Question 1

What does Audre Lorde mean by "the erotic as power"?

Accepted Answer

In 'Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power' — one of the most cited essays in Sister Outsider — Lorde argues that the erotic is not primarily about sex but about a deep knowing, a capacity for joy and fullness that women have been taught to distrust and suppress. The erotic, for Lorde, is the force that allows us to know what we feel deeply and fully — to distinguish between what we do with genuine engagement and what we do merely to survive or to please others. She argues that women have been taught that this kind of deep knowledge is dangerous (because it might lead them to refuse the conditions imposed on them), and that the suppression of the erotic is a tool of domination: keeping women from their own deepest knowledge keeps them manageable. The essay is also a critique of pornography, which Lorde distinguishes from the erotic: pornography reduces the erotic to the purely sensational, stripping it of the depth and connection that are its value.

Question 2

What is Lorde's concept of intersectionality?

Accepted Answer

Lorde did not use the term 'intersectionality' — that was coined by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 — but Sister Outsider is one of the foundational texts of the thinking that the term names. Throughout the collection, Lorde insists that she cannot be understood as simply 'Black' or simply 'a woman' or simply 'a lesbian' or simply 'a mother' or simply 'a poet'; she is all of these simultaneously, and each aspect of her identity shapes the others and shapes how the world treats her. The essay 'Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference' is the most explicit articulation of this argument, but it runs throughout the collection. Lorde's insistence on holding all of these identities simultaneously without hierarchy — refusing to prioritize her racial identity over her gender or her sexuality — was controversial even within the feminist and civil rights movements, and her arguments for why this insistence matters are among the collection's central contributions.

Question 3

Who was Audre Lorde writing for in Sister Outsider?

Accepted Answer

The essays in Sister Outsider were addressed to multiple overlapping audiences: to white feminists who were ignoring or marginalizing the experiences of women of color (most explicitly in 'The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House,' originally delivered as a comment at a New York University Institute for the Humanities conference on 'The Personal and the Political'); to Black men who were excluding women from the civil rights conversation; to straight women who were marginalizing lesbians; and to Black women who were pressuring each other to prioritize racial solidarity over the acknowledgment of other forms of oppression. The collection emerged from Lorde's specific position as a Black lesbian feminist poet living with cancer, and she insisted throughout on the specificity and value of that position — on speaking from who she actually was rather than adopting any movement's preferred identity.

Sister Outsider Reading Order

Complete Sister Outsider Book List

Sister Outsider

Zami: A Biomythography

Sister Outsider — Frequently Asked Questions

What does Audre Lorde mean by "the erotic as power"?

What is Lorde's concept of intersectionality?

Who was Audre Lorde writing for in Sister Outsider?

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