"The very house of difference": Zami, Audre Lorde's lesbian-centered text

Locating the feminist subject at the intersection of shifting social groups, or "homes," allows me to explore the connections between concepts of home and identity in Audre Lorde's "biomythography," Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. While Lorde's writing attends to the complex intersections of race, gender, and sexuality, as the prologue to the text makes apparent, it also testifies to the "naturalness" of lesbianism as the ground of writing, thinking, and acting. In Lorde's text, the lesbian body figures neither as an essential or fixed identity nor as the site for a unified conception of community or home, but rather, as a paradigm for a new kind of writing--one which inhabits the very house of difference.