Introduction to Audre Lorde ‘Age, race, class, and sex : Redefining difference’

Nayak, S

Abstract

This text (1980) by the Black feminist lesbian activist Audre Lorde (1934 -1992) also known as the ‘Sister Outsider’ concerns issues that occupy Lorde’s critical social theory (Byrd, 2009:21). Re-reading Lorde forces critical analysis of reading practices, offers conceptual and methodological resources to bear on our contemporary crisis of ‘the tightening economy, and increased conservatism’ and compels us to ask (as she asks in this text)why are some texts are used more others.
‘I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self’ is characteristic of Lorde’s engagement with the ‘psychological toll’ (The Combahee River Collective, 1977) of the aporia of intersectioning simultaneous, multiple oppression within a ‘profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.’ Any attempt at a ‘psychic retreat’ (Steiner, 1993:1) from the ‘psychological toll’ the aporetics of intersectionality is to disavow the aporia. Lorde exposes the ways in which oppressive social structures create oppressive psychic structures warning that ‘[a]s members of such an economy, we have all been programmed to respond to human differences with fear and loathing.’

Citation

Nayak, S. (2015). Introduction to Audre Lorde ‘Age, race, class, and sex : Redefining difference’. In I. Parker (Ed.), Marxismo, psicología y psicoanálisis. Mexico DF: Ideas y Letras

• Publication Date: Jan 1, 2015
• Deposit Date: Jun 8, 2015
• Book Title: Marxismo, psicología y psicoanálisis