Friendship as Method: A Psychobiography of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker

This paper centers friendship as a meaning-making tool in exploring the entwined subjectivities of two prominent feminist writers, Audre Lorde and Pat Parker. Primarily relying on their letters to each other written between 1974 and 1989 and the poems written for/about the other, the paper attempts to situate friendship as a feminist practice helpful in (re)defining one’s self-concept against societal strictures. Utilizing the psychobiographical method and drawing on Black feminist theories of affection and feminist psychoanalytical theories of women’s friendships, the paper establishes the importance of friendships as sites of self-disclosure, affirmation, validation and recognition, especially for people from marginalized social identities who have been denied visibility and voice. The paper concludes that the letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker are the private spaces where the two reflect on their sense of being, their identity, draw comfort from their connection, and develop survival mechanism by resisting gendered racial discrimination. These friendship letters not only serve as spaces of identity formation but also as spaces of healing.