I’m feeling very grateful this week after graduating from the University of Bristol with first-class honours in English (BA). I am so lucky to have completed my degree alongside such wonderful friends and tutors, and to have spent the past three years fully immersing myself in a subject I love.
Writing my dissertation, ‘To the journeywoman pieces of myself’: Fragments, Queer Becoming and Diasporic Homemaking in Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name’, was my favourite part of my degree.
I explored how Lorde’s dissenting and complex literary practice reflects the creative process of queer self-formation. Merging queer and phenomenological theory with intersectional feminist politics and Lorde’s own essays, I considered queer becoming to be a self-affirming and politically resistant journey; the queer body is externally defined, judged, and shaped by political contexts, and to write from the lived experiences of a ‘Black lesbian mother warrior poet’ refutes such histories of effacement.
My conclusion is pictured below, in which I write of Lorde’s literary practice as political testimony, which offers real-world implications for the reader to enact their own journeys of queer self-formation.
I loved creating this project and writing about the incredible Audre Lorde, and I cannot wait to continue to be involved in projects on queer subjectivities and intersectional feminist politics.
