Caleb Ward
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calebw.bsky.social
Caleb Ward
@calebw.bsky.social
3.6K followers 1.3K following 3.3K posts
Social and political philosophy, feminism, social change

The Unflinching Philosophy of Audre Lorde, forthcoming 2026

Postdoc at Uni Hamburg
Photo by Frank Ward, 1999
https://www.calebward.xyz/
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calebw.bsky.social
This is why I love the morning train commute to Hamburg across the fields. A bevy of what looks like five roe deer enjoying the thaw
January 14, 2026 at 9:33 AM
calebw.bsky.social
“But who’s gonna protect you from ICE if you defund the police?”
Thor face in need of a punch
January 12, 2026 at 4:58 PM
calebw.bsky.social
Loving this pic of my very much not so political dad making a “NO FASCISM” sign for a protest in my parents’ little town
Grizzled white dude in a beanie coloring a No Fascism sign with a “DUMP TRUMP” sign in the foreground
January 10, 2026 at 5:20 PM
calebw.bsky.social
By “sexual passion” above I actually mean “erotic desire and pleasure” in a Lordean sense… but most of my examples are horny quotes from activists about how cruising and screwing addresses their oppression, so forgive the imprecision
Bonk horny meme
January 7, 2026 at 11:03 AM
calebw.bsky.social
Love it. Also, who among us does not have some version of that picture in an old family photo book? Here's my own Ashkenazi granddad sometime in the 1920s
January 6, 2026 at 2:22 PM
calebw.bsky.social
For no reason whatsoever, posting these images of US troops enjoying the pleasures of imperialism in Panama, 1990
US soldiers smirk while talking to local women in Panama during the occupation A US tank bashes through a Lavandería in Panama City during Operation Just Cause, 1989
January 5, 2026 at 1:04 PM
calebw.bsky.social
Audre Lorde on the personal political power of each of us:

"Power that is not used is dangerous, because power is never quiescent, it’s never neutral. If I do not use my power, however relative it is, if I do not find out what it is and learn to use it, someone else is using it."
Screengrab of a video of Audre Lorde speaking at the I Am Your Sister conference in 1990.
January 4, 2026 at 5:33 PM
calebw.bsky.social
I call it the "Dr. Strangelove" formula👇

OUP alone has given us in 2025–26:
"How Gender and Sexuality Come in Degrees"
"How Patriarchy Shapes Our Reality"
2 different books with the subtitle "What It Is and Why It Matters"
"How to Think More and Better"
"How We Think, Feel, and Act Together"
poster for Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
January 3, 2026 at 3:59 PM
calebw.bsky.social
Happy Jewish Christmas Bahn mi to all who observe
Bahn mi platter
December 24, 2025 at 6:53 PM
calebw.bsky.social
for what we in the seats of imperialism are all ignoring, but cannot ignore, but somehow manage to pretend to ignore, as we go about our lives making everything as comfortable as possible.

"The sweetish smell of unseen rotting flesh"
Unseen, but you know it's there. Stop lying
Equal Opportunity by Audre Lorde The american deputy assistant secretary of defense for Equal Opportunity and safety is a home girl. Blindness slashes our tapestry to shreds. The moss-green military tailoring sets off her color beautifully she says “when I stand up to speak in uniform you can believe everyone takes notice!” Superimposed skull-like across her trim square shoulders dioxin-smear the stench of napalm upon growing cabbage the chug and thud of Corsairs in the foreground advance like a blush across her cheeks up the unpaved road outside Grenville, Grenada An M-I6 bayonet gleams slashing away the wooden latch of a one-room slat house in Soubise mopping up weapons search pockets of resistance Imelda young Black ina tattered headcloth standing to one side on her left foot takes notice one wrist behind her hip the other palm-up beneath her chin watching armed men in moss-green jumpsuits turn out her shack watching mashed-up nutmeg trees the trampled cocoa pods graceless broken stalks of almost ripe banana her sister has been missing now ten days
December 16, 2025 at 8:23 PM
calebw.bsky.social
I wonder where this piece ended up
Screen grab from auction of Twitter bird logo light from the Twitter HQ
December 11, 2025 at 9:39 AM
calebw.bsky.social
Yesterday was World AIDS Day, & today I’m talking about my paper “Hot for Revolution”, which is inspired by ACT UP. There’s also insights from Crip Camp & disability justice, adrienne maree brown, & of course Audre Lorde in there.

