Surfacing Audre Lorde in Rachel Luft’s "Embodied Politics: A Movement Genealogy of Transformative Organizing" (2025)

“The future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference.”

— Audre Lorde, 1980

Acknowledging Lorde

There is a kind of silence that is louder than speech. It is the silence that transcends a well intended and empowering text, when a name that should anchor the discourse is nowhere to be found. When the very roots of a movement are described in meticulous detail while one of its creators herself is written out of the genealogy. Rachel Luft’s Embodied Politics: A Movement Genealogy of Transformative Organizing (2025) is an ambitious and, in many respects, valuable contribution to the scholarship of contemporary social movements. Her Foucauldian genealogical method traces three registers: the political economy of the non-profit industrial complex, the cultural turn of late-stage capitalism, and the innovations of new social movements, detailing the three to explain how and why transformative organizing emerged in the twenty-first century through a misapplication of historical materialism. Nonetheless, it is careful, well-documented, and deeply researched.

It is also, in one devastating respect, a work of historical revisionism.

In Luft’s paper, Audre Lorde, Black, lesbian, feminist, poet, mother, warrior, who between 1977 and 1988 articulated essentially the entire theoretical framework that Luft documents as emerging in the 2000s, is not cited. Not once. Not her call for “new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference” (1980). Not her theorization of self-care as “an act of political warfare” (1988). Not her insistence that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (1979). Not her revolutionary account of the erotic as an embodied epistemology of liberation (1978). Not her transformation of silence into language and action (1977). The name of the woman who wrote the theoretical foundation for transformative organizing a full generation before it was institutionally named does not appear in Luft’s genealogical registers nor in the application of historical materialism.

It is this erasure that reveals something structural about how knowledge is produced, credited, and circulated in academia, and about how historical materialist methodology, when applied uncritically, can function as an instrument of epistemic violence against the very intellectual traditions it purports to study.

The Three Genealogies: What Luft Builds

To understand what is missing, we must first understand what is present. Luft constructs her genealogy across three registers, each offering a partial explanation for transformative organizing’s emergence.

The first register is the political economy of the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. As movements were absorbed into bureaucratic structures tracking white institutional norms through a type of professionalization, community-based embedded relations (the cultural ties born of living in proximity, attending the same church, frequenting the same gathering places) were replaced by professional pipelines, commuter jobs, and credentialized relationships. What was lost was comprehensive organic mentorship, mutual aid networks, functional conflict and accountability mechanisms, and what Malkia Devich-Cyril calls “soul” and “spirit.” Transformative practice, in Luft’s telling, is “an effort to replace what was lost in non-profitization.” 

The second register is the cultural turn of late-stage capitalism, the rise of what Eva Illouz calls “emotional capitalism” and the therapeutic as a hegemonic cultural matrix. Under this regime, emotions become “entities to be evaluated, inspected, discussed, bargained, quantified, and commodified.” Trauma metastasizes from a clinical diagnosis of abnormal response to a “major signifier of our age.” The body, once feared by radical thought for its essentialist implications, is rehabilitated through neuroplasticity and reimagined as a mutable site of both domination and liberation. Together, these cultural shifts made it, in Luft’s framing, “normalized, likely, reasonable, encouraged” to center healing, embodiment, and emotional work in social movements.

The third register is new social movement innovations. The rich legacy of Black, feminist, and queer political lineages. Here Luft documents the crucial contributions of the Combahee River Collective, the Black Panther Party’s survival programs, ACT-UP’s integration of care and resistance, and feminist abolitionist projects of transformative justice. She traces the expansion of prefigurative politics from participatory democracy to encompass psyche, body, relationships, care, accountability, and grief, an expansion emerging from the intersection of Black, feminist, and queer thought and work.

The genealogical architecture is impressive, but it is built on an absence that undermines the entire edifice.

The Temporal Scandal: What Lorde Wrote Before the World Was Ready

Consider the chronology, not the one Luft constructs, but the one history actually delivered.

In 1977, Audre Lorde published, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” theorizing the movement from personal suffering through political speech to collective liberation, the simultaneous personal-political praxis that Luft documents as a twenty-first-century innovation. In 1978, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” articulated embodied knowledge, joy as revolutionary energy, and the integration of body wisdom into political life, decades before the “embodiment turn” and “politicized somatics” that Luft credits to practitioners of the 2000s. In 1979, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” provided the philosophical foundation for what would become the distinction between transformative and transactional organizing, not merely that oppressive methods are ineffective, but that they are ontologically incapable of producing liberation. In 1980, Lorde called explicitly for “new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference,” the precise language that would become the conceptual core of transformative organizing a quarter-century later. And in 1988, writing through the urgent knowledge of cancer, she declared, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” The theoretical seed of healing justice, planted in soil, that would not be named for another nineteen years.

