Anger Among Allies: Audre Lorde's 1981 Keynote Admonishing the National Women's Studies Association

Abstract This essay argues that Audre Lorde's 1981 keynote speech, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism, ” has much to contribute to communication scholars’ understanding of human biases and rhetorical artistry. The significance of Lorde's subject is one reason for devoting critical attention to her speech, because, in contemporary public life in the United States, anger has abiding relevance in an extraordinary range of rhetoric and public address. Another reason for contemplating Lorde's speech is the fact that anger was a major theme throughout the internationally acclaimed poet-activist's advocacy. The essay suggests that Lorde's speech illustrates a communication technique, shifting subjectivities, which recurs in her rhetorical artistry. Keywords: Audre LordeAngerEmotionsRacismFeminismWomen's Public Address Acknowledgements For funding this research on Audre Lorde, he is grateful to Iowa State University for a Carrie Chapman Catt Prize for research on Women and Politics, the National Endowment for the Humanities for a Summer Stipend, and research grants from the Women's Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh. He thanks the editor and reviewers for helpful advice. He presented earlier versions of this essay to the National Communication Association at Chicago in November 2004 and the Women's Studies Program at the University of Pittsburgh in October 2006 Notes 1. Worldcat lists an audio recording of Audre Lorde's speech under the plenary session title “Racism, Homophobia, and the Power of Women” (OCLC 23951607). That entry's whereabouts is not known. Audre Lorde, “Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism, ” Sister Outsider: Essays AL Papers, Box 3, f. 23, LHA. Additional, typed draft copies are at the LHA in Box 1, f. 9 and Box 3, f. 26. The latter had the title “The Anger Papers: The Uses of Anger. ” More handwritten and typed draft copies are among AL Papers held at the Spelman College Archives, Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia (henceforth, SA), where a typed manuscript is located in a file “women another audiotape at the University of Oregon (OCLC 3802226). 17. Dagmar Schultz to Lorde, letters dated July 17, 1981 and September 12, 1981, AL Papers, SA; Alexis De Veaux, Warrior Poet (New York: Norton, 2004), 295–96. 18. Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism, ” Women and Language 11, no. 4; Mary F. Rogers, ed. , Multicultural Experiences, Multicultural Theories (New York: McGraw Hill, 1996), 274–78; Bart Schneider, ed. , Race, An Anthology in the First Person (New York: Crown, 1997), 99–109; Looking Back, Moving Forward, a special anniversary issue of Women's Studies Quarterly 25, no. 1–2 (1997): 278–85; Anne Minas, ed. , Gender Basics (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2000), 39–44. 19. George F. Will, “Anger is All the Rage, ” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, March 26, 2007. 20. “Anger: How We Became the United States of Fury, ” The Chronicle Review, with essays by Sasha Abramsky, David P. Barash, and Elaine Tyler May, July 16, 2010, B6–12, quote on B3. 21. Pamela Annas, “A Poetry of Survival: Unnaming and Renaming in the Poetry of Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, Sylvia Plath, and Adrienne Rich, ” Colby Library Quarterly 18 (1982): 21, n. 16. 22. Elaine Maria Upton, “Audre Lorde, 1934–1992, ” Contemporary Lesbian Writers of the United States (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1993), 319. 23. Carol Zisowitz Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, Anger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 14, 4. 24. Mari J. Matsuda, “Beside My Sister, Facing the Enemy: Legal Theory Out of Coalition, ” Stanford Law Review 43 (1991): 1185. 25. Robert Ariss, “Performing Anger: Emotion in Strategic Responses to AIDS, ” Australian Journal of Anthropology 4 (1993): 19; Charles Kaiser, The Gay Metropolis (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 267–348. 