Amazon Feminist

Anti-androcrat, A-mazingly Anti-male, Furiously and Finally Female.

[eaytazy]

[amazonfeminist]

[amazonfeminist]

In her own words, Audre Lorde was a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet." Lorde began writing poetry at age 12 and published her first poem in Seventeen magazine at age 15. She helped found Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, the world's first publisher run by women of color, in 1980. Her poetry was published regularly throughout her life and she served as the State Poet of New York from 1991 to 1992. Lorde explored issues of class, race, age, sex, and – after a series of cancer diagnoses — health, as being fundamental to the female experience. She died of liver cancer in 1992.

[amazonfeminist]

We Are Everywhere

by Cheryl Clarke, Living as a Lesbian

We are everywhere and white people still do not see us.  They force us from sidewalks.  Mistake us for men. Expect us to give up our seats to them on the bus.  Challenge us with their faces.  Are afraid of us in groups.  Thus the brutal one on one.  Like a t.v. news script, every transition frustrates rage. Hand in hand with me you admonish not to let them come between us not to let them come between us on the street.  We are struck by war crazy men recording their gunfire on stereo cassette decks.

[amazonfeminist]

"Why don’t white lesbians have a genuine desire to learn from lesbians of African descent?"

[amazonfeminist]

Barbara Smith, "Racism and Women's Studies", All the Women are White, all the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave, p. 49.

[amazonfeminist]

Barbara Smith, "Racism and Women's Studies", All the Women are White, all the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave

[amazonfeminist]

Barbara Smith (born December 16, 1946) in Cleveland is an American, lesbian feminist who has played a significant role in building and sustaining Black Feminism in the United States. Since the early 1970s she has been active as an innovative critic, teacher, lecturer, author, independent scholar, and publisher of Black feminist thought. She has also taught at numerous colleges and universities over the last twenty five years. Smith's essays, reviews, articles, short stories and literary criticism have appeared in a range of publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Ms., Gay Community News, The Guardian, The Village Voice, Conditions (magazine) and The Nation. In 1975 she reorganized the Boston chapter of the National Black Feminist Organization to establish the Combahee River Collective. Barbara has a twin sister, Beverly Smith, who is also a lesbian feminist activist and writer.

[amazonfeminist]

The genius of any slave system is found in the dynamics which isolate slaves from each other, obscure the reality of a common condition, and make united rebellion against the oppressor inconceivable.

Andrea Dworkin, "Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics", Chapter 8 Our Blood: The Slavery of Women in Amerika.

[wretchedoftheearth]

Racism, sexism, heterosexism, and class exploitation as systems of oppression all draw upon varying dimensions of this logic of segregation. Segregate people into boxes of ghettos, barrios, closets, and prisons, rank the boxes as being fundamentally separate and unequal, and keep the entire system intact by forbidding individuals to get to know one another as fully human beings.

Patricia Hill Collins (via wretchedoftheearth)

[discosunfish]

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference — those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older — know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It 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 Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”

[discosunfish]

For women, the need and desire to nurture each other is not pathological but redemptive, and it is within that knowledge that our real power is rediscovered. It is this real connection which is so feared by a patriarchal world…Interdependency between women is the way to a freedom which allows the I to be, not in order to be used, but in order to be creative. This is a difference between the passive be and the active being.

Audre Lorde

“The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House”

[childofzami]

“The love expressed between women is particular and powerful because we have had to love in order to live; love has been our survival.”

-Audre Lorde (via daughterofzami)

[childofzami]

“Whenever a conscious Black woman raises her voice on issues central to her existence, somebody is going to call her strident, because they don’t want to hear about it, nor us. I refuse to be silenced and I refuse to be trivialized, even if I do not say what I have to say perfectly.”

-Audre Lorde (via daughterofzami)

[miafortunato-deactivated2014071]

[childofzami]

“According to many African-American women writers, no matter how oppressed an individual woman may be, the power to save the self lies within the self. Other Black women may assist a Black woman in this journey toward personal empowerment, but the ultimate responsibility for self-definition and self-valuations lies within the individual woman herself.”

-Patricia Hill Collins (Black Feminist Thought, “The Power of Self Definition,” 130)

[childofzami]

Black lesbian relationships pose little threat to “self-defined” Black men and women secure in their sexualities. But loving relationships among Black women do pose a tremendous threat to systems of intersecting oppressions. How dare these women love one another in a context that deems Black women as a collectivity so unlovable and devalued?

- Patricia Hill Collins (Black Feminist Thought: Black Women’s Love Relationships, 182)