Liabilities of language: Audre lorde reclaiming difference

Quarterly Journal of Speech

Volumn 84, Issue 4, 1998, Pages 4348-470

  Olson, Lester C ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH   (United States)

Author keywords

Audre Lorde; Black liberation; Complicity; Difference; Feminist rhetoric; Gay and lesbian liberation; Human liberation; Human rights; Relational practices; Women's liberation

Indexed keywords

EID: 0345829817     PISSN: 00335630     EISSN: 14795779     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00335639809384232     Document Type: Article

References (60)

1. In rhetorical criticism, listening rarely receives attention as a radical activity. Susan Zaeske, "The 'Promiscuous Audience' Controversy and the Emergence of the Early Woman's Rights Movement," Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 191-208.
2. James Darsey, "Die Non: Gay Liberation and the Rhetoric of Pure Tolerance," Queer Words, Queer Images: Communication and the Construction of Homosexuality, ed. R. Jeffrey Ringer (New York: New York UP, 1994) 45.
3. Ossie Davis, "The English Language Is My Enemy," in Language, Communication, and Rhetoric in Black America (New York: Harper, 1972) 49-57.
4. Audre Lorde, "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action," Sister Outsider: Essays & Speeches by Audre Lorde (Freedom, CA: Crossings, 1984) 43-44.
5. For a rhetorical interpretation, Lester C. Olson, "On the Margins of Rhetoric: Audre Lorde Transforming Silence into Language and Action," Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 49-70.
6. Audre Lorde, "Age, Race, Class, Sex: Women Redefining Difference," Sister Outsider 114-123.
7. Martha Minow, "Justice Engendered," Harvard Law Review 101.1 (1987): 13.
8. Lorde, "Age, Race, Class, Sex," Sister Outsider 114-123.
9. Lorde, "Transformation of Silence," Sister Outsider 43.
10. Additional speeches that examine coalition politics include Adrienne Rich, "If Not with Others, How?" Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose, 1979-1985 (New York: Norton, 1986) 202-209
11. Angela Davis, "Let Us All Rise Together: Radical Perspectives on Empowerment for Afro-American Women," Women, Culture, & Politics (New York: Random House, 1990) 3-15
12. Bernice Johnson Reagon, "Coalition Politics: Turning the Century," Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table, 1983) 356-36
13. Linda Gordon, "On 'Difference'," Genders 10 (1991): 91-111
14. By referring to "layering, matrixing, and compounding," I am using metaphors, none of which are altogether satisfying intellectually. Scholarship that discusses the implications of these metaphors includes: Patricia Hill Collins, "Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought," Social Problems 33.6 (December 1986): 514-532
15. Patricia Hill Collins, "Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment," Black Feminist Thought 221-238
16. Nancy A. Hewitt, "Compounding Differences," Feminist Studies 18.2 (Summer 1992): 313-326
17. Deborah K. King, "Multiple Jeopardy, Multiple Consciousness: The Context of a Black Feminist Ideology," Signs 14.1 (1988): 42-72
18. Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill, "Theorizing Difference From Multiracial Feminism," Feminist Studies 22.2 (Summer 1996): 321-331.
19. Mark McPhail, "Complicity: The Theory of Negative Difference," Howard Journal of Communications 3.1-2 (Summer/Fall 1991): 3.
20. Linda Alcoff, "The Problem of Speaking for Others," Cultural Critique 20 (Winter 1991-2): 7.
21. For an analysis of this concern, see Michael Awkward, "Negotiations of Power: White Critics, Black Texts, and the Self-Referential Impulse," American Literary History 2.4 (1990): 581-606.
22. Lisa A. Flores, "Creating Discursive Space Through a Rhetoric of Difference: Chicana Feminists Craft a Homeland," Quarterly Journal of Speech 82 (1996): 142-156
23. Gloria Hull, "Living on the Line: Audre Lorde and Our Dead Behind Us," Changing Our Own Words: Essays on Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, ed. Cheryl A. Wall (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1989)
24. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (New York: George Braziller, 1955). Lorde's speech can be understood as a strenuous exercise in demystification, confronting the various sources of mystery stressed by Burke: mystification resulting from symbolism, social relations, and hierarchy (115, 117, 120, and 279).
25. Lorde, "The Transformation of Silence," Sister Outsider 43.
