Audre Lorde's "Contact Lenses": Feminism and Subjectivity

Introduction: De-personalizing Oppression

Audre Lorde's "Contact Lenses" is a poem that demonstrates a deep engagement with feminism through its analysis of the poet's own subjectivity. Through a close reading of the poem, included in Lorde's 1978 collection The Black Unicorn, this paper argues that it addresses concerns with gender and race by concentrating on their epistemological effects on the poet's own mind. Lorde frames her argument through a central metaphor that, to a certain degree, renders the concrete details of racism or sexism abstract — as though to forestall the charge that she writes purely from resentment. Instead, "Contact Lenses" demonstrates the way in which any form of social oppression can affect a person's most basic way of seeing the world.

In that sense, it offers a broadly applicable depiction not simply of victimization but of the subjective experience of being oppressed. The way in which it demonstrates Lorde's personal commitment to feminism, racial progress, and gay rights is precisely by de-personalizing the account, in order to focus on a description of subjectivity that can resonate across different marginalized identities.

Form and Structure of the Poem

"Contact Lenses" is a poem of twenty-one lines; the text consists of five relatively short and uncomplicated sentences, freely enjambed into a thin vers libre column. Lorde's sense of enjambment is formally quite conservative: each of the five sentences concludes in an end-stopped line, the punctuation is straightforward, and there is no avant-garde refusal to make sense. By so clearly delineating each sentence within a space of a few short lines — without ever ending one sentence and beginning another on a single line — the poem seems to demand that the reader confront each sentence in order. This paper therefore takes such an approach.

One historical observation is worth noting: contact lenses in 2011 may differ slightly from what Lorde would have been thinking of in 1978. The modern soft contact lens was only introduced commercially in the United States in 1971; the lenses Lorde describes were more likely the older rigid type, which has the hardness of actual glass. Even so, the poem's opening lines make it clear that Lorde is using the concept of contact lenses metaphorically.

The poem opens:

The Opening Sentence: Hunger and Deprivation

Lacking what they want to see / makes my eyes hungry and eyes can feel only pain. (Lorde, 1978: 94)

The poet describes here the effect on her own subjectivity of beholding a world that does not correspond to her internal desires. Lorde describes only the basics of deprivation: "lacking what they want to see / makes my eyes hungry" expresses an unsatisfied desire without defining what it is that the poet wants to see. We may assume, given Lorde's very public political commitments as an African-American lesbian feminist, that she wants to see a world offering justice and equality — but the poem's force derives from its refusal to offer a catalogue of specific complaints.

Lines 2 and 3 emphasize a distinction between "my eyes" and "eyes" in general, which signals the poem's concern with subjectivity. Ordinarily, "eyes can feel / only pain," suggesting that beholding the world can summon only unpleasant emotion — yet "hungry" is not ordinarily a form of "pain." This tension prepares the reader for the complication of the metaphor that follows.