Lorde, Audre

Poet, social critic, activist, teacher, and warrior are some of the words that have been used to describe Audre Lorde (1934–1992). Born in New York City to West Indian parents, Lorde's ideas have become crucial to feminist theory and women's studies. As an African American, lesbian feminist, Lorde was marginalized in a variety of communities. Thus, she spent her life fighting against marginalization and the practices that silence marginal voices.

Lorde attended Hunter College from 1951 to 1959, where she majored in literature and philosophy. She earned her master's degree in library science from Columbia University. In 1968, she left her position as head librarian at the University of New York to accept the position as poetin-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. There, she published her first volume of poetry, The First Cities. Later in her career, she held the post of Thomas Hunter Chair of Literature at Hunter College.

Along with her poetry, Lorde wrote much about the sexism in mainstream white culture, African American culture, and in feminist and lesbian movements. Her prose emphasized the importance of stronger voices for black women in general, and all marginalized groups in particular. Lorde cofounded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press with Barbara Smith, which explicitly focused on publishing works by women of color. She organized the Sisterhood in Support of Sisters in South Africa, established the St. Croix Women's Coalition, and helped to build coalitions between Afro-German and Afro-Dutch women. Lorde was married for eight years and had two children, Elizabeth and Jonathon. She died in 1992 of breast cancer. Shortly before her death, she took the name Gambda Adisa, Warrior: She Who Makes Her Meaning Known, in an African naming ceremony. When she died, she was living in St Croix, Virgin Islands, with her life partner. Over her lifetime, she had won many honors and awards, and since that time she has had literary awards and activist organizations named in her honor.

One can best become acquainted with the themes in Lorde's work through her biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982). Lorde created the term [Page 454]biomythography to describe how her own life story connects to history, biography, and personal memories. In this work, one learns how Lorde came to develop an ethics of reflexive action and how she regularly sought to break the silences often imposed upon marginalized social groups. In this work, Lorde also challenges static sexual binaries. A superficial analysis of her work can lead one to assume that she is promoting the sort of sexual essentialism that is found in some of Adrienne Rich's work. However, while Lorde does value women-centered relationships, she does not do so at the expense of attributing universal characteristics to members of any human group.

Sister Outsider (1984) is a compilation of some of Lorde's most important essays. These essays are central to contemporary feminist theory and other work concerned with social justice. From this volume, the essay “Poetry Is Not a Luxury” is a standard citation for many who contend that poetry, prose, and other creative forms of self-expression interconnect with political activism and self-reflection. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” is another work that is widely cited in both feminist and queer theory. In this essay, she examines the power that can be found when one embraces one's sexuality. Lorde purposefully uses the word erotic because of the debates, then and now, concerning women's sexuality. In feminist theory, there is the contention that sex, pornography, and thus the erotic can never be an avenue of liberation because these terms and actions are defined within a patriarchal and thus misogynist context. As such, there can be no strength found by dwelling in a sexualized body. However, Lorde reclaims the erotic as it is derived from its Greek root, eros: “the personification of love in all its aspects—born of Chaos, and personifying creative power and harmony. When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women” (1984:55). For Lorde, the erotic fuses women's creative powers with their sexuality, making women-identified love a source of empowerment instead of subordination.

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