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= Editing Draft:“The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House” =

“The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House” is a feminist speech given by Audre Lorde at the Second Sex Conference of 1979, published later in This Bridge Called My Back (1981) and again in Lorde’s own Sister Outsider (1984). The fourth edition of This Bridge was published by the State University of New York Press (or SUNY Press) but was previously published by Third Women Press up until the book went out of print in 2008. Aside from the clear alignment Lorde and This Bridge editors made to include her speech in a feminist anthology aimed at deinstitutionalizing white feminism, Lorde’s Sister Outsider solidifies the timeliness of encapsulating all women under feminism, later known as what black legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw called (and thereby coined the term) intersectionality in 1989.

Synopsis
“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; 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 other identified as outside the structures, in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”
 * Composed of sixteen, condensed paragraphs, Audre Lorde briefly yet impactfully presents her thoughts regarding a comprehensive understanding of what it means to be a woman at the 1979 Second Sex Conference held on October 29. Lorde establishes the academic focus for her attendance at “The Personal and the Political” panel, claiming that that she will comment on papers about American women, and will aim to fortify the argument in favor of intersectional feminism.
 * The spectrum of women Lorde discusses includes “difference of race, sexuality, class, and age,” labeling any scholastic work that exempts these realities of “academic arrogance.” As a self-proclaimed “black lesbian feminist” Lorde is not surprised that her passion for social reform is silenced in “the only panel [...] where the input of black feminists and lesbians is represented.” The patriarchy and its results, “the fruits,” are representative of the examination Lorde implores her audience and readers to recognize in terms of feminism: you reap what you sow. She claims change is limited by the institutionalized parameters set by men.
 * Lesbian consciousness and the consciousness of third world women are brought up by Lorde as their representation is absent in all of the papers she has encountered. Although she speaks in general for all the papers, she uses one unnamed paper that highlights the chasm in womankind itself. In the paper Lorde notes a lack of “mutuality between women,” of shared support systems, and of “interdependence [...] between lesbians and women-identified-women.” Using the same paper she is critiquing, Lorde quotes the author saying the emancipation of women may be “too high a price for the results,” highlighting what is missing to include all women.
 * The “real power” of women stems from the redemptive “desire to nurture each other,” a power that Lorde claims the patriarchal world fears. This same world is what grants “maternity [as] the only social power open to women.” Along with differentiating between the use of the “passive ‘be’ and the active ‘being’ as a form of freedom, Lorde is clear that the advocacy of “mere tolerance” is unacceptable and “[gross].” Her reasoning for this is that difference sparks creativity, and as a result there is a necessity for an interdependency encompassed by different strengths, both “acknowledged and equal,” that promotes the mentality that “being” cannot be limited to specific groups of people.
 * Lorde argues that differences are what have caused a history of “separation and suspicion” that could have been used to promote change instead. Using the imagery of womankind as a disjointed community, that can therefore not achieve liberation, Lorde transitions to her iconic position for marginalized women and their need to recognize their differences:
 * Women cannot remain blind to the differences that surround them everyday; the exclusion of marginalized women from the “circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women,” must cease to exist.
 * The spectrum of women is not limited to the papers they are discussing. Marginalization is an actual injustice millions of women need to survive, and simply discussing such matters will not aid these survivors. It is imperative for those who are socially segregated, or who go against the status quo, to unite in order to solve the issue that affects underrepresented women. Relying on “support” of the “master’s house” jeopardizes woman’s potential as it is established to keep women subordinate in a society where the hegemonic patriarchy governs.
 * Lorde gives her closing remarks about male ignorance and the societal expectation that it is a woman’s job to educate them about woman’s “existence” and “needs”: these are the concerns the master has exercised “to keep the oppressed occupied.” For Lorde, the same “repetition of racist patriarchal thought” is mirrored when “black and third world women” hear it is their task to “educate white women.” She concludes by quoting the woman at the center of the conference, Simone De Beauvoir, stressing the significance surrounding the “knowledge” of “genuine [social] conditions” and allowing that knowledge to “illuminate” how they choose to live their lives.

Impact
Audre Lorde’s comments in “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House” (1983) allude to the hegemonic power of American social constructs, such as white supremacy, female oppression, and heterosexual bias in a poignant message. Hers is a literary echo in a long tradition of nineteenth and twentieth century writers who portrayed the compartmentalization of the black, female body, some including Margaret Fuller, Sarah Grimke, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, bells hooks, and Judith Butler. She thereby contributes to this tradition by giving voice to silenced intersections between race and gender in a message that is palatable to a wide audience.

In her “Unghosting Apparitional Histories: Erasures of Black Lesbian Feminism ,” author Michelle Moravec of USC uses the image established by Lorde, of women separated by a circle, as the connection to Lorde’s 1984 title Sister Outsider. In a conference where one hundred and twenty women were invited to speak, “only three women, Audre Lorde, Camille Bristow, and Bonnie Johnson,” were black. The kinship of women is destabilized and it leaves women such as Lorde, Bristow, and Johnson, as the sisters excluded from a circle that promotes equality and inclusion. The lack of diversity at this conference is presented by Moravec when she discusses Susan McHenry, a black speaker and protege of Robin Morgan, who was not formally invited and whom principal conference organizer Jessica Benjamin did not know about until the last minute. The separation of differences and its limiting constructs was a common thread throughout numerous papers presented at the conference, and Moravec makes sure to highlight the “Both And ”  paper by Bristow and Johnson that went directly against the “Either Or” feminist theory that was discussed at the same conference. In “Both And” both women express the vitality of using “and” in a world that is accustomed to “or,” in regards to “working with white feminist[s]” and the “separatism from black men.”

Philosophy writer Lester Olson’s “The Personal, the Political, and Others: Audre Lorde Denouncing ‘The Second Sex Conference ’” discusses the crucial importance of academics such as Lorde to like conferences. Celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of French existentialist Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, “[M]ore than 800 women from all over the world gathered at a conference on feminist theory.” Similar to de Beauvoir, Lorde placed a significant amount of emphasis on the importance of the Other––the marginalization of specific social and cultural groups. “Both women rejected biology as the basis for women's situation, believing instead that material conditions are most fundamental,” particularly the need for more people to connect the “self” with the “Other.”