Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches.
de Audre Lorde
Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Audre Lorde texte complet - Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. est le grand livre que vous voulez. Ce beau livre est créé par Audre Lorde. En fait, le livre a 192 pages. The Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. est libéré par la fabrication de Crossing Press. Vous pouvez consulter en ligne avec Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. étape facile. Toutefois, si vous désirez garder pour ordinateur portable, vous pouvez Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. sauver maintenant.
Sister Outsider The fourteen essays and speeches collected in this work, several of them published for the first time, span almost a decade of this Black lesbian feminnist's work. Lorde is unflinching in her observations and is lucid and clarifying in her coverage of a range of essential topics. Full descriptionRang parmi les ventes Amazon: #42397 dans LivresMarque: Brand: Crossing PressPublié le: 2007-08-01Sorti le: 2007-08-01Langue d'origine: AnglaisNombre d'articles: 1Dimensions: 8.97" h x .55" l x 6.00" L, .65 livres Reliure: Broché192 pagesExtraitScratching the Surface:Some Notes on Barriers toWomen and LovingRacism: The belief in the inherent superiority of one race overall others and thereby the right to dominance. Sexism: The belief in the inherent superiority of one sex andthereby the right to dominance. Heterosexism: The belief in the inherentsuperiority of one pat,tern of lovingand thereby its right to dominance. Homophobia: The fear of feelings of love for members of one'sown sexand therefore the hatred of those feelings in others. THEABOVE FORMS of human blindness stem from the same root- an inability to recognize the notion of difference as a dynamichuman force, one which is enriching rather than threatening tothe defined self, when there are shared goals. To a large degree, at least verbally, the Black community hasmoved beyond the "two steps behind her man" concept of sexual relations sometimes mouthed as desirable during the sixties.This was a time when the myth of the Black matriarchy as asocial disease was being presented by racist forces to redirect ourattentions away from the real sources of Black oppression.For Black women as well as Black men, it is axiomatic that ifwe do not define ourselves for ourselves, we will be defined byothers - for their use and to our detriment. The developmentof self-defined Black women, ready to explore and pursue ourpower and interests within our communities, is a vital componentin the war for Black liberation. The image of the Angolanwoman with a baby on one arm and a gun in the other isneither romantic nor fanciful. When Black women in this countrycorne together to examine our sources of strength and support, and to recognize our common social, cultural, emotional,and political interests, it is a development which can only contribute to the power of the Black community as a whole. It cancertainly never diminish it. For it is through the corningtogether of self-actualized individuals, female and male, that anyreal advances can be made. The old sexual power relationshipsbased on a dominant/subordinate model between unequalshave not served us as a people, nor as individuals.Black women who define ourselves and our goals beyond thesphere of a sexual relationship can bring to any endeavor therealized focus of completed and therefore empowered individuals. Black women and Black men who recognize that thedevelopment of their particular strengths and interests does notdiminish the other do not need to diffuse their energies fightingfor control over each other. We can focus our attentions againstthe real economic, political, and social forces at the heart of thissociety which are ripping us and our children and our worldsapart. Increasingly, despite opposition, Black women are corningtogether to explore and to alter those manifestations of oursociety which oppress us in different ways from those that oppress Black men. This is no threat to Black men. It is only seenas one by those Black men who choose to embody withinthemselves those same manifestations of female oppression. Forinstance, no Black man has ever been forced to bear a child hedid not want or could not support. Enforced sterilization andunavailable abortions are tools of oppression against Blackwomen, as is rape. Only to those Black men who are unclearabout the pathways of their own definition can the self-actualization and self-protective bonding of Black women beseen as a threatening development.Today, the red herring of lesbian...baiting is being used in theBlack community to obscure the true face of racism/sexism.Black women sharing close ties with each other, politically oremotionally, are not the enemies of Black men. Too frequently,however, some Black men attempt to rule by fear those Blackwomen who are more ally than enemy. These tactics are expressed as threats of emotional rejection: "Their poetry wasn'ttoo bad but I couldn't take all those lezzies." The Black man say...ing this is code...warning every Black woman present interestedin a relationship with a man - and most Black women are that(1) if she wishes to have her work considered by him shemust eschew any other allegiance except to him and (2) anywoman who wishes to retain his friendship and/or support hadbetter not be "tainted" by woman-identified interests.If such threats of labelling, vilification and/or emotional isolation are not enough to bring Black women docilely into camp asfollowers, or persuade us to avoid each other politically andemotionally, then the rule by terror can be expressed physically,as on the campus of a New York State college in the late 1970s,where Black women sought to come together around women'sconcerns. Phone calls threatening violence were made to thoseBlack women who dared to explore the possibilities of a feministconnection with non...Black