ABSTRACT
The confessional demand, as Foucault put it, which is sometimes issued as a moral imperative, attempts to relieve an anxiety cultivated within a liberal, democratic context organized by labels. In simple terms, queer transformative epistemology highlights the genealogy of knowledge, reading the knower by exposing the context of observation as an important element in the initial source of knowledge. In less simple terms, queer transformative epistemology redeems knowledge from its inherited tether to stasis and loosens the grip of ontological essence. Audre Lorde talks about this as erotic knowledge, in which the body and sensuality are epistemes-sources of knowledge that cannot but yield truth, regardless of whether or not it is externally denied. And for Lorde, the necessity of liberation for black and queer women requires a return to such knowledge, and a commitment to redeem what the people have been taught "to suspect in themselves".
