Sister Outsiders of the Lesbian Bar: Spatial Hauntings in Audre Lorde's <i>Zami: A New Spelling of My Name</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In weaving queer temporality and Black feminist theory together, this article examines the role of the lesbian bar in Audre Lorde's 1982 biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. This article examines the various ways Audre Lorde as both main character and author experiences and negotiates the spaces and dynamics of the 1950s working-class lesbian bar in Greenwich Village, New York City. I analyse how Lorde conceives of the lesbian bar as the only place available for lesbians in 1950s New York City, but also how Lorde experiences feeling out of place and unbelonging in this supposed ‘only’ place for lesbians at the time. I examine both the fleeting moments of acceptance within the lesbian bar and the affective, lonely and displaced experiences of the bar, particularly for Black lesbians or, as Lorde names them, the ‘sister outsiders’. Engaging ideas of hauntology and queer temporality, this article contemplates how Lorde works within, bends and alters the common, hegemonic understandings of the lesbian bar as the only place for acceptance and community. Furthermore, in drawing on the Black feminist theory of Katherine McKittrick and Marquis Bey, this article concludes with an analysis of how Lorde and other sister outsiders re-negotiate and redetermine place, belonging, gender, sexuality and Blackness within the sometimes necessary yet oftentimes confining space of the lesbian bar.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".