women. Some of these women, intimidated by threats and the withdrawal of Black male approval,did turn against their sisters. When threats did not prevent the attempted coalition of feminists, the resulting campuswide hysteria left some Black women beaten and raped.Whether the threats by Black men actually led to these assaults,or merely encouraged the climate of hostility within which theycould occur, the results upon the women attacked were the same.War, imprisonment, and "the street" have decimated theranks of Black males of marriageable age. The fury of manyBlack heterosexual women against white women who dateBlack men is rooted in this unequal sexual equation within theBlack community, since whatever threatens to widen that equation is deeply and articulately resented. But this is essentiallyunconstructive resentment because it extends sideways only. Itcan never result in true progress on the issue because it does notquestion the vertical lines of power or authority, nor the sexistassumptions which dictate the terms of that competition. Andthe racism of white women might be better addressed where it isless complicated by their own sexual oppression. In this situation it is not the non..Black woman who calls the tune, butrather the Black man who turns away from himself in his sistersor who, through a fear borrowed from white men, reads herstrength not as a resource but as a challenge.All too often the message comes loud and clear to Blackwomen from Black men: "I am the only prize worth having andthere are not too many of me, and remember, I can always goelsewhere. So if you want me, you'd better stay in your placewhich is away from one another, or I will call you 'lesbian' andwipe you out." Black women are programmed to defineourselves within this male attention and to compete with eachother for it rather than to recognize and move upon our common interests. The tactic of encouraging horizontal hostility to becloud morepressing issues of oppression is by no means new, nor limited torelations between women. The same tactic is used to encourageseparation between Black women and Black men. In discussionsaround the hiring and firing of Black faculty at universities, thecharge is frequently heard that Black women are more easilyhired than are Black men. For this reason, Black women's problems of promotion and tenure are not to be considered important since they are only "taking jobs away from Black men."Here again, energy is being wasted on fighting each other overthe pitifully few crumbs allowed us rather than being used, in ajoining of forces, to fight for a more realistic ratio of Black faculty. The latter would be a vertical battle against racist policies ofthe academic structure itself, one which could result in realpower and change. It is the structure at the top which desireschangelessness and which profits from these apparently endlesskitchen wars.Instead of keeping our attentions focused upon our real needs,enormous energy is being wasted in the Black community todayin antilesbian hysteria. Yet women..identified women - thosewho sought their own destinies and attempted to execute themin the absence of male support - have been around in all of ourcommunities for a long time. As Yvonne Flowers of York College pointed out in a recent discussion, the unmarried aunt,childless or otherwise, whose home and resources were often awelcome haven for different members of the family, was a familiar figure in many of our childhoods. And within thehomes of our Black communities today, it is not the Black lesbian who is battering and raping our underage girl..children outof displaced and sickening frustration.The Black lesbian has come under increasing attack fromboth Black men and heterosexual Black women. In the sameway that the existence of the self..defined Black woman is nothreat to the self..defined Black man, the Black lesbian is anemotional threat only to those Black women whose feelings ofkinship and love for other Black women are problematic insome way. For so long, we have been encouraged to view eachother with suspicion, as eternal competitors, or as the visibleface of our own self-rejection.Yet traditionally, Black women have always bonded togetherin support of each other, however uneasily and in the face ofwhatever other allegiances which militated against that bonding. We have banded together with each other for wisdom andstrength and support, even when it was only in relationship toone man. We need only look at the close, although highly complex and involved, relationships between African co..wives, or atthe Amazon warriors of ancient Dahomey who fought togetheras the King's main and most ferocious bodyguard. We need onlylook at the more promising power wielded by the West AfricanMarket Women Associations of today, and those governmentswhich have risen and fallen at their pleasure.In a retelling of her life, a ninety-two-year-old Efik-Ibibiowoman of Nigeria recalls her love for another woman:I had a woman friend to whom I revealed my secrets. She wasvery fond of keeping secrets to herself. We acted as husband andwife. We always moved hand in glove and my husband and hersknew about our relationship. The villagers nicknamed us twinsisters. When I was out of gear with my husband, she would bethe one to restore peace. I often sent my children to go and workfor her in return for her kindnesses to me. My husband beingmore fortunate to get more pieces of land than her husband,allowed some to her, even though she was not my co-wife.