Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde was a prominent African American writer, feminist, and civil rights activist. She is known for her powerful writings on race, gender, and sexuality, and for her advocacy of intersectional feminism. Lorde's work emphasized the importance of embracing differences and confronting systems of oppression, making her a significant figure in the fight for social justice and equality.
6 Key excerpts on "Audre Lorde"
eBook - ePubModern Women
52 Pioneers
- Kira Cochrane(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Aurum(Publisher)
...Audre Lorde Writer, 1934–1992 Audre Lorde, 1983. ‘ When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak ’ A udre Lorde’s life was dedicated to making the unseen seen. She was a woman. She was black. She was a lesbian. She was a socialist, a poet, a mother, an activist and a teacher, and for the last decade and a half of her life she was a person living with cancer. As her friend and fellow poet Jackie Kay once wrote, ‘Lorde was Whitman-like in her refusal to be confined to single categories. She was large. She contained multitudes’. She knew if you denied one part of yourself the whole edifice was jeopardised. Lorde’s legacy and influence has grown since her death in 1992. During that period, the theory of intersectionality has become perhaps the dominant strand in western feminist thought – a theory first coined in those terms by the US academic Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989. This suggests that in order to understand discrimination, prejudice and possible remedies, we have to understand how people’s identities intersect, and to honour those identities. These are ideas Lorde discussed throughout her career. In her essay ‘There is no Hierarchy of Oppressions’, she wrote about sexism, heterosexism and racism, and how these arose from the same source – a belief in the inherent superiority of one mode of being above all others, and thereby its right to dominance. ‘I cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which I must battle these forces of discrimination, wherever they appear to destroy me,’ she wrote. ‘And when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you.’ Born in New York in 1934, Lorde was the third daughter of an immigrant family, her father from Barbados, her mother from Grenada; she didn’t speak until she was four and her short-sightedness made her legally blind...
eBook - ePubFeminist Theory Reader
Local and Global Perspectives
- Carole McCann, Seung-kyung Kim, Emek Ergun, Carole R. McCann, Seung-kyung Kim, Emek Ergun(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...She reflects on how her identity and embodied experiences shape and are shaped by her relations with others as she moves through the landscape of her neighborhood and her personal history. Reflecting on her position as a white woman from the US South, she ponders the dimensions of race, class, and “First World” privilege and asks how we can be accountable to them. How can we reposition ourselves in interactions across differences? Arguing that we must “walk into change,” she reviews what she learned in the landscape of her privileged and constrained youth and asks what she was taught not to see in her hometown. In this way, she illustrates how white women might learn to draw from the strengths of their heritage and culture and yet reject racist and Orientalist appeals to national belonging. She concludes that we must “expand [our] constricted eye” if we are to make effective coalitions with women of color in the United States and the Global South (Reading 26). Throughout her writings, Audre Lorde continuously draws attention to the interconnectedness of gender, race, and sexual identity. As a lesbian of color, she criticized the strategy of lesbian separatism advocated by white lesbian feminists as an unworkable strategy for lesbians of color (Lorde 1984b; see also Smith and Smith 1981; Smith 1983). Yet while separatism is unworkable, Lorde sees that organizing across differences is very challenging for Black women as well. In the piece included here (Reading 27), Lorde addresses the exclusions lesbians of color have had to confront within their racial/ethnic/cultural communities. She illuminates the complexity of heterosexism and homophobia by which her identity as a lesbian is subsumed under her identity as a Black woman in race-based identity politics, forcing her to hide to gain inclusion...
eBook - ePubAvailable Means
An Anthology Of Women'S Rhetoric(s)
- Joy Ritchie, Kate Ronald(Authors)
- 2001(Publication Date)
- University of Pittsburgh Press(Publisher)
...Audre Lorde 1934–1992 “Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself—a Black woman warrior poet doing my work—come to ask you, are you doing yours?” These powerful words of Audre Lorde embody her constant resistance to the politics of racism, homophobia, and separatism and her insistence on the necessity of action. From her earliest collection of poetry, The First Cities (1968), to her biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982), she showed how women can use their differences to construct a stronger community. Her poetry and prose reverberate with concern about the distance between white women and women of color, insisting that white women become conscious of their privilege and attend to the different material conditions of women of color. Lorde does not name these differences to separate women from one another; rather, she names them so that women can use and build upon their differences. By this act of naming, Lorde actively negates the collective silence that she says keeps women apart: “for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.” A self-described “warrior” and “casualty,” Lorde died in 1992 from breast cancer. In this speech, which was first delivered as part of the “Lesbian and Literature Panel” at the 1977 Modern Language Association Conference, she speaks of her initial diagnosis and surgery to an academic audience invested in public, academic discourse. She breaks with convention by delivering a public speech that deals, in part, with the intensely private issue of breast cancer. Not only does she challenge the academic notion of public discourse in all of her work, but she also establishes theories of the erotic and the emotions, creating a feminist rhetoric that does not separate the body from language, nor anger from reason. She offers her personal experience in this inspiring speech to urge women to break the silences in their lives...
