Erotic Testimonies

<p><b>Asks how Black women tap into their feelings to develop ways to live freely.</b></p><p><i>Erotic Testimonies</i> draws inspiration from Audre Lorde's "Uses of the Erotic" to explore how Black women access their interiority and use their feelings to engage in processes of self-actualization and make themselves free. Blending genres and resisting the confines of conventional scholarly analysis, Julia S. Jordan-Zachery undertakes what she characterizes as a performative embodied reading of testimonies by four "wild" women from her own life. Jordan-Zachery takes care not to define what constitutes a wild woman-that's been done enough to oppressive ends-but rather tends to these women's forms and means of self-articulation. Complex accounts of wildness, freedom, femininity, the erotic, and the divine emerge from her field notes. <i>Erotic Testimonies</i> attests to the experience of the individual as well as, and even more importantly, how the individual speaks to a broader collective that here includes Lorde, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Janet Jackson, the author, her grandmother, and many more.</p>