Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name as a Feminist Bildungsroman

Abstract

This paper explores the attempt of women writers to reconfigure and reformulate established fictional genres to create more responsive genres that better represent the heterogeneity of women’s experiences in accordance with the increasing confirmation within feminist literary and cultural studies on women’s literature and the rumination of its social function to provide a sympathetic as well as a critical analysis of contemporary feminist fiction. Focusing on the way Audre Lorde incorporates individual and collective memories as well as erotic and traumatic memories in her literary works, I use the literary category of feminist Bildungsroman to examine her biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name in which she presents an alternative model of female development in terms of forming a distinct identity and subjectivity. The paper traces the strenuous personal development and transformation of Audre as a black woman endeavouring to challenge marginalization and resist the various forms and layers of abuse and subjugation practiced against her in a racialized and sexist society. Taking into consideration that the political implications of women’s writing can only be theorized when it is related to the cultural and ideological processes that shape it, I employ Rita Felski’s analysis of women’s modern writing as an context where female political identities and collective consciousness are depicted.