Living a Feminist Life

Audre Lorde, born Audrey Geraldine Lorde (1934-1992), was a feminist poet and author, best known for her influential essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” She was born in New York, the child of two immigrants from Grenada. She earned a Master’s degree in Library Science from Columbia University and worked as a librarian while publishing poetry. She was comfortable with her identity as a lesbian, however in 1962 she married a white gay man, Edwin Rollins, and had two children. They divorced in 1970. She later met Frances Clayton, a white lesbian and professor of psychology, who remained her partner up to her death in 1992.

Audre Lorde was a vocal feminist of color who, like Sara Ahmed, fought for intersectionality between issues of gender, race, and sexuality. Her essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” calls for feminists to acknowledge and celebrate the many differences among them and use those differences as a “source of power rather than one of division” (Brandman, Mariana. “Audre Lorde Biography.” National Women’s History Museum). She is also well-known for her book Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, which she called a “biomythography,” in that she combined elements of history, biography, and myth-making to tell her own story.

She also wrote extensively of her experiences with cancer in The Cancer Journals, which influenced her ideas about personal identity and which, like “Master’s Tools,” touts the importance of differences as well as commonalities in the fight for intersectionality among gender, race, sexuality, and socioeconomic class. Her work has become hugely influential among other scholars of gender, race, and sexuality.

Judith Butler (1956—) is an American academic specializing in feminist and queer theory, whose conception of the performativity of gender and sex were ground-breaking in critical theory and feminist philosophy. Their philosophical foundations come primarily from Hegelian and Foucauldian philosophy, from which they eventually diverted into gender theory.

They were born in Cleveland, OH, attended Bennington College, and received their MA and PhD in Philosophy from Yale University. As a prominent scholar and professor, they have taught at Wesleyan, George Washington, Johns Hopkins, and UC Berkeley, among other prestigious colleges. They are the Founding Director of the Critical Theory Program at Berkeley.

They are most well-known for their book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), and its sequel, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (1993) in which they explore their concept of performativity. In these books, Butler builds the accepted cultural theory that “gender is socially constructed [...] rather than innate and that conventional notions of gender and sexuality serve to perpetuate the traditional domination of women by men and to justify the oppression of homosexuals and transgender persons” (Duignan, Brian. “Judith Butler.” Encyclopedia Britannica). One of their most important contributions to gender theory is the concept that gender is created through action and speech—thus through the performance of gender—rather than any innate quality.

Gloria Anzaldua (1942-2004) was an American scholar of Chicana feminism and queer theory. She was born in Texas, daughter of a Spanish American and an Indigenous American. She lived near the Mexico-Texas border, where her parents were farm workers and she wrote about the Chicana and mestiza experience. She described herself as “a Chicana/Tejana/lesbian/dyke/feminist/writer/poet/cultural theorist” (Napikoski, Linda. “Gloria Anzaldua: Multi-Identity Chicana Feminist Writer.” ThoughtCo), all of which formed the basis for her theoretical/cultural work. Like Audre Lorde, she advocated for an intersectional understanding of gender, race, sexuality, and socio-economic issues.

She is most well-known for her book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), which explores her life on the Mexico-Texas border, her experiences of social and cultural marginalization, and how these experiences have shaped her ideas of gender and race. She addresses several important issues that impact the Chicana lesbian experience, including heteronormativity, patriarchal dominance, and colonialism.

She also pays particular focus to the ways cultural mixing happens along borders, which directly influences her sense of intersectionality. Anzaldua is also known for her work co-editing the essay collection, This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981) with Cherríe Moraga and Light in the Dark⁄Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality, which was based on her unfinished PhD dissertation and written in the last years of her life (“This Bridge Called My Back.” Gloria Anzaldua).