Sister Outsider

Sister Outsider is a collection of speeches and essays by Audre Lorde. She lived from 1934-1992. Contextually, this puts her life experience as a black lesbian on the forefront of American civil rights, women's rights, and sexual liberation movements. With her unique experience, her writings in Sister Outsider demonstrate how the diverse experiences among women are not limited to gender, but also race, orientation, class, age, and ability in an intersectional framework. In this paper, I argue Audre Lorde encourages the use of human intersectional difference as a tool for creative change, learning, and improvement.

Though Audre Lorde has been labeled as many things, such as a writer, feminist, womanist, and civil rights activist, she defines herself first and foremost as a poet.[1, 2] It is through her poetry that she gives "name to the nameless so it can be thought."[3] In many ways, Black lesbians within the civil rights movement were still developing the language to articulate their oppression. Historical hindsight can be used to label and name, but for persons experiencing these oppressions there likely wasn't an easy way to describe the experience. Audre Lorde used poetry to creatively open a window into the experiences of black lesbians. She regarded this medium as one that could transcend class. "Of all the art forms, poetry is the most economical."[4] Many seem to be unaware that economic class limits a person's access to supplies and time to produce art, but as Lorde noted, poetry could be scribbled on any available scrap of paper, jotted down on a subway between jobs, and requires the least amount of physical labor. Not only could poetry transcend classist distinction, but many physical abilities. Poetry required few finances and could be written in the most stringent of schedules.

In her essay, Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women Loving Women, she dives into the oppressions at the intersections of race, sex, and orientation. She begins by asserting that racism, sexism, heterosexism, and homophobia are "forms of human blindness [that] stem from the same root—an inability to recognize the notion of difference as a dynamic human force, one which is enriching rather than threatening to the defined self, when there are shared goals."[5] Difference has often been used to promote competition instead of cooperation. For example, the sexual arrangement between heterosexual white women and heterosexual black women, pitted one against the other in interracial relationships. Vilification between white and black women harbored resentment between one another through race. Viewing black women as "taking" white men from white women, and white women as "taking" black men from black women is an example of racial segregation and heteronormativity used as a divisive tactic to keep women from building alliances with one another in creative relationships. Rather than seeing each other as valuable allies with common interest, women were/are programmed to view their worth within the context of male attention.

Black lesbians had particular difficulties in building alliances, due to the wasted energy in anti-lesbian hysteria. Many self-defined heterosexual black men and women view lesbian relationships among black women as a threat to the established order. In her words, "For so long we have been encouraged to view each other with suspicion, as eternal competitors, or as the visible face of our own self-rejection."[6] Lorde acutely identifies that the oppressions existing within the Black community undermine their shared goals of racial liberation. Similarly, she notes the same limitation in the feminist movement where women withhold from building alliances with one another.

In her essay, The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House, she discusses the importance of alliances made among women to dismantle patriarchal power. In seeking unity through diversity, she notes that the absence of intersectionality undermines feminist movements.[7] It is arrogant to assume that feminism can productively exist without addressing, even embracing, these differences. The tools of a racist patriarchy cannot be the same tools to dismantle it. If that is the case, the oppressed risk becoming the oppressor, and difference is used to thwart genuine change. The denial of difference between women is the denial of difference as a function of creativity. As she states, "Only within that interdependency of different strengths . . . can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters."[8] Seeing difference with suspicion is a tool to keep the oppressed occupied with one another at the master's benefit. Lorde demonstrated that addressing the flaws within racist feminism is an essential step toward dismantling the oppressor through interracial cooperation.

Age is also an essential difference in dismantling oppression. It is often the case that the lack of intellectual engagement in historical oppression leads to historical amnesia, which puts us in a cyclical pattern of the oppressed becoming the oppressor without any genuine change. Differences in age also challenge the ominous homogeneity of experience under the umbrella of what is called "woman." Sisterhood that is ignorant of age difference keeps us in a pattern of repeating and relearning what our foremothers long since discovered, because we were unable or unwilling to listen to one another.

Perhaps one of the most compelling arguments Lorde makes is in her essay Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference. She notes that we are programmed to respond to difference in one of three ways: (1) ignore it (2) copy it (3) dismantle it. Those that wish to ignore it serve as inert agents which empower the oppressor. Those who seek to copy it may find themselves joining the oppressor in domination of others as a source of meaning in superiority. Those who seek to dismantle difference may find themselves ignorant of the value of difference as a change agent. Difference, in this model, is then "misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion."[9] For Lorde, all of these approaches fall short of acknowledging our differences as a springboard for dynamic and creative change.

Audre Lorde illustrates that for humanity to exist in non-oppressive communities, we must work together to decolonize our minds of racism and fight against the self-hatred of womanhood we learned from birth. Likewise, we must resist the internal homophobia we have been conditioned to embrace as a mythical normative attitude affecting every aspect of our lives. Lorde encourages us to not fear our differences, but to welcome them as agents of creative change. Only then do we actualize the creativity which comes from our unique differences.

Notes and Citations

[1] Audre Lorde, "Sister Outsider," (New York: Random House Inc., 2007), 8. "When we began editing Sister Outsider—long after the book had been conceptualized, a contract signed, and new material written—Audre Lorde informed me as we were working one afternoon, that she doesn't write theory. 'I am a poet,' she said."

[2] Audre Lorde, "Sister Outsider," (New York: Random House Inc., 2007), 87. Audre Lorde responds during interview with Adrienne Rich when she is asked, "Why did you use a pseudonym?" She responded, "Because. . .I don't write stories. I write poetry. . ."

[3] Ibid., 37.

[4] Ibid., 116.

[5] Ibid., 47.

[6] Ibid., 49.

[7] Audre Lorde, "Sister Outsider," (New York: Random House Inc., 2007), 110. "The absence of these considerations [race, sexuality, class, and age] weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and political."

[8] Ibid., 111.

[9] Ibid., 115.