26. Marilyn Frye, “A Note on Anger, ” The Politics of Reality (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing, 1983), 84–94. 27. Peter Lyman, “The Politics of Anger: On Silence, Ressentiment, and Political Speech, ” Socialist Review 11, no. 3 (1981): 55–74. For psychology's and psychiatry's role in the systematic abuse of gay, lesbian, bisexual, trans-gender, and queer populations, see Kaiser, Gay Metropolis, 235–40. On race, William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs, Black Rage (New York: Basic, 1968), which has been criticized for colluding with the psychological move, see bell hooks, Killing Rage (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 12. On sex and gender, Carol Tavris, Anger (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982) ; Christa Reiser, Reflections on Anger (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999). 28. Ronald T. Potter-Efron, Angry All the Time, 2nd ed. (Oakland, CA: New Harbinger, 2004). 29. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, “Anger, ” On Death and Dying (New York: Macmillan, 1969), 50–81. 30. This line is from a seven page, handwritten draft, AL Papers, SA. This line is not in any printed versions of her speech. 31. Aristotle, Rhetoric, trans. W. Rhys Roberts (New York: Modern Library, 1954), 20, 90–100. 32. Frederick George Bailey, The Tactical Uses of Passion (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 11. 33. Linda M. Grasso, The Artistry of Anger (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 4. 34. Barbara Deming, “On Anger, ” We Cannot Live Without Our Lives (New York: Grossman, 1974), 48. 35. These lines are from a seven page, handwritten draft, AL Papers, SA. 36. Tavris, Anger, 237. 37. For examples, Audre Lorde, “Scratching the Surface: Some Notes on Barriers to Women and Loving, ” Sister Outsider, 48; Audre Lorde, “Learning from the 60s, ” Sister Outsider, 136. 38. hooks, Killing Rage, 26, see also 16. 39. bell hooks, “Talking Back, ” Talking Back (Boston: South End, 1989), 5. 40. Matsuda, “Beside, ” 1189. 41. Evelyn C. White, Alice Walker (New York: Norton, 1984), 298–300. “‘I am a Renegade, an Outlaw, a Pagan’—Author, Poet, and Activist Alice Walker in Her Own Words, ” radio interview on “Democracy Now!” by Amy Goodman, February 13, 2006, http: //democracynow. org/2006/2/13/iₐmₐᵣenegageₐnₒutlaw. 42. These minutes from The Sisterhood are held in AL Papers, SA. 43. Audre Lorde, “An Open Letter to Mary Daly, ” This Bridge Called My Back, eds. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Watertown, MA: Persephone, 1981; repr. , New York: Kitchen Table/Women of Color Press, 1983), 97; repr. in Sister Outsider, 66–71. 44. Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex, ” Sister Outsider, 116. 45. A manuscript without crosshatches is in a file, “Women and Racism, ” AL Papers, SA. The quotations in the next few paragraphs are from this manuscript. Similar content can be found on a typed manuscript with crosshatches at AL Papers, Box 3, f. 23, LHA. 46. Audre Lorde, Zami (Watertown, MA: Persephone, 1982), 125–27. 47. Quotation is from the typed manuscript at AL Papers, SA, but similar phrasing can be found in Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex, ” Sister Outsider, 118. 48. Chrysalis no. 1 (1977): n. p. 3. 49. Chrysalis nos. 3 and 9 respectively. 50. Audre Lorde, to the editors of Chrysalis, July 20, 1979, AL Papers, SA. 51. The Oct. 23, 1979 letter to Lorde has these names typed on it: “Jessica Benjamin, Margaret Honey, Serafina Bathrick, Kate Ellis, Carol Ascher, Muriel Dimen, Harriet Cohen, and Sara Ruddick. ” The letter recurs in the AL Papers at SA, including a file labeled “Replies” and another file labeled “Face to Face: Black Women's Anger. ” Sara Ruddick wrote an apology to Audre Lorde, April 3, no year, AL Papers, SA. 52. Audre Lorde, “Power, ” The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (New York: Norton, 1997), 215–16, 319–20. 53. “Using the Destruction Within Us: An Interview with Audre Lorde, ” Susan Christian, September 24, 1983, AL Papers, SA. 54. “Using the Destruction. ” 55. Pat Miller, “Third NWSA Convention To Be Held in Connecticut, ” Women's Studies Quarterly, 9, no. 1 (1981): 30. 