Doing the Work: Audre Lorde’s Warrior-Academics

This chapter provides an instructive example of work’s emptying out after the defeats of the 1970s: Audre Lorde’s invention of ‘the work’. This version of labour, centred around the activities of the academic, is here framed as a confiscation of work from workers, amid an increasing suspicion of the latter among liberals. Through such confiscation, I show how the resistant and revolutionary potentials of labour and political struggle are conflated with common forms of self-reflection and self-fashioning. After outlining the changing dynamics of race and class in the period, and the university’s place within it, I describe the content and function of work for Lorde: to claim practices of self-fashioning as political in the manner of earlier workers’ struggles, primarily through recourse to the category of ‘consciousness’. I then specify the nature of this self-fashioning: the academic career, finally connecting Lorde’s particular university work with the wider tendency among academics to assume the mantle of the subject of history.