Read & join us! 🧄🌱

emotionandsociety.substack.com/p/tomorrow-1...
Announcement for my talk in the Works-in-Progress series of the Emotion & Society Lab. The talk is Dec. 2 at 11am Pacific (that’s 7pm UK time and 8pm in Central Europe). It’s a read-ahead event Cover of Deborah Gould’s Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight against AIDS
December 2, 2025 at 8:31 AM
calebw.bsky.social
This is funny, and I'll add that Alfred North Whitehead's Process and Reality proves horseshoe theory, but for continental and analytic philosophy
there are three distinct nexus of occasions to be considered : ( i ) The nexus of M's contemporaries, defined by the characteristic that M and any one of its co· L"mporaries happen in causal i ndependence of each other. (ii ) Durations including M; t any such duration is defined by the characteristic that any two of its members are contemporaries . (
November 25, 2025 at 10:00 PM
calebw.bsky.social
Not everyone has a lawyer, but even those who don't can be like Audre Lorde on this one (this from her FBI file)
-However, as it turned out, LORDE's mai objection to assisting the FBI was that she would not report on her friends. No further interview with LORDE is contemplated, as it is felt that she would give no information regarding HEIT or anyone else she knew.
November 25, 2025 at 7:33 PM
calebw.bsky.social
This made me laugh. HBD!
November 22, 2025 at 8:06 AM
calebw.bsky.social
I mean, rule of law blah blah blah, but this is obviously outrageous given how publicly obvious corruption has been over the past year. But also:
He attempted to get a retrial after claiming that his former lawyer David Kenner, best known for representing Suge Knight in his 2015 murder case, used artificial intelligence to come up with closing arguments. In early 2024, Kenner pleaded guilty to misdemeanor criminal contempt and was sentenced to one year of probation over his handling of discovery materials in Michel’s case.
November 21, 2025 at 8:08 AM
calebw.bsky.social
Just spent a couple hours talking about Audre Lorde's erotic with an awesome student-led research group at FU Berlin on love/friendship and political action.

We read some of her erotic poetry too, and listened to her read it. I had a little epiphany about the first four lines of this poem 🧄
On a night of the full moon I Out of my flesh that hungers and my mouth that knows comes the shape I am seeking for reason. The curve of your body fits my waiting hand your flesh warm as sunlight your lips quick as young birds between your thighs the sweet sharp taste of limes.
November 20, 2025 at 12:54 PM
calebw.bsky.social
Oh look, some good news for holding accountable transnational corporations. Nice when a week starts with humanity beating out profit.

From the weekly global newsletter by @shamjaff.bsky.social, which you should probably just subscribe to
The Americas A U.K. judge ruled that an Australian company is responsible for the 2015 Brazil dam collapse that killed 19 people What happened An Australian multinational mining company is in deep sh*t. BHP has been found liable by a U.K. judge for a 2015 dam collapse in Mariana, Minas Gerais in southeastern Brazil. The incident killed 19 people and spilled about 40 million cubic meters (1.4 billion cubic feet) of toxic mine residue onto downstream towns and waterways for 675 kilometers (419 miles). Why this matters: This dam collapse is considered to be Brazil's worst environmental disaster. A recent study found that there were still a lot of arsenic, manganese, cadmium and other metals in the wildlife there.
November 17, 2025 at 8:43 AM
calebw.bsky.social
Already got feedback on "Hot for Revolution", and the chapter is almost ready to go out as a preprint. I'm presenting it in the Emotion & Society Lab work-in-progress series in a couple weeks if you want to read it and talk about it with me 🤗

