Audre Lorde - The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master's House & This Bridge Called My Back

Vocabulary flashcards covering key terms, theoretical concepts, historical figures, and publications from Audre Lorde's essay 'The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master's House' and the front matter of 'This Bridge Called My Back'.

The Master's Tools

Mechanisms and frameworks derived from a racist patriarchy that may temporarily allow the oppressed to beat oppressors at their own game, but will never enable genuine change or dismantle oppressive systems.

Academic Arrogance

The assumption within feminist circles that feminist theory can be meaningfully discussed without examining differences of race, sexuality, class, and age, and without significant input from poor women, black and third-world women, and lesbians.

Patriarchal Model of Nurturance

An either/or framework of material and emotional support that ignores mutuality and interdependence between women, asserting that women attempting emancipation pay too high a price and making maternity the sole social power open to women.

Interdependency Between Women

An equal, non-dominant relationship based on acknowledged differences of strength, which provides the security to generate new ways to actively "be" in the world and forge personal and creative power.

Tolerance of Difference

Described by Audre Lorde as the grossest form of reformism; a superficial accommodation that denies the creative, dialectical role that differences play in sparking change.

Community

The foundation required for true liberation—without which only a temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression exists—achieved not by shedding or ignoring differences, but by recognizing them as strengths.

Survival (Lorde's Formulation)

Not an academic skill, but the practice of learning to stand alone, sometimes unpopular and reviled, and making common cause with others identified outside dominant structures in order to flourish.

Define and Empower

The strategic feminist alternative proposed by Audre Lorde to replace the traditional patriarchal tactic of "divide and conquer."

Educating the Oppressor

A primary diversionary tool of oppressors that keeps the oppressed occupied with the master's concerns, exemplified when black and third-world women are expected to expend energy educating white women about their existence and differences.

Second Sex Conference (October 29, 1979)

The New York University Institute for the Humanities conference where Audre Lorde presented her critique during "The Personal and the Political" panel.

Conditions

A Brooklyn, NY magazine noted as an exception to mainstream feminist exclusion for consistently publishing the work of women of color before it was fashionable.

Simone de Beauvoir (quoted by Lorde)

The theorist who wrote: "It is in the knowledge of the genuine conditions of our lives that we must draw our strength to live and our reasons for acting."

This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color

A landmark feminist anthology edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, with a foreword by Toni Cade Bambara, first published in 1981 by Persephone Press and republished in 1983 by Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press.

Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press

The independent publisher based in Latham, New York that released the 1983 second edition of This Bridge Called My Back.