Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

"Sister Outsider continues to influence, which speaks to the power of Audre Lorde’s work. The fact that she was a Black lesbian poet makes her work especially resonant now. I love quoting Audre Lorde when she talks about anger and I especially appreciate her work about intersectional feminism. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The quote that I’m going to give you from Audre Lorde really speaks to the multiple oppressions, the tentacles of the octopus, that Black indigenous and women of color contend with: “Women of Color in America have grown up within a symphony of anger at being silenced, at being unchosen, at knowing that when we survive, it is in spite of a world that takes for granted our lack of humanness, and which hates our very existence outside of its service. And I say symphony rather than cacophony because we have had to learn to orchestrate those furies so that they do not tear us apart.” I love this metaphor; I think of the symphony as like the octopus, and the varied oppressions that squeeze women from marginalized communities are like instruments they must learn to orchestrate. When we’re flattened under this one label—women—it is very deceptive. Audre Lorde reminds us that what women experience depends on where in the world we live and how marginalized we are. When we see who has been most affected by this pandemic, for example, in the United States, it’s Black and Latinx women who have been pushed out of the workforce. We use the word women, but we have to disaggregate. In United States, as the economy starts to bounce back a bit from the pandemic, white women have been regaining jobs at a faster rate than Black and Latinx women. It’s really important to recognize that one-size-fits-all feminism isn’t going to liberate everyone; it isn’t going to loosen all those tentacles of oppression. I think this is what Audre Lorde meant when she wrote that recognizing differences will strengthen the fight against patriarchy."