Editorial commentary
Audre Lorde's 1981 essay 'The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism' — delivered as the keynote at the National Women's Studies Association conference in June 1981 — is one of the most analytically consequential interventions in late-twentieth-century feminist political theory. The essay engages anger as an analytical and political resource.
Audre Lorde was a poet, essayist, and political theorist who produced one of the most influential bodies of late-twentieth-century work on the intersections of race, gender, and sexual orientation. Her major essays — collected in Sister Outsider (1984) and across the broader corpus of essays and poetry — engage the political and analytical resources available to Black lesbian women under conditions where the dominant feminist and Black civil-rights traditions had not adequately engaged the political claims of the population she wrote from and for. Lorde died in 1992 at the age of fifty-eight.
The discussion circle reads the essay together with passages from the broader Lorde corpus — Sister Outsider (1984) is the standard anthological location for the essay — and engages the specific analytical work the essay performs: that anger is a diagnostically useful affective response to political injustice; that the suppression of anger in academic-feminist contexts has tracked the suppression of the political claims of women of color; and that the analytical resources for feminist political work are not reducible to the rational-argumentative register conventional political theory operates within.
The circle's discussion prompts engage three specific questions. First, what does Lorde's framework imply for contemporary feminist political work in institutional contexts where the rational-argumentative register has substantial institutional support? Second, how should the framework be received in contexts beyond the specific racial-political configuration in which Lorde was writing? Third, what is the relationship between Lorde's 1981 framework and the broader subsequent literature on intersectionality that developed from the late 1980s?
Preparation for the circle: read 'The Uses of Anger' in Sister Outsider (Crossing Press 2007 anniversary edition is the standard contemporary printing) along with the companion essay 'The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House.' Optional supplementary reading includes the broader Lorde corpus and the contemporary scholarly engagements with the framework.
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.
Editorial commentary
Audre Lorde's 1981 essay 'The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism' — delivered as the keynote at the National Women's Studies Association conference in June 1981 — is one of the most analytically consequential interventions in late-twentieth-century feminist political theory. The essay engages anger as an analytical and political resource.
Audre Lorde was a poet, essayist, and political theorist who produced one of the most influential bodies of late-twentieth-century work on the intersections of race, gender, and sexual orientation. Her major essays — collected in Sister Outsider (1984) and across the broader corpus of essays and poetry — engage the political and analytical resources available to Black lesbian women under conditions where the dominant feminist and Black civil-rights traditions had not adequately engaged the political claims of the population she wrote from and for. Lorde died in 1992 at the age of fifty-eight.
The discussion circle reads the essay together with passages from the broader Lorde corpus — Sister Outsider (1984) is the standard anthological location for the essay — and engages the specific analytical work the essay performs: that anger is a diagnostically useful affective response to political injustice; that the suppression of anger in academic-feminist contexts has tracked the suppression of the political claims of women of color; and that the analytical resources for feminist political work are not reducible to the rational-argumentative register conventional political theory operates within.
The circle's discussion prompts engage three specific questions. First, what does Lorde's framework imply for contemporary feminist political work in institutional contexts where the rational-argumentative register has substantial institutional support? Second, how should the framework be received in contexts beyond the specific racial-political configuration in which Lorde was writing? Third, what is the relationship between Lorde's 1981 framework and the broader subsequent literature on intersectionality that developed from the late 1980s?
Preparation for the circle: read 'The Uses of Anger' in Sister Outsider (Crossing Press 2007 anniversary edition is the standard contemporary printing) along with the companion essay 'The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House.' Optional supplementary reading includes the broader Lorde corpus and the contemporary scholarly engagements with the framework.
This entry sits within the archive's broader catalogue of primary-source documents, book reviews, audio essays, and discussion circles. Readers approaching the material for the first time will find suggested reading paths in the curated bundles in the shop section; readers with prior background in the tradition will find adjacent material via the Read Alongside links at the foot of each detail page. The archive's editorial policy is to reproduce public-domain texts in full, to excerpt in-copyright material under fair-use conventions with attribution to canonical sources, and to cite living scholars by name where their work is engaged. Provenance fields on each document record the source, the year of first publication, and the canonical digital edition used as the basis for the version on this site.