Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name By Audre Lorde

570 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: Essays about transgender people

Audre Lorde, a Caribbean- American writer has faced many struggles through her life, especially growing up in the 1950s as an African American lesbian. She takes the reader through the obstacles of her life and shares her feelings of isolation and longing in her biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Kate Bornstein, an American author and playwright shares her personal experience of undergoing a sex change. She also discusses the gender system and problems she encountered being a transexual woman.
Throughout Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, The author Audre Lorde exposes the difficulties of growing up in a society that was racist and not accepting to her lifestyle. Lorde’s various relationships throughout her life have definitely played a role in shaping the individual she has become. Her mother was very sheltering trying to hide the racism going on around her. For example, her mother told her white people have a nasty habit of spitting into the wind meanwhile they are spitting directly onto Audre becuase of her color. With growing older comes Audre’s realization of how s...

Show More
Related

  • Racism In Karen Hesse's Witness, A Classic Book

    743 Words  | 2 Pages

    As racism continues on to thrive in the town, Esther Hirsh, becomes a young girl who also faces discrimination only because she was a Jewish. In the same school as Esther, was a young African-American girl named Leonora who faces bully about almost every day, and everywhere, just because of her race. Her family is very well in poverty, and her mother is badly sick. She died later that month. In one quote,”Why can’t white folks leave me alone?”(P7), explains how excruciating racism was.

    Read More

  • Zora Neale Hurston's Dust Tracks On A Road

    726 Words  | 2 Pages

    Zora Neale Hurston grew up in Eatonville, Florida also known as “Negro Town” (Hurston, 1960, p.1). Not because of the town was full of blacks, but because the town charter, mayor, and council. Her home town was not the first Negro community, but the first to be incorporated. Around Zora becoming she experienced many hangings and riots. Not only did Zora experience t...

    Read More

  • Gender-Bending in She's Come Undone

    2029 Words  | 5 Pages

    "Gender-bending" also refers to sex change operations. Such as the case with performance artist Kate Bornstein - a graduate of Brown University - who underwent such an operation thirteen years ago. In an article on the school's website, Ms. Bornstein discusses "gender-bending" and some of the issues she discusses can also apply to "gender-bending" in novels.

    Read More

  • Social Discrimination In Danielle Evans's 'Snakes'

    1672 Words  | 4 Pages

    Danielle Evans’ second story “Snakes” from the collection of short stories, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self depict a biracial girl who has been pressured due to her grandmother’s urge to dominate her. The story pictures her suffering with remarkable plot twist in the end of the story. Evans utilize a profound approach on how to bring readers to closely examine racism implicitly, to make readers recognize the actions may lead to social discrimination and its consequences that are often encountered in our daily life.

    Read More

  • Julie Carter: Julie Blackwomon's Work

    89 Words  | 1 Pages

    Julie Carter, was born in Salud, Virginia in 1943. After discovering her new identity as a lesbian in 1973, Julie Carter renamed herself as Julie Blackwomon. Her work ranges from fictional stories to poems in which “Revolutionary Blues” was the most notable. Julie Blackwomon is an African American author who themes her work after herself, the tension of being African American and lesbian. She depicts her life as being difficult and unacceptable by her own people. Her work characterizes the struggle and fear of “coming out of the closet.”

    Read More

  • Audre Lorde's Theory Of Sexuality In Zami

    1494 Words  | 3 Pages

    Zami, a biomythography written by Audre Lorde, examines Lorde’s sexuality, racial formation, and gender identity by discussing memories and experiences from her childhood and early adult life. In 2016, a drama film titled Moonlight was released. This film, written and directed by Barry Jenkins, touches on many of the same issues and concepts introduced in Zami. Both pieces of work exemplify Lorde’s theory of the erotic, which is presented in an article titled “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” The main character of Moonlight is a young, homosexual, African American male named Chiron. Similarly, Audre Lorde’s book tells the story of how she discovered herself to be a lesbian black woman. Many of the experiences Lorde and Chiron go through are similar because they share a common sexuality and race; however, due to their differing genders and the intersecting nature of all these identities, some aspects of their lives differ greatly.

    Read More

  • Caucasia written by Danzy Senna

    1322 Words  | 3 Pages

    Although society advocates believing in a ‘sameness’ between people who are black or white, individuals are still organized by race, class, gender and sexuality into social hierarchies. These hierarchies essentially formulate stigmas that suppress certain races and discriminate against them. Caucasia written by Danzy Senna is focused around a young mixed girl, Birdie, who encounters obstacles in her life that help her form her own perceptions about issues regarding class, race, and sexuality. These obstacles fundamentally shape her to have a unique outlook on society where she begins to question white privilege and also sympathize towards the mistreatment of black individuals. Senna explores the fundamental problems that are associated with race, and the struggles that a diasporic individual faces due to the restrictions set by society. Although Birdie is a mix of both black and white, she is overlooked as a “white” girl, which has its fair share of benefits as well as hardships.

