Sister Outsider was published in 1984. It is a collection of personal essays by one of the leading women in the third wave feminist movement. I am shocked that it was published in 1984. It feels new and relevant. Lorde tackles: the racism in New York in 1984, the sexism in black men and their treatment of black women, the anti-lesbianism in the black community, and finally the treatment of black women of themselves and each other. Something Lorde was one of the first people to really push for is the idea of intersectionality. This means that feminists cannot single out their feminism from their other identities, because of how those things will intersect. For example, black women experience something called misogynoir, but they also experience racism and misogyny independently. For a black lesbian there are even more types of oppression to compound to this.
Another relevant topic to discourse today is the way Lorde tackles internalized racism. Speaking from a trauma-informed lens, it becomes much easier to understand when you see all of these bigotries as layers of generational, cultural, and familial trauma stacked on top of one another. In Sister Outsider Lorde is pissed off. She knew because she had access to this anger that she could use it. Actually, wield it, artfully and strategically.
The Personal is Political
As you go through the essays you also learn more about her. Not only that she was angry and committed to healing her communities (and thus herself), but the steps she had to take in order for these to occur. She was nervous, had to learn to speak through her shyness. She took classes, she travelled the world, she became an academic, and she was a lesbian raising a child with a white woman in the 1980s.
Audre Lorde is more well known for her poetry, however it is the words she writes in this collection of essays that are most often quoted. It is nice that she gets credit for so much of this work that we see the small fruits of in the current day. Though of course there is still so much bigotry to wade through, and so much reactionary bigotry to the small improvements.
Rating: 5/5
If you’d like to read Sister Outsider you can purchase it from Bookshop.org and help support independent book stores in the USA, or you can get it at Book Outlet if you’re in Canada.
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