ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how lesbian poets have negotiated the difficult gap between silence and speech in their attempts to construct within the symbolic, a language adequate to lesbian experience. It explores how poems by Olga Broumas, Muriel Rukeyser, Hilda Doolittle, Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde work to re-present lesbian libidinal difference, sexual identity and cultural identity in their own terms. Lesbian writing needs to contest some sites of gender-neutral language for they conceal buttresses to masculist authority and power. Lorde's poetry constitutes a radical challenge to the gender assymetries characteristic of the white western patriarchy, which would limit female participation in the culturally constructed forms of militarised power, its defences and hostilities. The link between the mother and the daughter has great importance in Lorde's work overall, yet as we shall see, it is not exclusive. Lorde positions herself as a Black lesbian warrior, an identity constructed in strong resistance to the conventional structures of a white hetero-patriarchy.
