Sexual Freedom as Empowerment

Abstract

Women face disturbing realities of repression in Western society, which are built, mainly, through the establishment of stereotypes. One of the main ways such repression takes place is through the limiting of women’s sexuality expression. In the Caribbean author Grace Nichols’s The Fat Black Woman’s Poems (1986), the fat black woman provides us with new images to deal with her sexuality and to understand it as more than the mere sexual through Audre Lorde’s concept of the erotic. In the poems, the fat black woman uses the erotic to empower herself and to question the system of patriarchy. By doing so points out the importance of sexual freedom for women to gain control of their own forms of representation and, ultimately, their own lives.