Literary theories are means through which a text can be broadened and understood in a new way. In queer theory, texts are seen through a lens that reveals the underlying queer aspects of it. Audre Lorde’s “Beams” is a poem that already subtly delivers its meaning but when read from a queer theory point of view, it is even clearer to see the internal struggle faced by the speaker. A decision of maternity versus sexuality is discussed through vivid descriptions of places, people and memories and the poem demonstrates a common struggle for many humans, not only in its time but also in present day. As the poem opens, detailed descriptions of nature are given, and the audience is told, “I started to tell you/ what Eudora never told me/ how quickly
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While she is happy to have children, she knows her heart is in “Salina Cruz” with the belly dancer, and in West Virginia where one of the “Dark women clad in flat and functional leather/… /lays her lips like spring across my chest.” In fact, she admires these very same women and they remind her of “the last Dahomean Amazons” who she says are in a picture “hanging on my office wall.” As can be read in the footnotes, Audre Lorde herself has spoken on these women who “were highly prized, well-trained, and ferocious women warriors.” In another piece by Audre Lorde entitled Sister Outsider, she talks of these women who some take part in a marriage known as “giving the goat to the buck,” where essentially two women are in a relationship but one “may or may not bear children” and while some of these relationships are to “provide heirs for women of means who wish to remain ‘free’” some are purely romantic, lesbian relationships. Through mentioning this in “Beams” and describing it in Sister Outsider, it can be inferred not only that the speaker feels sadness and nostalgia about her past and regret about her final decision between maternity and sexuality, but that also through the Dahomey Amazon women she sees a compromise. The lifestyle of the Dahomey women who marry other women but still bear children are the concept that breaks the binary between maternity and sexuality
While she is happy to have children, she knows her heart is in “Salina Cruz” with the belly dancer, and in West Virginia where one of the “Dark women clad in flat and functional leather/… /lays her lips like spring across my chest.” In fact, she admires these very same women and they remind her of “the last Dahomean Amazons” who she says are in a picture “hanging on my office wall.” As can be read in the footnotes, Audre Lorde herself has spoken on these women who “were highly prized, well-trained, and ferocious women warriors.” In another piece by Audre Lorde entitled Sister Outsider, she talks of these women who some take part in a marriage known as “giving the goat to the buck,” where essentially two women are in a relationship but one “may or may not bear children” and while some of these relationships are to “provide heirs for women of means who wish to remain ‘free’” some are purely romantic, lesbian relationships. Through mentioning this in “Beams” and describing it in Sister Outsider, it can be inferred not only that the speaker feels sadness and nostalgia about her past and regret about her final decision between maternity and sexuality, but that also through the Dahomey Amazon women she sees a compromise. The lifestyle of the Dahomey women who marry other women but still bear children are the concept that breaks the binary between maternity and sexuality