    Read More

  • Expectations in the Movie The Hours

    3009 Words  | 7 Pages

    *"Virginia Woolf." Gay & Lesbian Biography. St. James Press, 1997. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, Mich.: The Gale Group. 2004. http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/BioRCć

    Read More

  • "Dead Beat" Dads?

    1095 Words  | 3 Pages

    This review by Desire Chilwane is for the book “Recognizing Transsexuals: Personal, Political and Medicolegal Embodiment” by Zowie Davy. This book outlines the history of transsexualism in the medical world and medical terms, such as GID (Gender Identity Disorder). This book also includes studies and interviews performed on both male-to-female transsexuals and female-to-male. This is rare and extremely helpful towards my research, because most research on tr...

    Read More

  • How Sexuality and Faith Are Essential to a Person's Life

    1817 Words  | 4 Pages

    Seidman, Steven, Nancy Fischer , and Chet Meeks. "Transsexual, transgender, and queer." New Sexuality Studies. North Carolina: Routledge, 2011. . Print.

    Read More

  • The Fourth Of July By Audre Lorde Analysis

    1066 Words  | 3 Pages

    Therefore, it shows that Lorde has to stand up for herself in order to go to the dining car. The essay reflects on when Lorde and her family visit a store, they were told to leave the store which made them feel excluded from the crowd. The author writes, “My mother and father believed that they could best protect their children from the realities of race in America and the fact of the American racism by never giving them name, much less discussing their nature. We were told we must never trust white people, but why was never explained, nor the nature of their ill will” (Lorde, 240). The quote explains that Lorde’s parents thought they can protect their child in United States from the racism, however, they had to go through it and face racism in their daily life. This shows that her parents were aware of racism, which they might have to stand up for their rights, but they did not take the stand for themselves as well as their child. Therefore, her parents guided them to stay away from white people. This tells readers that Lorde has to fight for the independence that she deserves along with going against her

    Read More

  • Analysis Of The Black Body By Ta-Nehisi Coates

    1040 Words  | 3 Pages

    In this book, Ta-Nehisi Coates details in a letter to his fifteen-year-old son the meaning of possessing a black body in America. In the form of an autobiography, Coates shares views of disappointment and anger over how the black

    Read More

  • Identity In Walt Whitman's In Song Of Myself

    1281 Words  | 3 Pages

    Throughout history LGBT literature has been growing and changing for the better. What was once something shadowed in ambiguity and covered up by society’s perception is now something that is overwhelming prevalent even celebrated. This literature can take a variety of forms such beautiful flowing poetry, as in the case of potential closeted writer Walt Whitman, outspoken activist Audre Lorde, or intense author Allen Ginsberg. It can be packaged tell all in a biography as it is for youtuber Tyler Oakley, AIDS activist Paul Monette, or songwriter Laura Jane Grace. It can be a novel related to their own identity as it is for authors Julie Ann Peters and David Levithan. Or it can in a variety of other literary mediums or reasons as it is for authors

    Read More

  • Borderlands La Frontera By Gloria Anzaldúa

    1358 Words  | 3 Pages

    The discovery of self-identity is a reoccuring theme in a multitude of Chicano and Race and Ethnicity literature. Gloria Anzaldúa’s compilation of essays and poetry, Borderlands La Frontera, best exemplifies this example as the author gives her story to finding herself in as a lesbian chicana in a predominantly white and straight society. Anzaldúa drags the reader through this by not limiting the problems she faces, but problems that everyone could face. She addresses the importance of overcoming conflicts with not only oneself, but society as well. Though these messages she portrays in her writing are not just hers, other popular authors such as August Wilson and Thomas King epitomize them in their writings as well. August Wilson’s African

    Read More

  • Summary: Why Labels Should Label Matter

    1045 Words  | 3 Pages

    Why should an author’s gender matter? What difference could a chromosomal assignment make on their words? In today’s culture gender equality has become far more complex than the days of the authors we will be focusing on; in their day there were only two genders. Male and female. While science still maintains there are only two biological genders popular society has designated at least 15 gender variations. (Adams, 2017) So again I ask; What difference could gender have on an author’s words? The answer to this question does not lie with biology, but instead with experience. The experience of being a particular gender, in the case of these authors female, is what matters. The attitude towards and liberties possessed by a gender in society can shape a person's thought process. These attitudes, liberties, and current affairs playing heavily on what sentiments an author chooses to express. Emily Dickinson, Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins-Gilman, and Edna St. Vincent Millay all by biological

    Read More

More about Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name By Audre Lorde

Open Document