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Audre Lorde Sister Outsider - Coggle Diagram
Audre Lorde
Sister Outsider
"Poetry is not a Luxury" (1977)
What is the problem?
"there's no new ideas. there are only new ways of making them felt--of examining what those ideas feel like [...] while we suffer the old longings, battle the old " (39).
poetry is the ability to express those things that we have felt but we haven't had the ability to say before
WHat is the method?
uh oh, it's feelings? (highly gendered; racialized too) Bashing against Descartes and Caretsian dualism: "The white fathers said I think therefore I am;" (37)
What is the evidence?
What's the way out?
"Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems" (37). Poetry is a very personal thing, and we need to use it to name our selves, our feelings, and the worlds we want to build.
"The transformation of Silence into Action" (1977)
the use of breast cancer and tumor to shock but create a form of intimacy; it's also gendered about breast cancer
immediacy and urgency show us the ways that we reflect on time and how we relate to
How do we name and recognize "oppressions"?
Frye's "birdcage" - if you're only looking at a singular pillar, you think folks can just move around it, but if you take a step back, you see the pillars and wires are all interconnected.
self-awareness! You have to do the work with yourself
the specific, deliberate histories of these systems
this comes with particular stereotypes as well
how do we handle multiple oppressions (sexism, racism, classism all together): we can't think about these at which one is worse
What strategies for Lorde offer us for change, and resistance?
we need to think through our own fears (and not let them stop you) "learning to put fear into perspective gave me great strength" (41)
"we learn more and more to cherish our own feelings, and to respect those hidden sources of our pwer from where true knowledge and, therefore, lasting action comes" (Pinal 37)