On Audre Lorde

“For the master’s tool will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”

I have pondered the above statement, expressed by American author, radical feminist, professor, and civil rights activist Audre Lorde, in her fiery essay “Master’s Tools Will Never Take Down the Master’s House”.

This essay was the subject of an introductory discussion in School of Women’s Thought — an initiative that intervenes in the processes of knowledge production that marginalize, invalidate and erase women — which I attended during my career break in early 2023.

Lorde — who self-described as “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”, and sometimes with occasional variations: “I am black and lesbian, and what you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering”- gave those remarks in 1979 after being invited to a conference to commemorate the 30th anniversary of Simone de Beauvoir’s Second Sex, where there was only one panel with a Black feminist or lesbian perspective, entitled “The Personal and The Political”.

She was the speaker of that panel.

She considered that it is a particular academic arrogance to assume any discussion of feminist theory without examining our many differences, and without a significant input from poor women, Black and Third World women, and lesbians.

The absence of these considerations, according to Lorde, weakens any feminist discussion of the personal and the political.

Lorde was one of African-American women and women in the South who denounced Second Wave Feminism — women’s movement which was began in the 60s and lasted for two decades, inspired by Liberal Feminist Theory, which was more concerned with policy making related to rape, reproductive rights, domestic violence, and workplace harrasment.

Lorde’s criticisms stemmed from Liberal Feminism’s disregard for how gender, ‘race’ and social class can be implicated as categories contributing to the inequalities faced by women of color.

In many of her writings, she voiced a ‘theory of difference’, dismissing the claim of a homogeneity of women’s experience. She was especially critical of the ways in which people in American society were/are taught to ignore their differences (based on ‘race’ for example).

“As women, we have been taught either to ignore our differences, or to view them as causes for separation and suspicion rather than as forces for change. Without community there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.” — Audre Lorde

Lorde suggested that interdependency between women is “the way to a freedom which allows the I to be”, not as an object but a subjet in order to be creative.

This is a difference between the passive being and the active being, she pointed out.

In “Master’s Tools Will Never Take Down the Master’s House”, Lorde asks, “What does it mean when tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy?”

She quickly answers her own question: “It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable.”

In her essay Lorde pointed out issues marginalized people face in certain oppressive spaces — having to be the sole representative of their position, having to use their intellectual and emotional labor to address oppression instead of any of their other intellectual interests.

As if the marginalized are equipped to talk about only their marginalization.

Today, forty four years after Lorde gave those remarks, such meager representation is still an issue in many supposedly feminist and inclusive spaces.

A participant of discussion in School of Women’s Thought, who is also an activist on labor and migrant workers issues, argues that the current policies and regulations have become tools to oppresse labor and migrant workers by employers and government.

“The master’s tools” — policies and regulations — often involve the labor and migrant workers only as a token, a mere object. As if they exist and are involved in policy making, but in fact they were “omitted”.

On the other hand, many of the labor and migrant workers use “the master’s tools” to oppress their comrades without any awareness of how to use the tools properly — sometimes damaging their own fight.

I raised a similar voice. After deciding to resign as a journalist a few months ago, I tried to reflect on my journey as a journalist. One of many reasons I quit was my discomfort with the media itself.

Today, the media is no longer a medium for conveying messages, but a medium to influence people’s opinions and attitudes. The media, afterall, caught in the vortex of interests, be it economic, social, or/and political interests.

Many media in Indonesia, for example, are controlled by conglomerates which, if they are not related to political parties, are affiliated with the oligarchy. This conglomeration has many media companies on various platforms which often become tools for the authorities — the master- to oppress their hegemony.

Not to mention, there are only a few news outlet with a gender perspective — treating women as objects without giving space for them to have a voice.

Therefore I have always focused on stories on women, women from indigenous peoples and their relation to environmental damage in my coverage over the last few years.

She then gave an analogy, “If the master’s tool is a knife, if that knife is pointed at us, we should try to avoid it, or seize the knife to free oneself, or if necessary, strike back at the oppressor”.

Labor and migrant workers in Indonesia, by any circumstances, are “the marginalized”. Likewise, indigenous people, women and LGBTIQ.

Those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are women from third world countries, who are members of indigenous communities, know that “survival is not an academic skill”, as Lorde puts it. Survival is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths.

“For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.” — Audre Lorde

The patriarchal mindset regards women who attempt to emancipate themselves “pay perhaps too high a price for the results”.

So, is there a hope to dismantle the master’s house?

Lorde suggested that only within that interdependency of different strengths, acknowledged and equal, can generate the power to seek new ways of being in the world.

Certainly, there are very real differences between us of race, age, and sex. But it is not those differences between us that are separating us, according to Lorde.

It is rather our refusal to recognize those differences, and to examine the distortions which result from our misnaming them and their effects upon human behavior and expectation.

Only if women can accept the differences, can women build strength together. Even if women can’t tear down the master’s house, women can protect and help each other.

A contemporary African-American feminist, Roxane Gay — who is also a lesbian, like Lorde — in her piece, “Audre Lorde’s Legacy” published in The Paris Review, pointed out that sometimes even a feminist surrenders to assimilationist ideas about social change.

For example, a strain of feminism that believes if only women act like men, women will achieve the equality they seek.

However, Lorde asks us to do the more difficult and radical work of imagining what our realities might look like if masculinity were not the ideal to which we aspire, if heterosexuality were not the ideal to which we aspire, if whiteness were not the ideal to which we aspire.

As I mentioned earlier, Lorde never grappled with only one aspect of identity. She was as concerned with class, gender, and sexuality as she was with race.

She valued the differences between us as strengths rather than weaknesses, and doing this was of particular urgency, because to her mind, “the future of our earth may depend upon the ability of all women to identify and develop new definitions of power and new patterns of relating across difference.”

Her thinking always embodied what we now know as intersectionality and she did so long before intersectionality became a defining feature of contemporary feminism.