Thoughts and Qutoes from Audry Lorde's Sister Outsider

within most patriarchal societies were are socialized and taught to respect, revere, and idolize the extraordinary. in addition to that we are taught that only the actions of men are extraordinary. thus it is only the heroes and not the heroines that are honored, and in addition to we are taught the lives and experiences of our sisters and mothers are not extraordinary. for a great deal of time i did buy into this paradigm, and the fact is it was only a recent realization that i did not have any females that i reguarded as being a person i could aspire to be. so here's some words from Audre Lorde that i found extraordinary.

from "Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving"

Racism: The belief in the inherent superiority of one race over all others and thereby the right to dominance.

Sexism: The belief in he inherent superiority of one sex and thereby the right to dominance.

Heterosexism: The belief in the inherent superiority of one pattern of loving and thereby its right to dominance.

Homophobioa: The fear of feelings of love for members of one's own sex and therefore the hatred of those feelings in others.

THE ABOVE FORMS of human blindness stem from the same root - an inability to recognize the notion of difference as a dynamic human force, one which is enriching rather than threatening to the defined self, when there are shared goals....

from "Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power"

...
But the erotic offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough.

The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.

from "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action"

...
And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own. For instance, "I can't possibly teach Black women's writing - their experience is so different from mine." Yet how many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another, "She's a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?" Or, "She's a lesbian what would my husband say, or my chairman?" Or again, "This woman writes of her sons and I have no children." And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other.