This is not a matter of Lorde being “ahead of her time.” That framing still centers the timeline that erases her. Lorde was not early. The field was late. She was not anticipating future developments. She was creating the theoretical foundation upon which those developments would stand, whether or not they acknowledged the ground beneath their feet.

Luft’s narrative structure tells us: NPIC created need (1980s–1990s); therapeutic culture provided vocabulary (1990s–2000s); practitioners responded with new frameworks (2000s), but the actual chronology is unambiguous. Lorde articulated transformation, embodiment, new definitions of power, self-care as warfare, and the impossibility of using the master’s tools before the NPIC crisis, before therapeutic capitalism colonized mainstream culture, before the embodiment turn was recognized in academia. Her theory did not emerge from the conditions Luft cites. It preceded them.

The Method as Erasure: The Misapplication of Historical Materialism

The erasure of Lorde is not incidental to Luft’s method. It is produced by it.

Historical materialism in its classical form positions material conditions as the base that determines the superstructure of ideas, culture, and consciousness. Applied to social movements, this means: economic conditions and institutional structures generate the ideas and practices that respond to them. Ideas are effects. Material conditions are causes. The base produces the superstructure, not the reverse.

When Luft asks “Why now? Why and how did this particular movement formation emerge when and how it did?”, she has already committed to a framework that centers structural conditions as the primary explanation and her genealogical registers are ordered accordingly: first the political economy (NPIC), then the cultural shifts (therapeutic capitalism), then the movement responses. The logic is causal and directional, conditions created the need, culture provided the vocabulary, practitioners innovated responses. Everything is well intended to align with this misapplication of historical materialism.

But Audre Lorde was creating before the peak of the political economy that produced the NPIC, and this misapplication of historical materialism leaves out of the genealogical register autonomous Black feminist intellectual labor that through the constructed chronology appears to precede and exceed the material conditions it is supposed to reflect.

This is the crux of the misapplication of historical materialism, the methodological problem. If the framework requires material conditions to explain ideas, and Lorde’s ideas precede the conditions being cited, then the framework cannot account for Lorde. It cannot see her. So she disappears, not because the scholar chose to exclude her, but because the constructed chronology and misapplied method is structurally incapable of recognizing what she represents, visionary theory that arises and dares to imagine beyond current paradigms, operating through poetry, eros, and embodied knowledge from the lived and historical experience under centuries of colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism as a Black, lesbian, feminist, poet, mother, warrior.

Observe the specific mechanics of this erasure. Where Luft explains the “emotional turn” through an analysis of therapeutic capitalism, by a sociologist theorizing emotional commodification, when Lorde had already articulated an entirely different genealogy of politicized feeling, not therapeutic culture’s hegemony enabling movements to adopt emotional work, but Black queer feminist thought autonomously theorizing emotion as political knowledge in opposition to commodification. Lorde’s framework for the erotic is not derivative of therapeutic capitalism, it is its critique and its alternative, arising from material conditions far deeper than the ones Luft selects, from the lived experience of a Black lesbian body under colonialism and racial capitalism, not from the emotional vocabulary of the therapeutic turn. Luft’s narrowed base begins with the NPIC and late capitalism’s cultural products, and as such, a theoretical tradition rooted in older and more violent material conditions falls outside a genealogy frame that arises from a misapplication of historical materialism.

Where Luft traces the “body turn” to post-industrial capitalism’s discovery of neuroplasticity and the rehabilitation of the body from essentialist threat to mutable possibility, Lorde was theorizing embodied knowledge from a position where body wisdom was not an intellectual fashion, but an existential necessity as a Black lesbian body navigating violence, desire, illness, and survival. She did not need permission from neuroscience to theorize what her body knew. Her embodied knowledge arose from the material conditions of the daily navigations of a Black lesbian body through violence, desire, illness, and survival under racial capitalism, that are as material as any economic structure. But because Luft traces the “body turn” to post-industrial capitalism’s scientific and cultural products, embodied knowledge rooted in the longer material history of colonialism and slavery has no place in the genealogy.

The result is a genealogy in which a Black queer feminist theorist who co-created the intellectual foundation for transformative organizing is nowhere to be found. Lorde, who was both theorist and practitioner, whose poetry was theory, breaks this division and so she is often erased.

What the Erasure of Audre Lorde Accomplishes

Let us be precise about what is at stake, because the consequences of this misapplication of historical materialism extend far beyond citation politics and into the substance of what the genealogy claims to explain.

