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Sister Outsider, By Audre Lorde

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Recommended: Position of women in literary works

Audre Lorde’s “Sister Outsider” is a powerful reflection of her life as a Black lesbian feminist writer, and activist. Her groundbreaking work of literature reflects a feminist approach which emphasizes the importance of eliminating gender discrimination, as well as any other forms of oppression. Through her writing, Lorde challenges societal norms and stands up to the patriarchy, establishing herself as a strong and courageous feminist voice. Lorde’s writing exemplifies the notion of intersectionality, the idea that all forms of oppression are interconnected, and that we must fight against multiple forms of oppression simultaneously. This is evident in her essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”, cited as a foundational work in the feminist movement. In this essay, Lorde asserts that the feminist movement often replicates the same patriarchal and oppressive structures it seeks to dismantle. She challenges feminists to consider the multiple forms of oppression that women face, including misogyny, racism, homophobia, and classism, among others. By acknowledging these oppressions, Lorde highlights the need for intersectionality within the feminist movement, in order to achieve true equality for all women. …show more content…

She believes that individuals have a responsibility to stand up against oppression, and her writing encourages readers to take action. In her essay “Uses of the Erotic”, Lorde argues that embracing the erotic can be a force for social change. She describes the erotic as “an assertion of the life force of women,” and encourages women to tap into their erotic selves as an act of resistance against patriarchal oppression. By embracing the erotic, Lorde believes women can break free from the sexual repression imposed on them by society and take control of their bodies and

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In September of 1979, Audre Lorde, poet, spoke about the impossibility of dismantling the patriarchy through oppressive means. The black feminist woman, Lorde, who has cancer at the point of this speech, uses ethos, pathos, and logos in order to guilt the audience into making a change of how black feminists are represented. Ethos is the building of the author's credibility in order to become more persuasive because people tend to believe people who they deem likable or respectable. “I agreed to take part in a New York University Institute for the Humanities conference a year ago, with the understanding that I would be commenting upon papers dealing with the role of difference within the lives of American women: difference of race, sexuality, class, and age. The absence of these considerations weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the political.”

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“The Terrible Beauty of the Slums” by Säidya Hartman features a carefully crafted narrative meant to illustrate the incompleteness of historical archives that fail to capture the hope in intimate Black life. Hartman’s work is a genre-defying text that refuses categorization due to its unconventional rhetoric. Typically, readers assume that Hartman’s purpose is simply to liberate the young Black girls from dehumanizing stereotypes by undermining the othering gaze of the outsider, the perpetrators of surveillance and racism. This assumption fails to take into account Hartman’s choice to place readers in the role of the undermined outsider. If we do not explore the implications of having the role of the outsider imposed on us, then we fail to

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In Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name, Audre, a Black Lesbian Poet, narrates her life story as unfair. This novel is under the unique genre that Lorde came up with called biomythography, which combines real life and myth. Moreover, Zami takes place in the 1950’s, which is still considered a critical time in America history for civil rights. In her quest for “fairness,” Audre often rebels against the status quo. This is due to the feeling she gets through the erotic, or what she describes as “sensation with feeling.”

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In it, Audre Lorde talks about outrage against bigotry and the delegitimization of that outrage by white ladies. Time and again, outrage is seen as "disruptive" to woman's rights or "terrifying" for white ladies to manage. Lorde contends this is on account of standard culture doesn't need us - either ethnic minorities or white people - to react to prejudice, yet rather to smother our sentiments and genuineness. Outrage she in this manner reframes as a wellspring of energy, vitality, and learning. Outrage, for her, is a justifiable reaction to bigotry and being hushed and should be tuned in to.

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The scene that occurred after Civil War, in a hospital, according to Lorde, it is a clear example of how Black women were and, are still, neglected from the American society. Although one may argue that the anecdote of when Lorde was a child, which took place on a subway train in New York, a white woman jerked her coat away from Lorde. The reason to why the woman acted in such way is because she was disgusted by Lorde being Black. Lorde’s subway anecdote is a similar experience to being racially profiled, because just as Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested and perceived as a criminal for being Black, Lorde as a child, felt the same way. The woman considered her a criminal by communicating her horror and demonstrating her disapproval,

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As with all theories, this feminist approach to Louise Halfe’s “Body Politics” does not come without its flaws. While it can be argued that this poem criticizes the performativity of feminine gender roles in a patriarchal society, this cannot be proven definitively without knowing the author’s original intentions. Furthermore, the poem does not give its readers enough information to conclude that the society the women live in is in fact a patriarchal society. This becomes evident, as there is no reference to any masculine figure – so any assumptions about the masculine-dominant culture are purely speculative. It is possible that Halfe wrote this poem in an attempt to challenge the gender binary, however one stands to question how successfully she is in doing so.

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This frames Afrekete as a mythical woman, someone with great influence but little presence, challenging societal notions of power regarding women in a relatively short portion of the narrative. This is achieved through the use of a mix of genres of writing that creates a narrative that is both reality and legend. As revealed above, Shange’s choreopoem provides a key example of another hybrid form that challenges normative perceptions of literature as well as power structures. However, it does so in a visual way, adding another dimension that Lorde’s piece did not have. Whether interpreting the stage directions, or watching a video, the audience is provided with many avenues of engaging with the text, so that Shange’s messages arguably have greater reach in their ability to expose oppressive mechanisms of

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