Difference, self-definition and Empowerment: a necessary interpretation of Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde

Abstract

In this short article I will describe and analyze the forms of resistance towards sexism and homophobia that Audre Lorde postulates in some of the essays and speeches gathered in Sister Outsider (1984). Additionally, I would like to demonstrate that those texts can be understood as systematical political interventions that look forward the construction of spaces of expression where all the voices of historically relegated subjects can converge. In the context of her prose writing, Lorde addressed and explored diverse concepts such as pride, love, violence, racial fear, sexual oppression, ways of urban living and the different forms of surviving in the big city. Starting with the theoretical base of Black Feminism, I pretend to prove the importance of Lorde’s contribution to the concept of intersectionality as well as the visibilization of multiple situations of violence inside the black community.