eBook - ePubBlack Internationalist Feminism
Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945-1995
- Cheryl Higashida(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- University of Illinois Press(Publisher)
...Jones challenged monadic, androcentric formulations of race by accounting for the triple burden of Black working-class women. But rather than positing open-ended intersections of race, gender, and class, she argued that “every aspect of Negro oppression in our country stems from the existence of an oppressed nation” under U.S. imperialism. 91 Within this oppressed nation, Black women constituted a vanguard that would lead the way to “a Socialist America—the final and full guarantee of woman’s emancipation.” 92 Lorde’s later essays and poetry expand Jones’s thought to address sexual, gender, and racial identities under late capitalism. In the work discussed in this chapter, Lorde theorized the leadership and concerns of women of color within national liberation movements that would advance the rights of other women, lesbians, and gays. For Lorde, sexual and racial difference could not thrive under a neoliberal/neocolonial global order. Therefore, battles for self-determination, national culture, and land reclamation were principal bases for validating intersectionality and heterogeneity. Like Jones, Lorde conceptualized a dialectical rather than an oppositional relationship between national liberation and internationalism, which accounted for the agendas of radical feminists of color throughout the world such as the Afro-German women Lorde encountered while teaching poetry in Berlin, the leaders of the antiapartheid and indigenous land rights movements, and other Black women writers such as Paule Marshall, Michelle Cliff, June Jordan, and Ntozake Shange who decried the depredations of U.S. imperialism. Tracing its lineage to Jones’s work on the Negro question and the woman question, Lorde’s revolutionary praxis indicates the role of the postwar anti-colonial Left in shaping late-twentieth-century Black feminism and critiques from queer women of color. In chapter 6, I meditate on the presence and influence of this Left internationalist feminism within contemporary U.S...
eBook - ePubWomen Psychotherapists' Reflections on Female Friendships
Sisters of the Heart
- Lillian Comas-Diaz, Marcella Bakur Weiner, Lillian Comas-Diaz, Marcella Bakur Weiner(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...31–32) and having what I can only understand as a spiritual experience. Since our first introduction many years ago I can say with confidence that Audre has become one of my fiercest and most ardent sisters of the heart. Audre’s inimitable voice continues to draw me towards a deeper understanding of the standards to which I must hold myself accountable in the context of relationship. She also stands sentinel against those forces of oppression that seek to leave me disillusioned and unfocused. She nurtures a critical understanding of many of my personal experiences as a queer Black feminist pursuing a doctoral degree. In September of 1979 Audre Lorde delivered a speech at the last panel on the last day of the Second Sex Conference in New York. Invited at “the last hour” to participate in what was the only panel “where the input of Black feminists and lesbians [was] represented,” she used the occasion to direct attention to not only the heteropatriarcal underpinnings, but also the classist and colonialist discourses inherent in the practices that structured the conference (Lorde, 1984d, p. 110). Audre asked, “What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?” (Lorde, 1984d, pp. 110–111). That speech, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” is now a staple of contemporary feminist theory and one that I refer to often. On my travels as a woman of color through the master’s house of the academy she has inspired me, encouraged me and guided me while at the same time gently and firmly reminding me that, Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—know that survival is not an academic skill...
eBook - ePub- Eva Lennox Birch(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...These are qualities placed high on Lorde’s list of human values, and are expressed in her prose and poetry. The compass of this present work does not allow for a protracted study of her poetry, but its emotional source is clearly defined in her essays. In ‘Poetry is not a luxury’ Lorde stresses the need for black women to ‘respect those hidden sources of our power from where true knowledge and therefore lasting action comes’ (Sister, p. 37). It is in Lorde’s connection between emotion and action, between poetry and rhetoric, between the personal and the political, that we can discern the cutting edge of her feminist consciousness. With clarity and courage she articulates some of women’s fiercest and long-hidden dreams. She urges women to verbalise their instinctive wisdom and so express selves that have been hitherto suppressed. She argues that to hide a self-truth is to bow to oppression, and as a lesbian mother she claims the right to express her own sexuality without the burden of society’s opprobrium. It is Lorde’s belief that to maintain silence in the face of oppression is to give that oppression tacit acceptance. In ‘The transformation of Silence into Language and action’ (Sister, p. 40), she articulates her very real fear of being silenced for ever because of the breast cancer she had developed. The possibility of a premature death gives urgency to her appeal to all women to speak up before it is too late. She recognises the courage needed in a self-expression which involves a painful exposure of an inner self, and admits that her own courage was strengthened by her knowledge of her African heritage. She describes how the Afro-American harvest festival ‘Kwanga’ embodies a message of encouragement to all women: ‘Kujichagulia – self-determination – the decision to define ourselves, name ourselves, and speak for ourselves, instead of being defined and spoken for by others’ (Sister, p...
