On the margins of rhetoric: Audre lorde transforming silence into language and action

Quarterly Journal of Speech

Volumn 83, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 49-70

  Olson, Lester C ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH   (United States)

Author keywords

Audre lorde; Cancer; Feminist rhetoric; Human rights rhetoric; Silence

Indexed keywords

EID: 85011186876     PISSN: 00335630     EISSN: 14795779     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/00335639709384171     Document Type: Article

References (28)

1. Some would argue that these are salient features of African American rhetoric, as in Jack Daniel, Geneva Smitherman-Donaldson, and Milford A. Jeremiah, “Makin’ A Way Outa No Way: The Proverb Tradition in the Black Experience,'" Journal of Black Studies 17 (1987): 482-508.
2. Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by A udre Lorde (Freedom, CA: Crossings, 1984).
3. Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, & Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” Sister Outsider 114.
4. Audre Lorde, “Learning from the 60s,” Sister Outsider 137. Later in the same speech, she makes another similar set of observations about multiple features of her identity and the external pressure to be fragmenting and reductive in her self definition (143).
5. Karlyn Kohrs Campbell, “Hearing Women’s Voices,” Communication Education 40 (1991): 33-49.
6. One of Lorde’s speeches, “Learning from the 60s,” was printed in Robbie Jean Walker, ed., The Rhetoric of Struggle: Public Address by African American Women (New York: Garland, 1992) 125-140.
7. “An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich,” Sister Outsider 108.
8. “An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich” 108.
9. Robert L. Scott, “Rhetoric and Silence,” WesternJournal of Speech Communication 36 (1972): 146.
10. Audre Lorde, “Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface,” Sister Outsider 60.
11. Nadya Aisenberg and Mona Harrington, “Voice of Authority,” Women of Academe: Outsiders in the Sacred Grove (Amherst, MA: U of Massachusetts P, 1988) 64. The chapter provides a useful survey of literature on voice and silence in women’s studies.
12. Mary Field Belenky, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, andjill Mattuck Tarule, Women’s Ways of Knowing: The Development of Self Voice, and Mind (New York: Basic, 1986) 18.
13. Audre Lorde, “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger,” Sister Outsider 146; for the childhood experiences, see esp. 145-159.
14. Audre Lorde, “Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” Sister Outsider 132.
15. Urvashi Vaid, Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay & Lesbian Liberation (New York: Doubleday, 1995) 141.
16. Gershen Kaufman and Lev Raphael, Coming Out of Shame: Transforming Gay and Lesbian Lives (New York: Doubleday, 1996) dust jacket
17. Joan Nestle, “Stone Butch, Drag Butch, Baby Butch,” A Restricted Country (Ithaca, NY: Firebrand, 1987) 74-77.
18. “‘Telling Our Stories’: Sexual Harassment in the Communication Discipline,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 20 (1992): 360-361.
19. Lisa Delpit, “The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children,” Harvard Educational Review 58 (1988): 280-298.
20. Richard Bauman, “Let Your Words Be Few: Speaking and Silence in Quaker Ideology,” Let Your Words Be Few: Symbolism of Speaking and Silence Among Seventeenth-Century Quakers (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge UP, 1983) 23.
21. Karla Hammond, “An Interview with Audre Lorde,” American Poetry Review 9.2 (1990): 18.
22. Nancy K. Bereano, “Introduction,” Sister Outsider 10. An account in Sinister Wisdom also mentions that the session was “Attended by 700 women.” Sinister Wisdom 6 (1978): 4.
23. “An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich” 108.
24. Delese Wear, “ ‘Yourbreasts/sliced off: Literary Images of Breast Cancer,” Women & Health2§. 4 (1993): 82.
25. Kenneth Burke, A Rhetoric of Motives (Berkeley: U of California P, 1950).
26. Brigid Brophy, “Women: Invisible Cages,” in Don*t Never Forget (New York: Holt, 1963); rpt. in Evelyn Ashton Jones and Gary A. Olson, eds., The Gender Reader (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1991) 498-505.
27. Abena P. A. Busia, “Silencing Sycorax: On African Colonial Discourse and the Unvoiced Female,” Cultural Critique 14 (1990): 103.
28. Jeanne Perreault, “Notes from the Co-Editors: Contemporary North-American Native Writing,” Ariel-A Review of International English Literature 25 (1994): 10.