Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches is a collection of the feminist writer Audre Lorde’s prose works. While Lorde primarily published poetry, she was also an accomplished essayist. Some of her most famous essays—as well as her speeches and lectures—can be found in this collection. These include the influential "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House" and "Poetry is Not a Luxury." The collection also includes several direct responses to Lorde's contemporaries, especially academics. The essays "An Open Letter To Mary Daly" and "Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface" are, respectively, direct responses to the writings of a well-known white feminist theologian and academic, and a Black male social scientist. Lorde often discusses her own identity as a Black lesbian, both in discussions of her personal life (for instance, in "Man Child: A Black Feminist Lesbian's Response") and in her evaluations of broader institutions and communities. For instance, Lorde often uses her own intersecting identities as a starting point from which to critique both mainstream white feminism and Black patriarchy, generally by analyzing how each oppressed group has unwittingly absorbed and repeated the values of a powerful white, patriarchal society.
These essays are often hybrid works, including tangents of memoir, quotations of poetry (sometimes Lorde's own), and analysis of data and primary sources. Collectively, they remain relevant for both their literary and political content. In general, Lorde uses this book to promote a vision of wholeness as a radical political gesture. Her essays critique the binary language used to separate poetry and prose, for instance, or emotion and logic. In deconstructing these binaries Lorde unpacks the stereotypes and assumptions inherent in them, encouraging readers to seek liberation through wholeness. Lorde's work offers insight into the ways that forms of oppression and experience intertwine—a concept which is today referred to as "intersectionality." This concept is part and parcel of her ideal of wholeness, since she emphasizes the importance of people like herself being able to openly display and draw upon their multifaceted experiences in activist spaces, rather than choosing between various identities for the sake of others' comfort.
