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A review by leelulah
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde
2.0
The good:
-Shows special concern for children, compared to other radfems
-Acknowledging that while accessible healthcare is a goal, the USSR wasn't a paradise, especially for their treatment of homosexuals
-Her words on poetry as a vital act for women, an act of resistance and a proof that not always feeling and thinking are necessarily at odds.
-Reflection on the awareness of death
-Importance of language
-Responsibility for others. Acknowledge difference but let it not become an excuse for separation as if an experience for someone of another race was totally unrelatable on that basis alone, which has become essential in today's identity politics.
-Opposes sterilization (... but, no mention of forced abortion).
Acknowledges women are put at odds between each other by the culture, and for the approval of men.
-Recognition of the manipulation of the erotic, "Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling" [...]
"The principal error of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need -the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fullfilment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we live. But this is tantamount to bringing a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it's also profoundly cruel."
-"There are frequent attempts to equate pornography and eroticism, two diametrically opposed uses of the sexual. Because of these attempts, it has become fashionable to separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical. “What do you mean, a poetic revolutionary, a meditating gunrunner? In the same way, we have attempted to separate the spiritual and the erotic, thereby reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the ascetic who aspires to feel nothing."
-Recognizes separatism wouldn't work; importance of willing sacrifice
-Importance of black men articulating their thoughts; erradication of sexism benefits men, too.
-Complexitiy of identity for boys-men raised by lesbian mothers. Mothers must learn to let go. ----Acknowledges the problem of exclusion of boys in radfem circles
-Institutionalized rejection of difference renders outsiders as surplus people.
Objectionable stuff:
-White-Father / Black inner mother dichotomy. Subconscious pagan argument of "we remember our old ways"
-Being into Kwanzaa (while it's Africanist nonsense that has no relation to the historical roots of the descendants of victims of the slave trade in the US)
Romanticization of some African notions of marriage that challenge the monogamic-heterosexual paradigm.
-Hasn't spoken much of ableism as a barrier that women face.
-Still supports abortion
-Assumes lesbians will still have children, which is odd for a radfem, to say the least.
-Use of rhetoric of power
-Atheism, but that's pretty common for a radfem, at least it shows to be equally disgusted by all religious manifestation and not selective.
-The Mary Daly incident. As it is known, this book features the open letter to Mary Daly on the wrong assumptions of Gyn/Ecology. Not only did Daly apologize in four months, but even accepted reuniting with her to talk about it, and reocgnized her limitations when talking about female black representations of the divine and Lorde still acted like Daly had not answered. (https://feminismandreligion.com/2011/10/05/mary-dalys-letter-to-audre-lorde)
Other interesting things
-Her interview with Adrienne Rich and the importance of her relationship with her mother, poetry, and teaching
-Her talk about Malcom X, even though I didn't find myself agreeing with all of it
-Shows special concern for children, compared to other radfems
-Acknowledging that while accessible healthcare is a goal, the USSR wasn't a paradise, especially for their treatment of homosexuals
-Her words on poetry as a vital act for women, an act of resistance and a proof that not always feeling and thinking are necessarily at odds.
-Reflection on the awareness of death
-Importance of language
-Responsibility for others. Acknowledge difference but let it not become an excuse for separation as if an experience for someone of another race was totally unrelatable on that basis alone, which has become essential in today's identity politics.
-Opposes sterilization (... but, no mention of forced abortion).
Acknowledges women are put at odds between each other by the culture, and for the approval of men.
-Recognition of the manipulation of the erotic, "Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling" [...]
"The principal error of any system which defines the good in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, or which defines human need to the exclusion of the psychic and emotional components of that need -the principal horror of such a system is that it robs our work of its erotic value, its erotic power and life appeal and fullfilment. Such a system reduces work to a travesty of necessities, a duty by which we earn bread or oblivion for ourselves and those we live. But this is tantamount to bringing a painter and then telling her to improve her work, and to enjoy the act of painting. It is not only next to impossible, it's also profoundly cruel."
-"There are frequent attempts to equate pornography and eroticism, two diametrically opposed uses of the sexual. Because of these attempts, it has become fashionable to separate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical. “What do you mean, a poetic revolutionary, a meditating gunrunner? In the same way, we have attempted to separate the spiritual and the erotic, thereby reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the ascetic who aspires to feel nothing."
-Recognizes separatism wouldn't work; importance of willing sacrifice
-Importance of black men articulating their thoughts; erradication of sexism benefits men, too.
-Complexitiy of identity for boys-men raised by lesbian mothers. Mothers must learn to let go. ----Acknowledges the problem of exclusion of boys in radfem circles
-Institutionalized rejection of difference renders outsiders as surplus people.
Objectionable stuff:
-White-Father / Black inner mother dichotomy. Subconscious pagan argument of "we remember our old ways"
-Being into Kwanzaa (while it's Africanist nonsense that has no relation to the historical roots of the descendants of victims of the slave trade in the US)
Romanticization of some African notions of marriage that challenge the monogamic-heterosexual paradigm.
-Hasn't spoken much of ableism as a barrier that women face.
-Still supports abortion
-Assumes lesbians will still have children, which is odd for a radfem, to say the least.
-Use of rhetoric of power
-Atheism, but that's pretty common for a radfem, at least it shows to be equally disgusted by all religious manifestation and not selective.
-The Mary Daly incident. As it is known, this book features the open letter to Mary Daly on the wrong assumptions of Gyn/Ecology. Not only did Daly apologize in four months, but even accepted reuniting with her to talk about it, and reocgnized her limitations when talking about female black representations of the divine and Lorde still acted like Daly had not answered. (https://feminismandreligion.com/2011/10/05/mary-dalys-letter-to-audre-lorde)
Other interesting things
-Her interview with Adrienne Rich and the importance of her relationship with her mother, poetry, and teaching
-Her talk about Malcom X, even though I didn't find myself agreeing with all of it