Lorde similarly defends the non-rational in Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power. She challenges patriarchal, rational, Enlightenment ideals by arguing that no thought could be articulated without the aid of poetry. In Poetry is Not a Luxury, Lorde asserts that poetry is essential to life and especially to women for it is through poetry that we illuminate and give shape to our ideas, hopes and fears. Throughout this collection, Lorde offers a defence of poetry, feeling, and those deep, non-rational elements of womankind, which are dismissed by the “white fathers” as useless and dangerous. Her essays challenge us to identify these pieces of the oppressor within ourselves and ultimately to discard them. In a speech entitled Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference, Lorde asserts that “the true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations which we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us”. Lorde, a self-described “Black lesbian feminist socialist”, emphasises the necessity of celebrating difference and recognising the tools of the oppressor in her groundbreaking feminist work.
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde is a collection of speeches and essays written in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s.
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