The misapplication of historical materialism is in selecting the wrong material conditions as the base. Luft’s genealogical registers begin with the NPIC (1980s–1990s) and the cultural turn of late capitalism (1990s–2000s) as the material foundations from which transformative organizing arose, but Lorde’s theoretical production did not arise from the non-profitization of movements or from therapeutic capitalism’s emotional vocabulary. It arose from the material conditions of colonialism, slavery, and capitalism as experienced through the intersectionality of a Black lesbian body navigating interlocking and interconnected systems of domination. These are material conditions. They are among the most consequential material conditions in history and they are entirely absent from Luft’s material base.

This is the first and most fundamental consequence. By narrowing the material base to the NPIC and late capitalism’s cultural products, the misapplication of historical materialism renders invisible the deeper, longer, more violent material history that actually produced the theoretical foundations of transformative organizing. Colonialism, the Middle Passage, enslavement, Reconstruction’s betrayal, Jim Crow, the ongoing project of racial capitalism, these are the material conditions under which Black feminist thought was forged. Lorde did not theorize self-care as warfare because therapeutic culture made healing vocabulary available. She theorized it because her body, marked by every axis of domination this society produces, required strategies of survival that were simultaneously acts of resistance. The material base is not the NPIC. The material base is centuries of racial capitalism and the forms of knowledge that Black queer women produced in order to survive it.

From this first consequence, the others follow with a grim logic. Because the misapplication of historical materialism selects a shallow base, it produces a deradicalized superstructure. When transformative organizing is explained as emerging from the NPIC crisis and therapeutic capitalism’s vocabulary, transformative organizing appears as adaptation; movements compensating for what professionalization destroyed, borrowing tools from the dominant culture’s emotional repertoire. However, when traced to its actual material base, Black queer feminist intellectual production under colonialism, slavery, and capitalism, transformative organizing appears as what it is: a revolutionary tradition of knowledge created by the most oppressed in opposition to the systems oppressing them. The difference is not semantic. An adaptation can be integrated into existing structures. A revolutionary tradition cannot. Not without being gutted. Lorde’s declaration that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” is not an organizational improvement strategy. It is an ontological claim about the relationship between means and ends, forged in the material experience of what the master’s house actually does to Black bodies. Erase the material base that produced this claim, and you erase the claim’s revolutionary character.

The misapplication also accomplishes a specific form of intellectual dispossession that historical materialism, if correctly applied, is supposed to expose. Marx’s method was designed to reveal how labor is extracted and its products attributed to structures rather than to the laborers who produced them. There is a political economy of knowledge production that operates by precisely this logic: Lorde performs the intellectual labor of theorizing transformation under conditions of extreme oppression; her concepts circulate through feminist networks, teaching, organizing circles, and the lived practice of Black queer women in movement spaces; the concepts are absorbed, anonymized, and eventually formalized by institutions; scholarship then attributes their “emergence” to the structural conditions of those institutions rather than to the intellectual laborer who created them. This is extraction. An accurate historical materialist analysis would trace this circuit and would name the laborer, identify the conditions of production, and reveal the mechanisms by which credit is redirected from the worker to the structure. Luft’s misapplication of historical materialism instead completes the circuit of dispossession by attributing to the NPIC and therapeutic capitalism what Lorde’s labor produced.

Finally, the misapplication of historical materialism undermines its own genealogical commitments. Luft invokes Foucault through Garland to trace how “contemporary practices and institutions emerged out of specific struggles, conflicts, alliances, and exercises of power.” Foucault’s genealogy, however, is not merely a structural explanation. It is, at its core, an investigation of subjugated knowledges, those forms of knowledge “disqualified as inadequate” or “insufficiently elaborated” by the hierarchies of formal knowledge production. This is among Foucault’s most insistent claims, that genealogy recovers what dominant frameworks bury. Lorde’s poetic, embodied, erotic theorizing, arising from the material experience of a Black lesbian navigating colonialism’s afterlives, is precisely the kind of subjugated knowledge a Foucauldian genealogy is designed to surface. Her theory was disqualified not because it lacked analytical power, but because it operated through poetry rather than monograph, through the erotic rather than the economic, through the body’s knowledge rather than the discipline’s categories. A genealogy that buries rather than surfaces this knowledge has not merely failed to apply Foucault. It has inverted him.

What Fidelity to Method Would Have Produced

The argument here is not against historical materialism or Foucauldian genealogy. It is that Luft’s deployment of both methods is unintentionally erroneous in their application. A rigorous application of either, let alone both in concert, would not have erased Audre Lorde. It would have surfaced her as central.

