"unruly, full of desire, unsettling": Erotic Forms of American Literature

This dissertation implements an erotic methodology drawn from Audre Lorde’s articulation of the erotic and which is best understood as a methodology of relation that disrupts the extractive forms of power in Western hegemony. The erotic, which Lorde defines as a source of power located within the feminine and the spiritual, is much less about sexuality than it is about relation to other individuals, to community, and to the world. It is a hermeneutic which we can deploy to address the nuanced relations of race, class, and gender, and other differences. The dialectic of the structural and the personal is important here, as the erotic is a way to make legible those connections that tie an individual to wider systems of power and relation, be it a collective community, a political regime, or matrices of oppressive power. The overarching goal of this project is to offer a new way of reading American Literature through the erotic form which enables us to critique and understand from multiple perspectives the intimate legacies which accumulate into the misnamed and misunderstood phenomena crafted in the pursuit of absolute power.