26. Lorde, " The Transformation of Silence," Sister Outsider 41.
27. Lorde, " The Transformation of Silence," Sister Outsider 43. This quote is not identical with the printed text, because the language is from an audiotape recorded by Judith McDaniel.
28. Audre Lorde, "Poetry Is Not A Luxury," Sister Outsider 37.
29. Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals (San Francisco: Spinsters Ink, 1980) 12-13.
30. Lorde, The Collected Poems 234.
31. Lorde, The Collected Poems: 220-221, 270-272.
32. Lorde, The Collected Poems 223, 323.
33. Pamela Annas, "A Poetry of Survival: Unnaming and Renaming in the Poetry of Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Rich," Colby Library Quarterly 18 (1982): 23-24
34. Brenda Carr, " 'A Woman Speaks… I am Woman and Not White': Politics of Voice, Tactical Essentialism, and Cultural Intervention in Audre Lorde's Activist Poetics and Practice," College Literature 20 (1993): 133-153.
35. Audre Lorde, "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," Sister Outsider 55.
36. Lorde, "Master's Tools," Sister Outsider 112.
37. Audre Lorde, "Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving," Sister Outsider 45.
38. Lorde, "An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich," Sister Outsider 99.
39. Lorde, "Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface," Sister Outsider 64.
40. Joan M. Martin, "The Notion of Difference for Emerging Womanist Ethics: The Writings of Audre Lorde and bell hooks," Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 9 (1993): 44.
41. Regenia Gagnier, "Social Atoms: Working-Class Autobiography, Subjectivity, and Gender," Victorian Studies 30 (Spring 1987): 363, n. 52.
42. Christina Crosby, "Dealing with Differences," Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan W. Scott (New York: Roudedge, 1992) 137.
43. Stephanie Riger, "Epistemological Debates, Feminist Voices: Science, Social Values, and the Study of Women," American Psychologist 47 (1992): 734.
44. Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites, "Toward Consideration of the Rhetorical Culture of Equality," Crafting Equality: America's Anglo-African Word (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993) ix.
45. Carol Gilligan and others, "Feminist Discourse, Moral Values, and the Law—A Conversation," Buffalo Law Review 34 (1985): 62.
46. Linda Alcoff, "Cultural Feminism verses Post-Structuralism: The Identity Crisis in Feminist Theory," Signs 13 (1988): 413, n. 19.
47. Minow, "Justice Engendered" 14. Similarly, Minow, Making All the Difference 50.
48. JoAnn Pavletich and Margot Gayle Backus, "With His Pistol in Her Hand: Rearticulating the Corrido Narrative in Helena Maria Viramontes' 'Neighbors'," Cultural Critique 27 (Spring 1994): 150, n. 14.
49. Nancy Corson Carter, "Claiming the Bittersweet Matrix: Alice Walker, Sandra Cisneros, and Adrienne Rich," Critique 35.4 (Summer 1994): 195.
50. Lorde, "Justice Engendered" 63, n. 246
51. Emily Erwin Culpepper, "New Tools for the Theology: Writings By Women of Color," Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 4.2 (1988): 42.
52. Murray Forman, " 'Movin' Closer To An Independent Funk': Black Feminist Theory, Standpoint, and Women in Rap," Women's Studies 23 (1994): 50.
53. Jane Gaines, "White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory," Screen 29.4 (1988): 23. Wilson and Russell comment on this line, Divided Sisters 143.
54. For such uses of "lesbian" in the communication discipline, Carole Blair, Julie R. Brown, and Leslie A. Baxter, "Disciplining the Feminine," Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 399.
55. Arlene Stein, "Sisters and Queers: The Decentering of Lesbian Feminism," Socialist Review 22.1 (1992): 45. Martin comments on this line (50).
56. Collins, "Resisting the Matrix of Domination," Black Feminist Thought 229.
57. Mark Lawrence McPhail, "The Politics of Complicity: Second Thoughts About the Social Construction of Racial Equality, Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 343-357.
58. Virginia R. Dominguez, "A Taste for 'the Other': Intellectual Complicity in Racializing Practices," several commentators' responses, and the author's reply to the commentators in Current Anthropology 35.4 (August-October 1994): 333-348.
59. Maureen Mathison, Mark McPhail, and Mary Strine, "Forum," Communication Theory 7.2 (1997): 149-185
60. Urvashi Vaid, Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay & Lesbian Liberation (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1995) 208.