Info below and at emotionandsociety.substack.com
Emotion & Society Lab Work-in-Progress series poster, Fall and Spring 2025-26 "Join us for a casual virtual workshop of papers on emotions" WHEN: 1st Tuesdays: 2PM (ET) / 11AM (PT) / 7PM (UK) WHERE: Zoom (with in-person vibes) Register at emotionandsociety.com
November 14, 2025 at 8:00 AM
calebw.bsky.social
Here's some material on Lorde's theory of power (this material is consecutive and i've marked the order in alt-text)
1 Alexis Pauline Gumbs describes Audre Lorde as a “theorist of energy,” interested in questions of where each person’s energy, or power, comes from, how each person can mobilize and direct it, and how it can be amplified into larger movements for systemic change. From her earliest essays, Lorde articulates her work in terms of how people can learn to recognize the power they have and use it to fight for survival and change. This is the motivation driving her essay “Uses of the Erotic,” which begins with the assertion: “There are many kinds of power, used and unused, acknowledged or otherwise” (SO 53). She clarifies this in an interview almost a decade later, stating that, “I don’t only mean power in the abstract. Personal power is comprised of social power, political power, economic power, as well as spiritual and psychic power. …I need to recognize what powers I have” (CWAL 165–66). In these discussions and elsewhere, she explores how personal power is activated in labor and creativity in the widest sense—how we draw on our resources to mobilize our actions and abilities toward our aims, making possible all our projects. Whether directed by one’s own commitments or according to the strictures of a job or a narrow social role, some form of power is at work when people use their intellectual capacities or material resources, when they put their bodies in motion, when they raise their voices, when they assess and judge, when they care for others, when they use their skills—whether “painting a back fence [or] writing a poem” (“Uses of the Erotic,” SO 58). Power in this sense is what we mobilize when we come together for political actions, but it is also what employers purchase with wages and what populist leaders seek to channel toward their own advancement. 2 In relation to action, personal power on Lorde’s view is both potential (i.e., a capacity, fuel) and kinetic (i.e., the force of labor in motion). In her discussion of the erotic, she describes power as both the capacity to feel and the electrifying spark of feeling itself that arises from creative undertakings. Later, she describes personal power to an interviewer as “a continuum… not merely personal power that concentrates itself in, but personal power which moves us. Electrical power runs trains and lights houses. Personal power moves us through the world, whatever we decide that we need to use that power for” (CWAL 164–65, emphasis original). So, unlike a theory of power as pure potentiality, such as labor-power for Marx, where power is expended and diminished when put to use as labor, power for Lorde persists through its use, though it is not infinite (cf. Marx 1996 [1867], 177–81). Under the right circumstances, however, it can through use be amplified and grow. 3 The energy a person has available to them can be limited by living in an oppressive society, particularly one built around converting human labor into profit and human beings into laborers and consumers. Lorde describes how human productivity canalized into repetitive and predictable behaviors captures a person’s power and alienates them from its use. For example, when asked by an interviewer in 1975 about whether it is a marker of success for Black people to be more represented on television and in popular media, Lorde expresses this view: “It is not successful to have a hundred million black machines because, although black is beautiful, a black machine is a black machine. I am not interested in seeing my children grow up to become American consumers. I am interested to see them grow up to be human beings who are black”. Lorde is most interested in how power can be claimed, nurtured, and self-directed—in short, how people can become empowered. Empowerment expands a person’s energy and frees it to be applied toward the work that they feel integrates their many commitments and generates possibilities for survival in Lorde’s rich sense. This might be gaining skills or expertise, becoming enmeshed in a community of mutual care, or seizing the means of intellectual production by starting a publishing house. Lorde describes how, when directed by the feeling of integration across the different sides of her self, “work becomes a conscious decision—a longed-for bed which I enter gratefully and from which I rise up empowered." Here we can see how, for Lorde, the energy we have and the things we do are in a fluid relation with one another, and when a person’s actions reach out toward alignment across their many aspects of self, or when they feel deeply in their work, they gain the ability to do more. This expansive character of power—its responsiveness to a process of empowerment—is Lorde’s meaning when she says, “we become strong by doing whatever we need be strong for”. 4 A form of empowerment can be achieved by taking on particular social roles: teaching in a university, joining a mass movement, taking the podium as a public speaker, serving as a librarian or archivist. For example, in the poem “Power,” a Black woman taking up her position on a jury gains access to “the first real power she ever had,” to use her vision and voice to pass judgment on a racist police officer who shot a child to death. It is risky, however, to rely on one’s social role as the fount of one’s power, because that power is always vulnerable to being expropriated or undercut by the institutions that confer it—institutions that often operate with hostility toward the disenfranchised. The denouement of the poem sees the jurywoman’s voice channeled into alignment with a white supremacist social structure, with her vote ultimately sealing the unanimous acquittal of the killer. Whereas empowerment is growing one’s power and using it toward what one believes, we see in “Power” the inverse: abdicating and denying one’s power, allowing it to be used by someone else. Lorde tells an interviewer in 1988 that “disempowerment does not mean merely passivity. It means one’s personal power, no matter how relative, being used by the other side, at least by a side not of one’s choice”. Here, Lorde avers a power principle that applies to all who struggle for survival under oppression: each person must take up their power in whatever form it exists, or risk it being used to further the structures aligned against them. In a conversation on Swiss radio in 1988, she declares, “To be silent not only means to be powerless…it also means to be of use to your enemies!” She reiterates this view across her speeches in 1989. At UCLA in California, she warns: Power that is not used is dangerous, because power is never quiescent, it’s never neutral. If I do not use my power, however relative it is, if I do not find out what it is and learn to use it, someone else is using it.
November 12, 2025 at 10:52 AM
calebw.bsky.social
November 12, 2025 at 9:55 AM
calebw.bsky.social
"People aren't just hot for revolution because they eroticize change. People are hot for revolution because change is the condition of possibility for regaining agency over their sexual & erotic lives, which have been exploited & usurped by a hostile society."

