Sister Outsider

Lorde’s landmark collection of essays amplifies ways of living and knowing long familiar to women and other marginalized groups. Her exploration of eroticism—a fully vivacious, embodied experience of life—as a source of women’s knowledge, wisdom, and power is yet unmatched in American letters.

Essential reading for anyone who has felt unsatisfied or unseen by the narratives handed down by the white, heteronormative, patriarchal powers that continue to hold our imaginations in a vice grip. 

Audre Lorde was known primarily as a poet, but her essays were more engaging for me. She was fearless in confronting male dominance and white supremacy—and every other hierarchy that structures modern life—always with an awareness of the centrality of love and beauty in our lives.

Two of those essays that became classics in feminism—“Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” and “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism”—were particularly influential for me and are as relevant today as when they were published in 1984.

She also died too young (at age 58 in 1992), and I have… show more.

Audre Lorde described herself as a Black, lesbian, feminist, mother, warrior.

She was primarily a poet, but she also wrote powerful prose including Zami that she called a “biomythography,” describing Black lesbian life in the 1940s and 1950s primarily in New York. This book, Sister Outsider is comprised of a series of short essays that profoundly changed and influenced my thinking from a Black, feminist, queer perspective.

Titles suggest new ways of thinking. For example: ”Poetry Is Not A Luxury,” “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” “The Master’s Tools Will… show more.

Classic essays on Black women, Caribbean resistance, language, anger, and the combinations of race, class, gender, sexuality. These essays are now fundamental as we think through issues of sexual difference, the ways that poetry and the creative are accessible once we open ourselves to experience and express our deep feelings, and how it re-names the erotic as a place for women that is not wholly sexual but is orgasmic if we are able to reach that zone of creativity.

On the face of it, Sister Outsider is not a book about colonial wrongdoing at all, but is the collected prose writing of the poet Audre Lorde on a variety of topics. However, given her status as a black lesbian of Grenadian descent living in the United States in the mid-twentieth century – and her astounding strength in battling against the racist patriarchy that despised her – I would suggest that her entire life is a monument to resisting colonial crimes and to fighting against embedded historical wrongs.

Much of that is reflected here in various ways. For example, it… show more.