Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

These four essays illuminate the sources of creative power that serve oppressed people, especially women, in the battle against oppression: feeling, self-definition, and embracing differences. Because these sources of power are emphasized throughout the collections’ remaining essays as well, Lorde here identifies them and explains their necessity to revolutionary change.

The capacity to feel—and to acknowledge and use those feelings—is vital to women’s liberation. Furthermore, we must liberate emotion from its subordinate position and misuse in Western society and models of power. Lorde emphasizes these points with “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” and “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” In the former essay, Lorde indicates women’s emotional depth and frames it as a reservoir of deep and ancient knowledge. She opens the essay by stating:

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives […] For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises (36).

Her words’ light/dark imagery immediately calls into question Western, white, patriarchal configurations of light and dark. This dark place of feeling is not dark because it is without knowledge, as would be connoted by dominant modes of Western thought, but rather because it is deep and ancient. In addition, it is the quality of light that matters in terms of how women see their lives and act on what they can observe. For example, the European emphasis on rationality is a quality of light, but it is one by which living is viewed “only as a problem to be solved” (37) and by which rationality is the only process through which people define themselves and assert their being (38).

Poetry, because it fuses feeling and thinking, “forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams towards survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action” (37). Because accessing the deep, ancient reservoir of feeling is a prerequisite for knowledge and change, this quality of light becomes one that is not mere rationality, but one that encourages women to know and accept their feelings as sources of knowledge. Similarly, the erotic is “firmly rooted in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling” (53). Because it comes from this place of feeling, the erotic has also been misconstrued and misused under patriarchal models of power, resulting in women’s suppression of it. A major tactic of oppressors has been fostering women’s distrust of their “deepest and nonrational knowledge” (53).

However, in the same way that poetry inspires change because it brings feeling into language, idea, and action, and requires women’s willingness to access and trust that feeling, the recognition and experience of the erotic stimulates lasting change as well. Lorde writes, “Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavors brings us closest to that fullness” (54-55). That is, once women become aware of their capacity to feel joy and satisfaction deeply, they demand that fullness and depth everywhere in their lives, so they can no longer accept the qualities and conditions that keep them oppressed. Acknowledging and honoring feelings changes the quality of light through which women view their lives. Feeling is thus essential to women’s liberation.

From the changes prompted by embracing feeling comes the need to self-define, which is also an essential requirement for the oppressed to attain liberation. Lorde touches on self-definition in “Uses of the Erotic” when she says that accessing the erotic allows “acts against oppression [to] become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within” (58), but she discusses self-definition even more extensively in “Scratching the Surface,” and the idea is implicit in “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” In “Scratching the Surface,” where she discusses the futility of antilesbian hysteria in the Black community, she writes, “The development of self-defined Black women, ready to explore and pursue our power and interests within our communities, is a vital component in the war for Black liberation” (45-46). She also notes that within dominant models of power, women have been socialized to define themselves within male attention (48). Therefore, the self-definition that is happening among Black women is perceived as a threat—specifically to those Black men who are happy to embody sexism and misogyny (46).

Pointing out who is threatened by Black women’s self-definition underlines Lorde’s point that self-definition is essential to liberation. Not only is it vital to the liberation of Black women but also to the Black community; it may prompt Black men to consider why they are “unclear about the pathways of their own definition” (46) to the point of feeling threatened by Black women’s self-definition. Such consideration should inevitably lead back to how white supremacy and patriarchy together have ravaged Black men’s sense of self, but as Lorde demonstrates in later essays, such self-awareness is perhaps only possible from the outsider perspective. Even so, the discussion of perceived threat introduces the recurring idea that the use of the oppressor’s tactics by oppressed people is not to the benefit of those who are oppressed, even when those tactics offer them a relative amount of privilege in comparison to community members.

“The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” also alludes to the power of self-definition by way of using one’s voice to speak up for oneself. The transformation is “an act of self-revelation” (42), suggesting that in choosing to speak, women also choose to tell the world who they are and how they perceive themselves, rather than allowing the world to define them along the measures of sexism and patriarchy. She emphasizes the Kwanzaa principle, Kujichagulia, or self-determination: “the decision to define ourselves, name ourselves, and speak for ourselves, instead of being defined and spoken for by others” (43). Thus, in this essay, Lorde clarifies that self-definition is a source of power that must be wielded in the battle against oppression.

In this same essay, Lorde emphasizes another Kwanzaa principle, Ujima, or collective work and responsibility, which she defines as “the decision to build and maintain ourselves and our communities together and to recognize and solve our problems together” (43). A major part of this building, maintenance, and problem-solving is the recognition and honoring of difference—another source of power that emerges throughout Sister Outsider and is introduced in these first few essays. To open “Scratching the Surface,” Lorde provides definitions of racism, sexism, heterosexism, and anti-gay bias, and she describes them as forms of oppression that deny difference is a dynamic and enriching force, especially when there are common goals among those who have differences (45). In fact, oppressors weaponize those differences to further divide oppressed communities and distract them from their common goals and their common enemies. Thus, there is much wasted energy on horizontal hostility, which is her major point about antilesbian hysteria and “kitchen wars” in the Black community.

In “The Transformation of Silence,” the author posits that it is women’s responsibility to seek out the words of other women, especially across differences. In the battle against oppression, it is not to women’s benefit to “hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own” (43). That is, oppressors have seeded this fear of difference; a primary tactic to keep the oppressed acquiescent to wretched and unequal conditions is by socializing them to respect fear more than their own needs (44). Thus, with this essay, Lorde lays a foundation for later parts of Sister Outsider that emphasize the value and power of difference among people who share a common oppression.

These four essays convey what Lorde considers to be indispensable sources of power for women fighting oppression. The ability to feel, self-define, and embrace difference all predicate lasting change and action because they set self-examination and community solidarity into motion. In addition, these tools lie outside of dominant models of power, since Western power structures have discarded these tools and sought to make them inaccessible to the oppressed. Therefore, these essays provide Lorde’s foundational elements of resistance—largely internal work—that are prerequisites for any meaningful activism or effective change.