56. On attendance and factors impinging on it, Women's Studies Quarterly 9, no. 3 (Fall, 1981): 2, and Alice Henry, “Women Respond to Racism, ” off our backs, 11, no. 7 (July 31, 1981): 3. 57. Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca, The New Rhetoric, trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1969), 116–20. 58. For comment on this line, Grasso, Artistry, 3–4. 59. Spelman, Fruits, 131–32. 60. For commentary on these lines, Patricia Sharpe, F. E. Mascia-Lees and C. B. Cohen, “White Women and Black Men: Differential Responses to Reading Black Women's Texts, ” College English 52 (1990): 142. 61. Brenda R. Silver, “The Authority of Anger: Three Guineas as Case Study, ” Signs 16 (1991): 370. 62. For commentary concerning these lines, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Critical Response: Tide and Trust, ” Critical Inquiry 15 (1989): 747, n. 1; Linda Garber, Identity Poetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), 99. 63. Mark McPhail, “Complicity: The Theory of Negative Difference, ” Howard Journal of Communication 3 (1991): 1–13; Maureen Mathison, Mark McPhail, and Mary Strine, “Forum, ” Communication Theory 7 (1997): 149–85. 64. Judith Kegan Gardiner, “Empathic Ways of Reading: Narcissism, Cultural Politics, and Russ's Female Man, ” Feminist Studies 20 (1994): 105. 65. See Berenice Fisher, “Guilt and Shame in the Women's Movement: The Radical Ideal of Action and Its Meaning for Feminist Intellectuals, ” Feminist Studies 10 (1984): 185–86. 66. Rosenfelt, “Overview, ” 10. 67. De Veaux, Warrior Poet, 294. 68. In Susan Christian's interview, cited above, Lorde stressed how “workshops” after the NWSA keynote precipitated a shift for her by focusing on angers among women of color: “a Latina woman of color was furious with me—because at one point in the speech I had spoken of women of color—and she said ‘You know, you talk about women of color but what you really mean is black women. ’ And I said ‘No what I really mean is women of color. ’ So she said, ‘well just once, I want to hear my name—my name. I'm Chicana!’ And she really got through to me. ” Without a recording, I have been unable to determine whether the passage in printed texts was a revision of Lorde's keynote. 69. For this journal, AL Papers, SA. 70. Audre Lorde, “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger, ” Sister Outsider, 152. 71. Lorde, “Eye to Eye, ” Sister Outsider, 152. 72. Audre Lorde, “Who Said It Was Simple? ” Collected Poems, 92 73. Grasso, Artistry, 11. 74. Kate Kenski, Bruce W. Hardy, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, The Obama Victory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 65–66 on McCain and 71, 82–89 on Obama. Quotes from 71, 82, 86, and 65. 75. Nicholas A. Valentino, Vincent L. Hutchings, Antoine J. Banks, and Anne K. Davis, “Is a Worried Citizen a Good Citizen? Emotions, Political Information Seeking, and Learning via the Internet, ” Political Psychology 29 (2008) 247. On memory and recall, see Andrew J. W. Civettini and David P. Redlawsk, “Voters, Emotions, and Memory, ” Political Psychology 30 (2009): 125–51. 76. Peter Lyman, “The Domestication of Anger: The Use and Abuse of Anger in Politics, ” European Journal of Social Theory 7 (2004): 133. 77. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). 78. bell hooks, Salvation (New York: William Morrow, 2001), xxiv. 79. For example, see Long Night's Journey into Day videorecording. Directed by Frances Reid and Deborah Hoffmann. (San Francisco, CA: California Newsreel, 2000). 80. To Peter Lyman, care “domesticates anger by redirecting its self-righteous concern for the self to service on behalf of others, ” though care “can be grounded in love as well, ” “The Domestication of Anger, 137. Additional informationNotes on contributorsLester C. Olson Lester C. Olson is a Professor of Communication and Women's Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is a Chancellor's Distinguished Teacher