An authentic historical materialist analysis would have begun by identifying the correct material base. The question is not only “What structural conditions existed when transformative organizing was named?”, but “What material conditions produced the intellectual resources that transformative organizing draws upon?” The first question leads to the NPIC and therapeutic capitalism, the conditions of the 1990s and 2000s. The second question leads to colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism, the material conditions of centuries. Lorde’s theoretical production is not a mystery requiring structural explanation. It is the predictable intellectual consequence of a brilliant mind working from within the most comprehensive experience of material domination this society has produced. She theorized embodiment because her body was a site of domination. She theorized new definitions of power because she lived under powers’ most concentrated forms. She theorized transformation because survival under interlocking oppressions required nothing less. The material base is there. Luft simply looked at the wrong historical period.

An authentic historical materialist analysis would have also recognized that theory becomes a material force when it grips the masses, one of Marx’s own foundational insights. Lorde’s work did precisely this. Her concepts circulated through the Combahee River Collective’s networks, through the feminist anti-violence movement, through Black queer organizing, through the classrooms and workshops where a generation of practitioners came of political age. When Cara Page names healing justice in 2007, she explicitly invokes ancestors and lineages, and she tells us where the ideas came from. When practitioners speak of transformative organizing, they are operationalizing theoretical resources that had been gripping organizers for decades. A historical materialism attentive to how theory becomes material force would have traced this circuit of influence: from Lorde’s conditions of production (colonialism, slavery, capitalism experienced through a Black lesbian body) to her intellectual labor (the essays, speeches, and poems of 1977–1988) to the material force of that labor (the practices and frameworks that contemporary movements formalized in the 2000s). Therefore, this is not idealism. This is historical materialism applied with the rigor that transformative organizing requires.

An authentic Foucauldian genealogy would have done something equally clarifying. Foucault’s method attends to discontinuities, to ruptures in the expected order of things, to moments where what should not yet exist, already does. Lorde’s theoretical production between 1977 and 1988 is precisely such a discontinuity within Luft’s constructed chronology: ideas that, according to the structural narrative, should not have been articulable until the 2000s were articulated, fully formed, a generation earlier. A Foucauldian genealogist encountering this discontinuity would not smooth it into a structural timeline. She would investigate it. She would ask: what made this articulation possible when the structural conditions Luft identifies had not yet matured? And she would discover what the actual material conditions reveal: that the experience of interlocking oppressions under colonialism, slavery, and capitalism, not the NPIC, not therapeutic culture, produced a vantage point from which the necessity of transformation, embodiment, and new definitions of power was already visible, because it was already lived.

An authentic genealogy would have also honored Foucault’s commitment to surfacing subjugated knowledges rather than reproducing their subjugation. In his 1976 lectures, Foucault defined genealogy as the “union of erudite knowledge and local memories” that allows for a “historical knowledge of struggles.” Subjugated knowledges include both knowledges buried within formal scholarship and knowledges “disqualified as inadequate” by disciplinary hierarchies. Lorde’s poetic, embodied, erotic theorizing is the paradigmatic case, disqualified by norms that recognize sociology, but not poetry as legitimate social theory, dismissed as insufficiently rigorous despite its extraordinary analytical power, buried beneath the very genealogy that claims to trace the tradition she helped create. A method that buries what it is designed to surface has not simply erred. It has become the thing it was built to oppose.

An Authentic Genealogy

If we apply historical materialism and Foucauldian genealogy with fidelity to their own commitments, identifying the correct material base, tracing how theory becomes material force, attending to discontinuities and surfacing subjugated knowledges, a radically different genealogy emerges. One in which Black queer feminist intellectual production is not the third register, the legacy, the afterthought. It is the foundation.

The first register should be Black queer feminist intellectual production arising from the material conditions of colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism (1970s–1980s). This is the actual material base. The Combahee River Collective’s 1977 statement articulating interlocking oppressions, intersectional political analysis as supportive of liberation, and the insistence that means must align with ends, forged in the material experience of Black queer women navigating racism, sexism, heterosexism, and class exploitation simultaneously. Lorde’s body of work from 1977 to 1988 theorizing transformation, embodiment, new definitions of power, self-care as political praxis, and the impossibility of using oppressive methods for liberatory ends, was produced from within the most comprehensive experience of domination this society generates. The contributions of bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, June Jordan and Angela Davis, each working from material conditions that demanded integrated and intersectional analysis because oppression was experienced as integrated. This intellectual tradition was anticipatory not because it transcended material conditions, but because the material conditions of Black women’s lives under racial capitalism revealed truths about power, embodiment, and transformation that narrower experiences of oppression could not yet see.

