Audre Lorde
"The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House"

NYU Institute for the Humanities Conference asks Lorde to comment on papers "dealing w/the role of difference w/in the lives of american women: difference of race, sexuality, class, and age" (22).

So: Lesbian consciousness, consciousness of Third World Women, offer new frame for seeing world -- need to see through that frame, not import it as a token aside, discardable, not seriously addressed

  1. "Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women . . . . know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish" (23).
  2. = THE MASTER'S TOOLS WILL NEVER DISMANTLE THE MASTER'S HOUSE!! (23).

women who define the master's house a their only source of support will be threatened by dismantling the house --

Ex: conference paper that argued that women "who attempt to emancipate themselves pay perhaps too high a price for the results" = PATRIARCHAL CONSCIOUSNESS

  • merely "tolerating" difference = grossest reformism; keeps center/same in place
  • Difference = fund of necessary polatirites between which our creativity can spark like a dialectic
  • creative generation = real CHANGE

REAL CHANGE -- not merely temporarily beating master at his own game -- through NEW CONSCIOUSNESS.

Ex: Interdependency between women

  • women desiring and nuturing each other REDEMPTIVE
  • Freedom which allows the I to BE, "not in order to be used, but to be creative. This is the difference between the passive 'be' and the active 'being' " (23).
  • Means we HAVE TO ADDRESS RACIST FEMINISM (23)
  

Some stray connections:

p. 23 --"Only within a patriarchal structure is maternity the only social power open to women" -- our entire notion of marriage is contingent on motherhood; definitions of "man" and "woman" convert to "husband/father" and "wife/mother" -- and my life/world/relation can neither fit into that frame nor be recognized by that frame. I am a woman who does not want to be a mother. I want to write, research, think, teach, create -- I do not want to have the JOB of taking care of another human being -- not a man human being or a child human being. NURTURING in Lorde's sense is NOT the JOB of "taking care of" (like the laundry or cooking-cleaning; to be expected to take physical care of the bodies that have a RIGHT to be CARED FOR (which implies: the designated CARETAKER has no such RIGHT!) is NOT the same as loving nurturing, given equally between people in relation. Loving nurturing is mutuality -- beginning from self-care and the shared RIGHT TO self-love and self-care . . .

. . . courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters" -- sustaining this is hard. I have generations of women before me standing up for my right to a professional identity, to an education, to a life that is NOT determined by who I am married to. Yet, when buying this new house, I found myself just referring to Kashif as "my husband" -- it was easier. I was tired -- how much time and energy do I have to educate people in my day to day surroundings? The loan officer processing my mortgage? The real estate agent? The builder (a retired Baptist minister)? The clerk at the paint store where I pick out the colors for the house, or at the flooring center? And then my guilt: my gay and lesbian friends do not have that cop-out, that safe escape route. What luxury, to be able to "pass" -- to rest for a moment, take a break from the never-done never-enough work of getting out of the master's house. BUT:

"Without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppressions" (23). My rest is

" . . . descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with the visions of our future, along with the concommitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being"

 

Change "Divide and conquer" into "Define and Empower"