In and With The Erotic: A Visual Exploration
What’s abject about being everyone’s fetish? How does everyone know what to name me? Why is knowing more about myself inescapably tethered to knowing more about this antiblack world? What does the erotic offer that the pornographic hasn’t already illustrated? When will it ever end? — K Anderson
In Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde calls us to embrace and return to the erotic—an abandoned and undertheorized epistemological reservoir. Her essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power*” encourages us to critically evaluate internalizations of (cishetero)patriarchy and the antiblack world’s mission to subdue acts of sensuality. Knowing deeply that “the erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings,” I screamed, moaned, and gasped for a revelation to come from this “impenetrable” source of knowledge[i].
In three vignettes and images, I recount instances when I sought to activate the erotic like a nightlight, as fantasies rich with the nastiest combinations of transmisogynior and antiblackness arrived as noisy text and dating app notifications. While Lorde considers the many ways the erotic is harnessed outside of “the bedroom”, in this visual essay I reckon with its toggling presence and absence in three instances: sex with Dom/sub dynamics, filming sexual content, and receiving messages on dating and social media platforms. Folks of varied orientations and identifications with/out gender led with text bubbles expressing both their arousal and disdain as they pictured me already outside of (cis)womanhood and as failing transwomanhood, too.
Following Lorde’s analysis, the erotic and the pornographic, as its own startling dichotomy, indicate the material conditions of women set by racism and patriarchy. During these recounted instances, I sat between the absurdities of the pornographic and the impossibilities of the erotic—wishing the latter was sufficient enough, powerful enough to save me from kisses that rhythmically disgusted and satisfied me.
As I contend with antiblackness and transmisogynior in this exercising of the erotic, the vignettes and images featured consider what happened when sexual objectification and being understood as with(out) gender, sexuality, and humanity (i.e., the pornographic) felt exciting, worrisome, and honest.
I wanted the depths of my feelings (i.e., the erotic) to reveal a salve for the ringing satisfaction I felt in some of these unfortunately common encounters. Instead, the erotic confirmed the orgasmic and terrifying realities of (de)humanization not as a final and complete indictment of abjection and fetishization, but as a revelation of how the pornographic (i.e., being understood as a black subject/human/thing) plays out before, during, and after my sexual encounters.[ii]
Everything about how I am engaged sexually is indebted to this frightening dynamic.
From this, I understand that accounts of sex that solely posit joy, relief, and pleasure as liberatory from the gross conditions of this world—while failing to mine internalizations of (cis)heteropatriarchy and transmisogynior—are not doing the sensuous and political work of the erotic. Our sexual interiorities—the way one a/sexualizes another based on desirability politics, the way we feel about sex, and the way we recount sex—are coded by pervasive logics of antiblackness[iii]. Logics that cannot be undone with a “radical” laugh after a serviceable nut.
While Lorde names that the erotic is “-so feared, and so often relegated to the bedroom alone, when it is recognized at all” and details where else the source can be found, this visual essay sits with the urgency of examining the erotic in the bedroom or wherever sex is being had[iv]. I fear we have yet to name the ghastly depths of yearning for someone, for something else.
K Anderson is a writer, porn archivist, and kinkster. Raised in Atlanta and getting further from home each day. Broadly, she writes, studies, and teaches about black sexual economies and geographies, pornography, BDSM, and kink. And yes, she’s ready to play. This visual essay was inspired by: “When Will It Ever End” by The Awakening (1972), “Uses of the Erotic” by Audre Lorde (1978), “What did I say…” series by Zalika U. Ibaorimi (2020), FOREPLAY by Ajamu X in AJAMU: ARCHIVE (2021), and “Louphoria” by Smino & Cruza (2022).
[i] Lorde, Audre. "Uses of the Erotic." Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1978): 54.
[ii] Jackson, Zakiyyah Iman. "Losing manhood: Animality and plasticity in the (neo) slave narrative." Qui parle: critical humanities and social sciences 25, no. 1-2 (2016): 95-136.
[iii] Harrison, Da’Shaun. “Desirability: Do You Really Love Fat People When You Can’t Even See Us Beyond the Political?”https://dashaunharrison.com/desirability-do-you-really-love-fat-people-when-you-cant-even-see-us-beyond-the-political/ (2019).
[iv] Lorde, Audre. "Uses of the Erotic." Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1978): 57.