Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches is comprised of fifteen individual sections, each of them in the form of an essay, speech, or letter.
The first, "Notes From a Trip To Russia," is compiled from notes Lorde took during a trip to the U.S.S.R. for the Africa-Asian Writers Conference. In a series of sketches, Lorde describes the landscapes and people of Moscow and Uzbekistan. She compares the cities she encounters to ones she already knows, in particular New York City and Accra, Ghana. Ultimately, Lorde remains ambivalent on the issue of whether life is better in the capitalist U.S. or the communist U.S.S.R.
In "Poetry is Not a Luxury," Lorde unpacks the view that poetry, along with emotion and instinct, is inferior to and opposed to rationality. She identifies this hierarchical, binary approach as part of a patriarchal European mentality, and encourages readers to view poetry as a necessary bridge between emotion and rationality, two equally important parts of a whole.
"The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action" uses memoir as a starting point from which to grapple with politics. Lorde shares her story of getting a tumor surgically removed, and explains the resulting epiphany, as she dwelled on her own mortality, that silence was more regrettable than speech. She urges readers to speak out and openly share their emotions and fears, explaining that doing so can result in both personal catharsis and political action.
"Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving" dwells on the twin issues of homophobia and sexism within Black communities. Lorde argues that men's fear of Black women becoming close with one another is based on sexism and is ultimately harmful to the struggle for racial justice. Indeed, Lorde writes, Black women are frequently urged to compete with one another for the attention of men, to the detriment of both race and gender-based solidarity.
In "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power," Lorde disputes the idea that eroticism is frivolous, arguing that attending to one's erotic instincts can offer great insight and personal fulfillment. Once an individual can recognize erotic enjoyment, Lorde writes, they expect equal levels of enjoyment and fulfillment in all facets of life, and therefore become more self-assured and demanding, both politically and personally. This, the essay concludes, makes eroticism a serious and important tool. She discerns between the erotic and the pornographic, asserting that the two are opposite, since eroticism is a response to deep personal feeling while pornography is based entirely on an emotionally barren gaze.
"Sexism: An American Disease in Blackface" is a written response to a paper in the journal The Black Scholar by the sociologist Robert Staples. Lorde uses the space to argue that Black feminism, a movement distinct from white feminism, is both necessary and nonthreatening to Black men. She argues for its necessity by explaining the economic, sexual, and political oppressions faced uniquely by Black women. She then accuses Staples of buying into a white-mediated model of success based on masculine dominance and feminine subservience, and argues that the rights of Black Americans as a whole will not be threatened by the closeness and political power of Black women.
"An Open Letter to Mary Daly" is, similarly, a response to an academic—this time to a feminist theologian and writer for whom Lorde expresses both admiration and disappointment. She writes that Daly's book Gyn/Ecology ignores the experiences of Black women except in rare cases, wherein Black women are cynically framed as helpless victims. Lorde particularly expresses displeasure with Daly's quotations from her own poetry, suspecting that Daly has merely borrowed the words of a single Black feminist writer rather than deeply engage with Black women's writings or experiences. She connects Daly's callousness to a recent spate of murders of Black women in Daly's city of Boston, arguing that Daly's erasure is connected to the violence committed against these women.
Lorde's writing takes a more autobiographical turn in "Man Child: A Black Lesbian Feminist's Response." She describes the experience of raising a son as a feminist and a lesbian, knowing that he will grow up to be a man in a misogynistic society. She argues that denying this reality is unhelpful, and that emotional openness, sharing, and modeling of patience and kindness are the only reliable ways to raise a well-adjusted boy in America. She also advocates for a feminism that tolerates and embraces male children and their feminist mothers, arguing that a separatism that shuns young boys is neither helpful nor radical.
