“The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”: Audre Lorde Book Review
“My response to racism is anger. I have lived with that anger, ignoring it, feeding upon it, learning to use it before it laid my visions to waste”
A round of applause is necessary for the feminist rockstar that is Audre Lorde. A short collection of arguably her best essays, I found this novella a fascinating and captivating read.
Lorde famously self describes herself as “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”.
I found Lorde’s work made me look at my self in a reflexive manner. When I look to the work of Lorde, I see my phenomenological reality. Lorde’s work makes me consider my intersectional identity and relationship with others. As noted in the quote above, Lorde appropriates the use of anger, not for moral reckoning but as a tool for emancipation. This is in-line with her thought-provoking and radical analysis of uses of the erotic.
I first remember reading Uses of the Erotic for. a feminist class I had on gender’s ontological relationship towards sexuality. I was captivated by the words I digested when analysing the text.
For Lorde, there is an epistemological and phenomenological strain to our thinking about the erotic. This is demonstrated in the quote below.
“Women so empowered are dangerous. So we are taught to seperate erotic demand from most vital areas of our lives other than sex”.
What is meant by this powerful assertion is that it works in the patriarchy’s best interests to separate women from the sexual domain, as women are often stuck in a quantum leap which subjugates them to their reproductive capacities. Lorde is critical of this social construction and argues that sex should not be designated to a heteronormative, reproductive cultural site, Within this narrative, Lorde is accounting for the plight of lesbian discourse, something which she claims is so often overlooked in the essay “The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”.
She then makes the astute analysis that the erotic is feared because it is all too often “regulated to the bedroom alone”. Within this Lorde discusses the plight of lesbian women and sex workers. Touching upon sex work and pornography, Lorde is brave in her assertion that:
“There are frequent attempts to equate pornography and eroticism, two diametrically opposed uses of the sexual. Because of these attempts, it has become fashionable to seperate the spiritual (psychic and emotional) from the political, to see them as contradictory or antithetical”.
There is so much to unpick with this quote. Lorde is indignant in her assertion that the spiritual and political must and should be combined so that they do not become oxymoronic terms in the theoretical equation of the erotic.
When looking to the quote above, Lorde makes many passionate assertions in her remedy to uses of anger.
This essay has become so powerful that Sara Ahmed (2004) commented upon it in her groundbreaking work “The Cultural Politics of Emotion”. Ahmed comments that Lorde’s anger comes from different places; as a response to the injustice of racism, as a vision of the future, as a translation of pain into knowledge and as being loaded with energy and information. For Lorde, anger is not resentment or a relationship to the past, but as an emanciptaive opening of the future.
What is interesting to note is Lorde’s use of terms such as “learning”. This made me think back to the powerful work put forward by Black psychologist Beverly Tatum on her groundbreaking work on racial identity in her anthology of essays “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in Cafeteria”. Tatum (1997) argues that when dissecting the topic of racism, the trick is not to learn new behaviours but unlearn old, reductive ones, Unlearning, for Tatum, is a key step within the learning stage. This analysis can be translated into the work of Lorde, as she quarrels with her learnt behaviours when analysing how to use anger effectively.
When I read Lorde I feel empowered and spiritually aware. Lorde has made me see the intersectional dynamics to the world I have constructed around me. I am Arab, queer, a woman and disabled. Lorde has helped me to emancipate myself so much more than any TedTalk could have possibly done.
I salute you, Audre Lorde.
Star Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
(6 stars out of 5).