The second register should be the institutional and cultural shifts that created urgency for operationalization (1980s–2000s). The growth of the non-profit industrial complex, the contradictions of late capitalism, the delocalization of organizing. These conditions did not produce the theoretical resources of transformative organizing, those already existed. They produced the urgency to formalize and institutionalize them. The NPIC destroyed organic community infrastructure, making it necessary to name and teach what had previously been practiced implicitly. Therapeutic culture proliferated emotional vocabulary, making Black queer feminist insights about politicized feeling more legible to broader audiences, but legibility is not origin. Context is not cause. The material conditions of the 1990s and 2000s explain why Black queer feminist theory was operationalized when it was. They do not explain the theory itself. That requires looking at the deeper material base.

The third register should be mainstreaming and operationalization (2000s–present), practitioners naming and formalizing existing theory for new contexts. Cara Page naming “healing justice” in 2007, drawing explicitly on lineages that include Lorde and the ancestors she invokes. Staci Haines developing “politicized somatics”, bringing feminist analysis to existing somatic work. Steve Williams articulating “transformative organizing”, synthesizing existing practices. These contributions are consequential and deserving of recognition, and they didn’t just materialize out of nowhere. They are the moment when theory, already a material force circulating through Black queer feminist networks for decades, achieved institutional form. The practitioners themselves say this. Cara Page opens healing justice with the declaration that “healing justice is not new.” A faithful genealogy takes such statements as evidence, not as rhetoric to be overridden by structural explanation.

This revised genealogy preserves historical materialism’s core insight, that ideas arise from material conditions, while correcting the misapplication. The material conditions that produced transformative organizing’s theoretical foundations are not the NPIC and therapeutic capitalism. They are colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism as experienced through the bodies and lives of Black queer women who refused to let domination have the last word. Lorde’s genius was not to transcend material conditions. It was to theorize from within the deepest material conditions this society has produced, and to extract from that experience a vision of power, embodiment, and transformation that would prove indispensable to movements a generation later.

The Name That Must Be Spoken

We return, finally, to the silence at the center of Luft’s genealogy, and to the voice that fills it.

Audre Lorde wrote the theoretical foundation for transformative organizing between 1977 and 1988. She wrote it as a Black lesbian feminist navigating the material conditions of multiple, interlocking oppressions, conditions stretching back through centuries of colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism. She wrote it through poetry because poetry was the form adequate to knowledge that the academy’s categories could not contain. She wrote it through the erotic because the erotic was the epistemology of full aliveness that commodification could not capture. She wrote it through the body because her body, marked by race, gender, sexuality, and ultimately cancer, was the site where all oppressions converged and where Liberation had to begin. She wrote it as vision arising from material reality, not floating above it, as creation forged in domination, not compensation for institutional failure, as a visionary of a world that did not yet exist, but that transformative organizing could make real.

When Cara Page names healing justice, she is extending Lorde. When practitioners develop somatic approaches to organizing, they are operationalizing Lorde. When movements insist that how we relate to one another must prefigure the world we are building, they are living Lorde. When anyone, anywhere, refuses the master’s tools and reaches for something more dangerous, more loving, more embodied, more honest, more whole, they are walking a path she cleared.

To write the history of transformative organizing without Audre Lorde is not simply to commit an error of omission. It is to perpetuate the very structures of erasure that transformative organizing exists to dismantle. It is to perform, in scholarly practice, the same epistemic violence that healing justice was developed to address.

The correction requires more than adding a name to a bibliography. It requires reconceiving the genealogy itself, identifying the correct material base in colonialism, slavery, and racial capitalism rather than in the NPIC alone; centering Black queer feminist intellectual production as the theoretical labor arising from that material base, tracing how that labor became the material force that shaped contemporary practice, and surfacing, as Foucault demanded, the subjugated knowledge that dominant frameworks bury. It requires recognizing that Lorde was the co-creator of the intellectual tradition that movements which now uplift transformative organizing, draw upon. She is not a figure in Genealogy Three. She is part of the soil and ground on which all three genealogies stand.

We speak her name not as academic courtesy, but as a political act, because to name the source is to protect the radical origin, to resist the domestication of revolutionary thought, to insist that Black queer feminist intellectual labor will not be disappeared into the passive voice of structural explanation. And every framework that builds on her foundation without naming her participates in the ongoing project of making Black women’s genius invisible.

The future of our Earth, Lorde wrote, may depend on new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference. She was right in 1980. She is right now. The methods Luft chose are capable of showing us this, if only we apply them to the correct material base, with the fidelity and courage intended. Let us, at least, begin there.