Liabilities of language: Audre Lorde reclaiming difference

Abstract

Distortions around the naming and the misnaming of human differences are the central foci of Audre Lorde's speech entitled “Age, Race, Class, Sex: Women Redefining Difference,” which she delivered at Amherst College in Massachusetts on April 3, 1980. Lorde's speech at Amherst exemplifies her deep understanding of what she refers to in an earlier speech as “that language which has been made to work against us.” Paradoxically, by scrutinizing some liabilities that language may pose for members of subordinated communities, Lorde's speech enacts specific and often subtle means for reclaiming language, exemplified by “difference.” Lorde's speech undertakes a fundamental transformation in a commonplace understanding of “difference” as domination by redefining it as resource, while calling attention to how complicity inheres in language. She contends that a focus upon relational practices across human differences is more fundamental than demographic categories for people in promoting the human liberation of diverse subordinated communities.

Key words:

• Audre Lorde
• difference
• complicity
• feminist rhetoric
• human rights
• human liberation
• women's liberation
• Black liberation
• gay and lesbian liberation
• relational practices