*On the West Coast of Africa, the Fon of Dahomey still havetwelve different kinds of marriage. One of them is known as"giving the goat to the buck," where a woman of independentmeans marries another woman who then mayor may not bearchildren, all of whom will belong to the blood line of the firstwoman. Some marriages of this kind are arranged to provideheirs for women of means who wish to remain "free," and someare lesbian relationships. Marriages like these occur throughoutAfrica, in several different places among different peoples.Routinely, the women involved are accepted members of theircommunities, evaluated not by their sexuality but by theirrespective places within the community. While a piece of each Black woman remembers the old ways ofanother place - when we enjoyed each other in a sisterhood ofwork and play and power - other pieces of us, less functional,eye one another with suspicion. In the interests of separation,Black women have been taught to view each other as alwayssuspect, heartless competitors for the scarce male, the all-important prize that could legitimize our existence. This dehumanizing denial of self is no less lethal than the dehumanization ofracism to which it is so closely allied.If the recent attack upon lesbians in the Black community isbased solely upon an aversion to the idea of sexual contact between members of the same sex (a contact which has existed forages in most of the female compounds across the African continent), why then is the idea of sexual contact between Black menso much more easily accepted, or unrema.rked? Is the imaginedthreat simply the existence of a self..motivated, self-defined Blackwoman who will not fear nor suffer terrible retribution from thegods because she does not necessarily seek her face in a man'seyes, even if he has fathered her children? Female-headedhouseholds in the Black community are not always situationsby default. The distortion of relationship which says "I disagree with you,so I must destroy you" leaves us as Black people with basicallyuncreative victories, defeated in any common struggle. Thisjugular vein psychology is based on the fallacy that your assertionor affirmation of self is an attack upon my self - or that mydefining myself will somehow prevent or retard your self,definition. The supposition that one sex needs the other's acquiescencein order to exist prevents both from moving togetheras self-defined persons toward a common goal.This kind of action is a prevalent error among oppressedpeoples. It is based upon the false notion that there is only alimited and particular amount of freedom that must be dividedup between us, with the largest and juiciest pieces of liberty go,ing as spoils to the victor or the stronger. So instead of joiningtogether to fight for more, we quarrel between ourselves for alarger slice of the one pie. Black women fight between ourselvesover men, instead of pursuing and using who we are and ourstrengths for lasting change; Black women and men fight between ourselves over who has more of a right to freedom, instead of seeing each other's struggles as part of our own and vitalto our common goals; Black and white women fight betweenourselves over who is the more oppressed, instead of seeing thoseareas in which our causes are the same. (Of course, this last separationis worsened by the intransigent racism that white womentoo often fail to, or cannot, address in themselves.)At a recent Black literary conference, a heterosexual Blackwoman stated that to endorse lesbianism was to endorse thedeath of our race. This position reflects acute fright or a faultyreasoning, for once again it ascribes false power to difference. Tothe racist, Black people are so powerful that the presence of onecan contaminate a whole lineage; to the heterosexist, lesbiansare so powerful that the presence of one can contaminate the whole sex. This position supposes that if we do not eradicate lesbianism in the Black community, all Black women will becomelesbians. It also supposes that lesbians do not have children.Both suppositions are patently false. As Black women, we must deal with all the realities of ourlives which place us at risk as Black women -homosexual orheterosexual. In 1977 in Detroit, a young Black actress, PatriciaCowan, was invited to audition for a play called Hammer andwas then hammered to death by the young Black maleplaywright. Patricia Cowan was not killed because she wasBlack. She was killed because she was a Black woman, and hercause belongs to us all. History does not record whether or notshe was a lesbian, but only that she had a four-year-old child.Of the four groups, Black and white women, Black and whitemen, Black women have the lowest average wage. This is a vitalconcern for us all, no matter with whom we sleep.As Black women we have the right and responsibility todefine ourselves and to seek our allies in common cause: withBlack men against racism, and with each other and whitewomen against sexism. But most of all, as Black women we havethe right and responsibility to recognize each other without fearand to love where we choose. Both lesbian and heterosexualBlack women today share a history of bonding and strength towhich our sexual identities and our other differences must notblind us.Revue de presse"An eye-opener"-Publishers Weekly"[Sister Outsider is] anotherindication of the depth of analysis that black women writers are contributing to feminist thought."- Barbara Christian, PhD, author ofBlack Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women WritersPrésentation de l'éditeurPresenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsidercelebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature. In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action and change. Her prose is incisive, unflinching, and lyrical, reflecting struggle but ultimately offering messages of hope. This commemorative edition includes a new foreword by Lorde-scholar and poet Cheryl Clarke, who celebrates the ways in which Lorde's philosophies resonate more than twenty years after they were first published. These landmark writings are, in Lorde's own words, a call to “never close our eyes to the terror, to the chaos which is Black which is creative which is female which is dark which is rejected which is messy which is...”“[Lorde's] works will be important to those truly interested in growing up sensitive, intelligent, and aware.”—New York Times
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