Recommendations
Books Like Sister Outsider
Best books to read after Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde
Sister Outsider established the vocabulary for thinking about difference, power, and the erotic as knowledge. These 8 books extend Lorde's project — Black feminist theory, intersectional thinking, the politics of the body — across five decades of women writing from the margins toward the center.
- 1Buy
Zami: A Biomythography
by Audre Lorde
Lorde's 1982 'biomythography' — a blend of autobiography, mythology, and fiction about her childhood in Harlem, her emergence as a lesbian, and her political awakening — is the personal and literary companion to Sister Outsider's theoretical essays, giving the essays a narrative and biographical context.
- 2Buy
Between the World and Me
by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates's 2015 letter to his son about the Black body in America works in the tradition that Sister Outsider helped establish — the tradition of Black American political writing that insists on the body as a political site and on the personal as the ground of the political — and is the most important recent work in Lorde's lineage.
- 3Buy
Bad Feminist
by Roxane Gay
Gay's 2014 essay collection brings the tradition of Black feminist writing that Sister Outsider represents to a contemporary popular readership — accessible, funny, and serious in equal measure, and deeply shaped by Lorde's insistence on honesty about contradiction and on the intersection of race and gender.
- 4Buy
This Bridge Called My Back
by Cherríe Moraga
Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa's 1981 anthology of writings by radical women of color — published three years before Sister Outsider — is the foundational companion text of the same moment in Black and Chicana feminist thought; Lorde contributed to it and is in ongoing dialogue with its project throughout Sister Outsider.
- 5Buy
The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House
by Audre Lorde
The essay that gives this title its name is included in Sister Outsider, but Lorde's essay collections are worth reading alongside the critical responses they have generated — particularly the ways in which subsequent feminist thinkers have extended and complicated her argument about working within or against existing power structures.
- 6Buy
Redefining Realness
by Janet Mock
Mock's 2014 memoir about her path to womanhood as a Black and Native Hawaiian trans woman extends Lorde's insistence on speaking from the specific intersection of race, gender, and sexuality into the twenty-first century, and Mock has cited Lorde as a foundational influence on her own thinking about identity and power.
- 7Buy
We Should All Be Feminists
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Adichie's 2014 extended essay brings a contemporary Nigerian-American perspective to the feminism that Sister Outsider helped shape, and is the most globally read feminist essay of the decade; reading it alongside Sister Outsider shows both the continuities and the differences in feminist thinking across generations and contexts.
- 8Buy
Feminism Is for Everybody
by bell hooks
hooks's 2000 introduction to feminist theory is the most accessible companion to Sister Outsider in the Black feminist tradition — clear, uncompromising, and addressed to readers who are encountering feminism for the first time, rather than to an academic audience, in the same spirit that Lorde consistently wrote for readers rather than for institutions.
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