some of the ideas we went over in class on Tuesday. We noted that Lorde referred to her book as a “biomythography” and we discussed that as a common genre we’ve confronted throughout our course so far. We also talked a bit about how Lorde introduces the book as a piece describing her relationship to the women who have made her her own person.
For your reading response today, in a document in your Google Drive folder, please describe some of the moments from the text, particularly the latter half of the book, when you see Lorde mythologizing the impact women have had on her life. (During our class discussion, I gave the examples of the way she discusses her mother early in the book – the way she walks down the street, the way the two of them cuddled in bed together, her mother as an air warden during WWII. What examples come to mind from later in the text?) How does she use mythology in her text? Where do we see the mythological elements coming into play? Is she direct or indirect in her use of “magic,” as we’ve seen in other queer stories this semester? And how does that impact the audience, and her story, differently? Please point to at least three specific examples from different moments in the text, analyzing them in your response.
