De la ira de Medea a la rabia de Audre Lorde

Abstract

The figure of Medea, woman and foreigner, is the common thread through which is analyzed the passion of anger from the classical tradition, which rejects it as a destructive passion, to the appropriation made by Lorde's North American black feminism. Both anger have something in common: Audre Lorde speaks about anger from misogyny, homophobia and racism she suffered and Medea´s anger is closely related with the misogyny and xenophobia of her time. To do this, first the article analyzes the vocabulary related to anger and rage in Greek and Latin. From there two threads develop. The first offers the traditional reading of the myth of the infanticidal Medea, which is the one found in Seneca´s tragedy and which is related to his philosophical treatise On Anger. In this way Medea becomes an exemplum e contrario and negative-image of the Stoic wise man. The second thread recovers the other tradition of the myth according to which Medea was not who killed her children but the Corinthians. Also, in this second thread is questioned the classic approach of anger to show its validity as a tool.