"An Interview: Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich" is an edited transcript of a long, wide-ranging conversation between Lorde and the feminist poet and essayist Adrienne Rich. The two discuss Lorde's early struggles to express herself with language and her eventual turn to poetry as a means to use language more deliberately and thoughtfully. Lorde describes the inspiration she felt during a period studying in Mexico as a young adult. She also delves into recollections of her teaching career, especially the revelatory experiences she had teaching young poets at Tougalou, a historically Black college in Mississippi. Furthermore, she responds to criticisms that her writing plays into stereotypes about Black women's emotional, mysterious natures, arguing that these emotionally charged and often denigrated categories should be destigmatized and understood as necessary to the functioning of every individual.
In her most famous essay, "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master's House," Lorde argues that women need to be truly unified in order to be free from sexism and misogyny, and that the existence and self-advocacy of nonwhite or non-straight women poses no threat to this unity. When feminist movements themselves kowtow to or display racism, heterosexism, or other forms of discrimination, they are metaphorically making use of "the master's tools." Lorde argues that such concessions only feed into the continued dominance of the patriarchy by keeping women from helping and sustaining one another.
In "Age, Race, Class, and Sex: Women Redefining Difference," Lorde fully articulates her governing philosophy that difference and diversity should be celebrated rather than rejected, erased, or diluted through tokenization. She uses her personal experience as a person with three minority or oppressed identities (Black, woman, and lesbian) as a lens to describe the way that activist communities, whether seeking racial justice or women's liberation, ask their participants to fracture and hide their identities rather than accept those whose race, sexuality, or gender differ from those of other members of the group. Lorde writes that those in power benefit from the powerless splitting on the basis of gender, race, sexuality, age, and class, and that activists should make an effort to acknowledge these differences in a non-hostile way. For this to happen, activists must put in the work necessary to educate themselves about the needs and conditions of many groups to which they do not belong—a difficult process, Lorde says, but a necessary step to liberation.
"The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism" is a full-throated defense of anger, beginning with a careful effort to define the emotion. Black women in feminist spaces are consistently asked to tone down their anger, Lorde says, in spite of the provocative racism they face from peers. To prove this point to her audience of white academics, she recounts a dizzying array of occasions on which she was either faced with racism or told not to express her anger about racism in the feminist movement. However, disguising anger not only allows racism to run unchecked: it also allows the anger to fester and turn into hatred. Instead, women should openly express their anger, using it to spur meaningful action.
"Learning From The Sixties" both celebrates the work of Black activists in the 1960s (particularly Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.) while arguing that their ideological descendants must learn from their mistakes. Lorde argues that the movements led by Malcolm X and his contemporaries were often riven with disunity on the inside, particularly due to rampant sexism and a desire for immediate change. Lorde urges her contemporaries to internalize the idealism and radicalism of the 1960s while embracing differences within their movements. This process will necessarily require more deliberateness and patience, Lorde writes, and therefore will cause immediate change to be replaced by deeper, more meaningful, and lasting change.
Lorde slips into a more confessional mode in "The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism," where she analyzes and laments the anger that Black women so often unjustifiably turn on one another. She confesses to feeling more impatient with and judgmental of other Black women than she is with people belonging to any other demographic. The reason for this widespread animosity, Lorde concludes, is self-hatred: Black women, treated as subhuman from a young age by everyone except perhaps their mothers, internalize this racism and sexism and project it onto their fellows. Lorde urges other Black women to treat themselves with more kindness and humanity, as their mothers once treated them, and to generalize this newfound patience to other Black women.
Finally, in "Grenada Revisited: An Interim Report," Lorde describes her trip to Grenada, her mother's home country, in the wake of the U.S. military's invasion of the small island nation. She attempts to persuade the audience that the American invasion was a deliberate operation meant to crush and subordinate a less-powerful, Black, socialist country. The invasion was undertaken, she writes, out of neither necessity nor a desire to help the Grenadian people—whose quality of life has significantly declined in the wake of the invasion after a period of flourishing under socialism. Instead, Lorde writes, the Reagan administration has staged the invasion both to assuage the fears of white Americans made nervous by the presence of a nearby, successful, Black sovereign nation, and to frighten Black Americans into submission.
