# Audre Lorde Born Audrey Geraldine Lorde on February 18, 1934 in Harlem, New York City; died November 17, 1992 in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. American writer, poet, and theorist who described herself as **"Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet"** — a self-identification that became one of the foundational rhetorical statements of contemporary Black feminist and queer-feminist thought. ## Major Works **Poetry collections (selected):** - *The First Cities* (1968), *Cables to Rage* (1970), *From a Land Where Other People Live* (1973, National Book Award nominee), *Coal* (1976), *The Black Unicorn* (1978) — widely considered her poetic masterwork, *Our Dead Behind Us* (1986) **Essays and prose:** - ***Sister Outsider*** (1984) — the essay collection now most-cited as her core theoretical work, including "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House," "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," and "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action" - ***The Cancer Journals*** (1980) — written during her treatment for breast cancer; one of the foundational works of feminist disability and illness writing - ***Zami: A New Spelling of My Name*** (1982) — described as a "biomythography," combining memoir, fiction, and poetry into a single autobiographical-experimental form; chronicles her Harlem and 1950s Manhattan lesbian-bar life ## Theoretical Contributions Lorde's most-cited theoretical contributions, all from the late 1970s and 1980s: - **"The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House"** — keynote at NYU's 1979 conference "The Personal and the Political," critiquing white-mainstream feminism's exclusion of Black, lesbian, working-class, and other marginalized women - **"Uses of the Erotic"** — reframing the erotic as a source of political and creative power rather than as a depoliticized private domain - **The "difference" essay framework** — her sustained argument that the silencing of difference within marginalized communities (e.g., white feminism's silencing of Black women; gay-rights movements' silencing of lesbians and trans people) reproduces the larger structures of oppression - **The [[Combahee River Collective]] interconnection** — Lorde was associated with the Combahee River Collective's 1977 *Black Feminist Statement*, the founding document of what would later be named "intersectionality" ## Place in the Vault Lorde is one of the **two or three foundational late-20th-century theorists** whose work made contemporary intersectional politics intellectually possible (alongside the [[Combahee River Collective]], [[Patricia Hill Collins]], and [[Kimberlé Crenshaw]], who explicitly named "intersectionality" in 1989). Her writing is now among the most-cited and most-anthologized work in Black feminist, queer-feminist, disability-studies, and decolonial intellectual traditions — and is among the most-banned in contemporary school book-removal campaigns. --- ## See Also - [[bell hooks]] — the parallel popular-audience articulation - [[Standpoint Theory]] — the epistemology her essays argue - [[Queer Liberation Ecosystem]] - [[Queer Liberation Timeline]] - [[James Baldwin]]