Sister Outsider: Essays and SpeechesPresenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature. “[Lorde's] works will be important to those truly interested in growing up sensitive, intelligent, and aware.”—The New York Times In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde-scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde's philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published. These landmark writings are, in Lorde's own words, a call to “never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is . . . ” |
Contents
6 | |
8 | |
13 | |
Poetry Is Not a Luxury | 36 |
The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action | 40 |
Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving | 45 |
The Erotic as Power | 53 |
An American Disease in Blackface | 60 |
A Black Lesbian Feminists Response | 72 |
Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich | 81 |
The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle the Masters House | 110 |
Women Redefining Difference | 114 |
Women Responding to Racism | 124 |
Learning from the | 134 |
Black Women Hatred and Anger | 145 |
An Interim Report | 176 |
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