I'm gonna finish this chapter today!
Hot for Revolution using Mamdani sign generator
November 10, 2025 at 12:28 PM
calebw.bsky.social
Here’s some important news I learned from @shamjaff.bsky.social’s global newsletter today: Australia secretively shipping people for indefinite detention in Nauru

This world sucks sometimes, but this newsletter is great, and you should sign up for it.
Australia is potentially deporting hundreds of people to an island five hours away What happened Australia has started deporting people it calls “non-citizens” to Nauru, a tiny Pacific island nation. These are mostly long-term residents who lost their Australian visas after criminal convictions but couldn’t be sent back to their home countries because it wasn’t safe. The move follows a new US$1.62 billion deal between Australia and Nauru, lasting 30 years, that allows Australia to “relocate” hundreds of people there. At least three men have already been flown out, and several others are being held for removal. What's the reaction been? There's been a lot of criticism. What's the difference? Ian Rintoul (Refugee Action Coalition) called it “replacing indefinite detention in Australia with indefinite detention on Nauru.” Who's accountable for this? Ogy Simic (Asylum Seeker Resource Centre) said the deportations are happening “under a veil of secrecy,” with no transparency or accountability. Are they OK? Will they be OK? Sarah Dale (Refugee Advice and Casework Service) said people are being sent away “without knowing if they had legal advice, health checks, or even due process.” Not much public information on the deal The biggest criticism is that the process is secretive and opaque.
November 10, 2025 at 9:57 AM
calebw.bsky.social
Just want to note that closed captioning on zoom writes “herbivore” for “de Beauvoir”
Herbivores work more thoroughly incorporated and reflected the historical experiences of minority women and men. Its impact could have been more profound for these groups.
November 7, 2025 at 7:44 PM
calebw.bsky.social
Thoughts on "rigorous" philosophy:

I'm back at the 6th Roundtable for Black Feminist & Womanist Theory, listening to Bailey Thomas introduce the event as "a space grounded not in hierarchy, but in care, collaboration, & rigor."

Time's ripe to reclaim "rigor" as a demand we make of philosophy 1/
Screen grab from the 2026 Roundtable for Black Feminist and Womanist Theory with Bailey Thomas introducing the event
November 6, 2025 at 3:31 PM