The Goddess in the Machine: The Radiophonics of Audre Lorde’s <i>Zami: A New Spelling of My Name</i>

Through close listening to recordings in the Pacifica Radio Archives of Audre Lorde’s public radio broadcasts on wbai 99.5fm, this essay reevaluates Lorde’s characterization of media technologies as among the master’s tools and examines how she puts the radio to use in her activism and literature. In her construction of the biomythography Zami, for example, Lorde interfaces with the form, logic, and material bases of radio broadcasting in a series of interrelated techniques defined here as the text’s radiophonics. Although Lorde’s feminism presupposes a fundamental difference between “the organism” and “the machine,” there are several instances across her thinking when such distinctions do not hold. Synthesizing Lorde’s cultural feminism with Donna Haraway’s subversive cyborg protocols, the essay likewise aims to synthesize (but by no means resolve) the differences between the organism and the machine—an endeavor of interest to feminists seeking to imagine new myths for our media-technological tools.