Sexual Subject and Textual Braid: Autobiographical Politics of Emancipation in Audre Lorde’s <i>Zami</i>

A critical study of Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name reveals that Lorde employs the embodied narrative as an emancipatory space, weaving together geography, history, myth, and biography to construct a revolutionary self—one that directly challenges heterosexist domination and the rigid, unitary concepts of identity and authorship. This paper examines how Lorde’s naming of both the narrator as “Zami” and the text as a “biomythography” enacts a radical form of resistance, decentering the traditional autobiographical subject and instead positioning a Black lesbian consciousness at the core of the narrative. Through an intricate interplay of intertextual and intratextual storytelling, Lorde constructs an alternative autobiographical form that resists Western hegemonic discourses of the “I.” Drawing on Sidonie Smith’s concept of the “manifesto” and Françoise Lionnet’s métissage as strategies of autobiographical emancipation, we argue that in Zami, Audre Lorde not only reclaims Black lesbian subjectivity but also deconstructs conventional narrative structures, employing a braided textuality that subverts dominant Western autobiographical traditions.