Summary
In this essay, Lorde identifies eroticism as an internal force that stems from deep unexpressed feelings. It holds a great deal of power and, when recognized, can spur individuals to pursue political change. However, people who are already in positions of power recognize the capacity of the erotic and are frightened of it. Since they are afraid of their own eroticism, men in the western world demand that women put theirs on display in specific sexual situations, essentially asking to use the feelings of women while ignoring their own potentially overwhelming ones. At the same time, men denigrate women's erotic expression as unserious, therefore discouraging them from making use of their erotic power. Moreover, while many people mischaracterize eroticism and conflate it with the pornographic, pornography and eroticism are actually opposites. While eroticism comes from deep internal feelings relating to the sensory, pornography is about "sensation without feeling."
Because the erotic offers people a feeling of completeness and wholeness, Lorde writes, it helps them connect to their work in a way that is otherwise impossible in a profit-oriented world. However, recognizing that women have more power if they are able to enjoy their work, patriarchy intentionally restricts eroticism to sexual situations and alienates women, in particular, from their labor. Eroticism, though, isn't naturally just about sex. The word "erotic" comes from the Greek god of love Eros, who is associated with creativity. Thus, eroticism is both an expression of and a contributor to women's creative power. The impulse to restrict and compartmentalize it into the realm of sex is the same compartmentalizing impulse that makes people falsely view eroticism and spirituality as opposing forces, since they mistakenly think that spirituality is about alienating oneself from sensory life rather than deeply engaging with it. Furthermore, this impulse to split and divide causes people to think that the spiritual and the political are at odds. In fact, the two can be unified and made more powerful through the presence of the erotic, which can help people acknowledge, nurture, and express their inner spiritual knowledge.
Finally, Lorde shares a few examples of how the erotic serves her in her own life. First, she describes how when she is able to access her own erotic feelings and recognize them in others, she is able to share joy and understanding with them. This makes differences between people feel less threatening and allows her to have deeper relationships. Secondly, allowing her own erotic nature free rein has let her experience the true joy to be found in sensory life. Once this happens, Lorde says, people realize how good life can feel and expect all of their experiences to match up to that of erotic wholeness. This makes people, especially women, demand more from the world around them. This is why eroticism is powerful and dangerous: it makes women refuse to settle for less, and allows them to act according to their own deepest natures rather than any externally exposed structure like marriage or religion.
Analysis
By the time readers get to this point in Sister, Outsider, it's probably apparent that Lorde is deeply invested in questions of wholeness and unity. In nearly every essay, her argument can be understood through this lens. Generally, Lorde's critique of European and American culture, and of patriarchal or white society, is that it establishes and enforces arbitrary divisions, often with the intention of alienating oppressed individuals from themselves and from one another. For instance, in "Poetry is Not a Luxury," Lorde argues that the "White Fathers" who have encouraged divisions between feelings and ideas are doing so in order to make women seem childish and unintelligent. After diagnosing this problem, Lorde often prescribes a solution in the form of a "bridge"—a concept or practice that helps unify what has previously been split. In Poetry is Not a Luxury, for instance, the prescribed bridge is poetry, since it allows writers and readers to unify their emotional and intellectual impulses. Here, in "Notes on the Erotic," Lorde takes a similar approach. Here, her argument is that people in western society (and women especially) have been taught that there are false binaries between their own sensory experiences, which are unimportant and even inappropriate, and their spiritual and political lives, which must meet certain externally imposed expectations. This binary keeps the spiritual and political from becoming truly potent, since they're cut off from the most natural source of power: natural strong feelings. The erotic, if allowed to thrive, can be a bridge between sensory life and outer actions, just as poetry can be a bridge between emotion and ideas. Therefore, in order to make sustained political change, women have to divest themselves of the notion that eroticism is purely sexual or otherwise irrelevant to "serious" matters.
Some readers, then, might wonder if Lorde is being a bit repetitive in her arguments. Indeed, her theory has been criticized for portraying femininity as an essentialized, "natural" state, associating it with mysterious concepts like the erotic and thereby making women seem like strange or exotic creatures. At the same time, careful readers—even those who agree with this critique—can see how Lorde herself addresses it within her writing. Eroticism, feeling, and nature, she indicates, aren't mysterious or exotic at all. Rather, they're normal parts of life that have been purposely made to seem inaccessible and strange. Moreover, while it can feel as if Lorde is making similar points in some of her essays, this makes perfect sense given her thematic interest in wholeness. Lorde essentially believes that American women face one great problem—the enforcing of arbitrary divides that prevent them from feeling complete—and therefore need to address them with one overarching solution. Racism, sexism, and homophobia, in this framework, are all expressions of the same overriding issue and can all be addressed as such. As a result, it's only reasonable for Lorde to come to similar conclusions about the host of social ills she describes.
