Sister Outsider: Audre Lorde's lessons for modern feminists
Hello,
How are you? I thought today I’d do something I haven’t done on this newsletter for ages: chat about a book!
Just before Christmas, I finally read Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider. Let’s leave aside the frankly baffling fact that it took me this long to get round to it and concentrate on this: it is brilliant. Stop-in-your-tracks, reread-a-sentence-in-awe, yes-that’s-it brilliant. I loved it.
For those of you who don’t know, Lorde was a black, queer, feminist activist in a time when being any of those things, let alone all of them, wasn’t exactly celebrated by society. She did some proper badass stuff, too - her biography is well worth a read - and she had the most incredible way with words.
Sister Outsider is a collection of her essays, articles and speeches. Naturally, they are a window into a different time, but many of the issues and themes she discusses are as relevant today as they were in the eighties. Two things stood out to me: her rich commitment to honouring the intersectionality of people’s identities (including her own), and her deep belief in the social value of representing those identities on the page.
The most famous essay in the collection, ‘The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,’ is a masterpiece, a gleaming rallying cry for anyone who is longing for a more equal future. There’s a reason it’s so well known, but I think the other pieces are just as valuable. Two essays in particular quite literally gave me goosebumps. The first, ‘Poetry is not a luxury’, is a beautiful meditation on how the arts, so often deemed frivolous by wider society, are in fact a source of power for the marginalised - a way of saying “I exist; my experience is important” - and how emotion, not just logic, is essential to any liberation work.
The second, ‘Age, race, class, and sex: women redefining difference,’ is a considerably less-well-known essay based on a speech Lorde gave at a women’s lib conference in 1970. In making a compelling case for a more inclusive feminism, she argues for a liberation movement that does not seek strength in minimising the differences between women but in celebrating them and, crucially, acknowledging the societal forces that create them. It’s a really powerful call - somewhere between a plea and a demand - for intersectionality and diversity. As I read it, I couldn’t help imagining what it must have been like for a black lesbian in 1970 to stand up in front of a rarefied group of white feminist academics and tell them that the brand of feminism they were espousing was inherently and critically flawed. And it struck me how our ostensibly-different modern feminism still needs to hear her message.
We can all learn something from Lorde’s writing and activism; she has a profound universality that makes sentenced crafted almost fifty years ago feel fresh and relevant. Perhaps that’s why, somehow, it was like she was writing directly to me, across the oceans of time and space.
Before Christmas, I’d been feeling burnt out and a bit lost. As I alluded to in this newsletter, I’d found myself wondering, perhaps for the first time in my life, if words were a strong enough tool for the task at hand, and, if they weren’t, what the hell I was going to use instead. And, while intersectionality has always been at the core of my work (I wrote a whole entire book about it), I’d been wrestling professionally and personally with questions about intersecting identities. Lorde’s writing felt like a guiding hand, reminding me when I really needed it that writing matters, that representation is powerful, and that recognising everyone’s complexities is a vital, life-affirming part of moving towards justice for all. Reading Sister Outsider, I saw a gift Lorde has given to generations of advocate-writers: a simple entreaty to keep going.
There is work to be done, and truths to be written.
Speak soon,
Lucy
Women's lives are shaped by sexism and expectations. Disabled people's lives are shaped by ableism and a complete lack of expectations. But what happens when you're subjected to both sets of rules?
This powerful, honest, hilarious and furious memoir from journalist and advocate Lucy Webster looks at life at the intersection; the struggles, the joys and the unseen realities of being a disabled woman. From navigating the worlds of education and work, dating and friendship; to managing care; contemplating motherhood; and learning to accept your body against a pervasive narrative that it is somehow broken and in need of fixing, The View From Down Here shines a light on what it really means to move through the world as a disabled woman.
ncG1vNJzZmikpZjGuLHBrKueql6owqO%2F05qapGaTpLpwvI6soKyslad6sMHTrKCdnaJirraw0Z5kpaeimbK0ecueqqynnqg%3D