Audre Lorde Quotes on Knowledge
Audre Lorde (1934–1992), the American poet and essayist whose Sister Outsider (1984) collected the most influential of her philosophical essays, gave late-twentieth-century feminist and critical race theory one of its founding statements of the epistemological case for the cognitive resources of those whom the dominant institutions had excluded. The framework — articulated across essays such as "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," "The Uses of the Erotic," and "Poetry Is Not a Luxury" — treats the situated knowledge produced from the standpoint of multiply marginalized subjects as a substantive cognitive achievement rather than merely a corrective to a more general account, and defends the embodied, affective, and poetic dimensions of cognition against the disciplinary norms then prevailing in academic philosophy.
Quotes
-
“When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.”
The Cancer Journals (1980) -
“The Cancer Journals (1980)”
When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision, then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid. -
“The Uses of Anger : Women Responding to Racism (1981)”
I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. -
“When I speak of the erotic , then I speak of it as an assertion of the life force of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.”
As quoted in Meditations for Women Who Do Too Much (1990) by Anne Wilson Schaef, entry for June 26: "Living Life Fully -
“Feminism must be on the cutting edge of real social change if it is to survive as a movement in any particular country.”
A Burst of Light (1988), cited in Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks