Audre Lorde on feminism, female friendships and intersectionality
I first found myself staring at the word 'feminist' and thinking: this is what I have been feeling, when I was fourteen and watching Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Ted Talk. Although Adichie is now one of my favourite writers, up until that point I had been reading whichever books I could find that dealt with themes of gender, and more often than not these writers were white women. Whilst there isn't anything wrong with this, I realise now that before going to university I hadn't considered the ways in which the voices of non-white female writers differed from the white writers that I'd grown up reading, and most importantly - how all of these voices come together to contribute to a whole.
Audre Lorde’s essay ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House’ begins by immediately highlighting this, and she writes that the absence of considerations of race, sexuality, class and age ‘weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the political’. White Feminism can be defined as 'the label given to feminist efforts and actions that uplift white women but that exclude or otherwise fail to address issues faced by minority groups', which is exactly the kind of exclusion that Lorde is addressing. Lorde was a black, lesbian, feminist writer and poet, who hailed from Harlem, New York, and her essay can be read as a warning against any kind of social/political movement that fails to consider the many ways in which we differ from each other, and the factors that may define this difference (intersectionality). I wanted to write about this essay because it’s short enough for a quick read, but also because Lorde’s writing is  a goldmine.
Something that has given me so much hope lately, is witnessing the way in which non-black folk have very publicly used social media as a platform through which to display their solidarity with black victims of police brutality and targeted public negligence. One of my favourite sections of this essay is where Lorde writes that ‘Difference must not merely be tolerated, but seen as a fund of necessary polarities between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic.’ This type of discussion is not only essential to feminism, but to helping us understand one another on a day to day basis, which social media has been an incredible tool for lately.
I was recently challenged by a man slightly older than myself to ‘prove’ that white privilege exists. Whilst I was (painfully) reading his messages about his thoughts on why the Black Lives Matter movement is redundant in today’s society, all I could think about was how much more meaningful our conversation could be if he spent as much time acknowledging the existence of difference as he did denying it, and how much more empathy and understanding that might then inspire. Lorde writes that ‘community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist.’ In this she isn’t dismissing issues that white women or men specifically may face, nor is she suggesting we only talk about black or minority issues, instead she is encouraging us to acknowledge the very real variation in our experiences that exist as a result of race, and then to work on empathising with each other and resolving these issues as a collective.Â
A powerful moment within the essay is when Lorde poses the question: ‘What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?’ When we consider this question in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement, we can encourage each other to take a closer look at the sources of information that we use to educate ourselves. Lorde seems to be suggesting that we cannot hope to resolve or understand issues of race using systems or frameworks that perpetuate this same oppression - many of the news outlets that are currently reporting on BLM or claiming to care deeply about racial inequality are the same institutions that have frequently worked to depoliticise, neglect or undermine issues of racism within the UK. In terms of my own use of social media, I have now followed a whole new group of accounts run by people of colour that I know deeply care about the issues that they are writing on, and you can find some here.
Something else that Lorde writes about is the beauty of female friendship; she describes the female desire to nurture and uplift one another as ‘redemptive’, and writes that ‘Interdependency between women is the way to a freedom which allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative’. To me this reads as an incredible testament to the power of female relationships. Whilst I’m sure that we’ve all seen the tweets laughing about how men don’t get therapists, they get a girlfriend, in reality relationships between men and women often involve a lot of emotional work, and attempts to provide the level of nurture that men don’t often offer one another within their friendships, which makes relationships exclusively between women so valuable.
Lorde’s sentiment is radical in the very fact that she’s not denying the way in which women lean on one another, but is instead elevating it as something to be celebrated. It’s during lockdown more than any other time that I’ve appreciated the very real way in which female friendships act as a pillar within my life and the lives of my friends, especially for those who don’t always have strong family relationships or a significant other to lean on.Â
If you take away nothing at all from my ramblings, please read Lorde’s essay, which I have linked here. In case you don’t want to read it because you're tired and lockdown has robbed you of the ability to read more than a page of writing, I’ve listed some of my favourite quotes from the essay below -
‘For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection which is feared by a patriarchal world. Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women.’
‘As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation or suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.'
‘The failure of academic feminists to recognise difference as a crucial strength is the failure to reach beyond the first patriarchal lesson. In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower.’
‘Only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters.’
