DescriptionThis project examines the struggles many feminists encounter with traditional forms of academic writing and attempts to understand the work of Audre Lorde as offering a potential alternative mode of writing. The difficulties experienced include disciplinary conventions and expectations and the violent nature of argument as it is currently taught. Freedom of voice and the significance and role of audience also figure into this discussion. By focusing my close reading of Lorde’s work on “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” and “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” I examine her use of the erotic as a mode of writing which allows us to connect to ourselves and to one another. These connections enable us to eliminate difference, hatred and discrimination within the text, thus further enabling any feminist thesis or project within it. Finally, by way of offering some sort of a conclusion, I propose the following three tools as crucial to enacting an erotic mode of writing: multiple subjectivity, embodied knowledge and a rhizomatic understanding of knowledge production. While each feminist subject must inhabit hir writing in hir own way, by honoring each difference in the process and writing through love, we allow feminist work to not only articulate but also embody the fight to end all oppressions.