SpringerLink
Log in

Audre Lorde, Black Writing, and Intersectional Aging

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging

  • 55 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter will consider the depiction of aging and its intersection with other kinds of difference in Audre Lorde’s poetry, life writing, and essays, building on insights found in her lecture on “Age, Race, Class and Sex” delivered at Amherst College in 1980. Using Lorde as a case study, it will consider the importance of intersectionality to age studies and the value of life-course narrative as a heuristic for revealing its meanings and effects. It will also consider the metaphors of aging in Lorde’s writing that connect it with the larger history of Black consciousness. Poems such as “Timing,” “Echoes,” and “Today Is Not the Day,” essays such as “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” and life writing such as Lorde’s poetic biography Zami all speak of the toll taken on individual lives and communities by unchanging conditions of discrimination, violence, and want, and give voice to the resulting gap between chronological and bodily aging. They also represent more positive facets of Black aging, however, such as the transmission of intergenerational knowledge and an affirmative politics of desire and self-care. The picture will always be complex when considering aging through an intersectional lens, but Lorde demonstrates the vital importance of doing so.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
EUR 32.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or Ebook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Chapter
EUR 29.95
Price includes VAT (Germany)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
EUR 160.49
Price includes VAT (Germany)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
EUR 213.99
Price includes VAT (Germany)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free ship** worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Works Cited

  • Andersen, Margaret, and Patricia Collins. Race, Class, and Gender: An Anthology. Wadsworth, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  • Beckett, Megan. “Converging Health Inequalities in Later Life—An Artifact of Mortality Selection?” Journal of Health, Society and Behaviour, vol. 41, 2000, pp. 106–19.

    Google Scholar 

  • Calasanti, Toni, and Sadie Giles. “The Challenge of Intersectionality.” Generations, vol. 41, no. 4, 2017, pp. 69–74.

    Google Scholar 

  • Collins, Patricia Hill. “Towards an Afrocentric Feminist Epistemology.” Turning Points in Qualitative Research, edited by Denzin Lincoln, AltaMira P, 2004, pp. 47–72.

    Google Scholar 

  • Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.” University of Chicago Legal Forum, vol. 1989, no. 1, 1989, pp. 139–67.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dillon, Stephen. “Affective Terror, Affective Insurgency: Audre Lorde, Anti-Blackness, and the Empire of Police Violence.” Theory and Event, vol. 24, no. 2, 2001, pp. 631–36.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dressel, Paula, et al. “Gender, Race, Class, and Aging: Advances and Opportunities.” International Journal of Health Services, vol. 27, no. 4, 1997, pp. 579–600.

    Google Scholar 

  • Eddo-Lodge, Reni. Preface. Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Silver P, 2017, pp. i–iii.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gilroy, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Harvard UP, 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hammond, Karla, and Audre Lorde. “An Interview with Audre Lorde.” The American Poetry Review, vol. 9, no. 2, 1980, pp. 18–21.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hanchard, Michael. “Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora.” Public Culture, vol. 11, no. 1, 1999, pp. 245–68.

    Google Scholar 

  • House, James S., et al. “The Social Stratification of Aging and Health.” Journal of Health and Social Behaviour, vol. 35, no. 3, 1994, pp. 213–34.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kim, **a B., and Sami Schalk. “Reclaiming the Radical Politics of Self-Care.” South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 120, no. 2, 2021, pp. 325–42.

    Google Scholar 

  • King, Martin Luther, Jr. “Nonviolence and Racial Justice.” Christian Century, 6 Feb. 1957, pp. 165–67.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kramer, B. Josea, and Judith Barker. “Ethnicity in the Elderly: Book Review Essay.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Gerontology, vol. 9, 1994, pp. 403–17.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lorde, Audre. “Age, Race, Class and Sex: Women Redefining Difference.” 1980. Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Silver P, 2017, pp. 94–106.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. Audre Lorde Interview (1982). Interview conducted by Blanche Cook, YouTube, uploaded by AfroMarxist, 20 May 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4rDL-xZ8N0.

  • ———. Audre Lorde Interviewed by Judy Simmons. 1979. YouTube, uploaded by AfroMarxist, 3 June 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=d_-XhFKn-f0.

  • ———. The Black Unicorn. 1978. Penguin, 2019.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. “A Burst of Light.” 1988. A Burst of Light: Essays. Firebrand, 2017, pp. 40–134.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. “I Am Your Sister.” 1988. A Burst of Light: Essays. Firebrand, 2017, pp. 10–18.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. The Cancer Journals. Aunt Lute, 1980.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. “A Conversation between Audre Lorde and Adrienne Rich.” 1979. Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Silver P, 2017, pp. 55–88.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. Conversations with Audre Lorde. Edited by Joan Wylie Hall, U of Mississippi P, 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. “Equinox.” Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Silver P, 2017, pp. 173–74.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. “An Interview with Audre Lorde.” Black Women Writers at Work, edited by Claudia Tate, Continuum, 1983, pp. 100–16.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. “Learning from the 60s.” 1982. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde, Crossing P, 2007, pp. 134–44.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. The Marvelous Arithmetics of Distance: Poems 1987-1992. W. W. Norton, 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. “An Open Letter to Mary Daly.” 1979. Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Silver P, 2017, pp. 38–44.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. “Poetry Is Not a Luxury.” 1977. Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Silver P, 2017, pp. 7–10.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. “The Transformations of Silence.” 1977. Your Silence Will Not Protect You, Silver P, 2017, pp. 1–6.

    Google Scholar 

  • ———. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. A Biomythography. 1982. Penguin, 2018.

    Google Scholar 

  • Morris, Margaret Kissam. “Audre Lorde: Textual Authority and the Embodied Self.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 23, no. 1, 2002, pp. 168–88.

    Google Scholar 

  • Perrault, Jeanne. “‘That the pain not be wasted’: Audre Lorde and the Written Self.” Auto/Biography Studies, vol. 4, no. 1, 1988, pp. 1–16.

    Google Scholar 

  • Phoenix, Anne, and Pamela Pattynama. “Editorial: Intersectionality.” European Journal of Women’s Studies, vol. 13, no. 3, 2006, pp. 187–92.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rodeheaver, Dean, and Nancy Datan. “The Challenge of Double Jeopardy: Toward a Mental Health Agenda for Aging Women.” American Psychologist, vol. 43, no. 8, 1988, pp. 648–54.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rowell, Charles R., and Audre Lorde. “Above the Wind: An Interview with Audre Lorde.” Callaloo, vol. 23, no. 1, 2000, pp. 52–63.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke UP, 2016.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thane, Pat. Unequal Britain: Equalities in Britain since 1945. Bloomsbury, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  • Timms, Emily K. “Intersections of Race/Ethnicity and Age in Film and Literature.” Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging, edited by Danan Gu and Matthew E. Dupre, Springer, 2022, pp. 2751–56.

    Google Scholar 

  • Torres, Sandra. “Ethnicity, Culture and Migration.” Routledge Handbook of Cultural Gerontology, Routledge, 2015, pp. 277–84.

    Google Scholar 

  • United States, Congress, Senate, Special Committee on Aging. The Multiple Hazards of Age and Race: The Situation of Aged Blacks in the United States. By Inabel B. Lindsay, Government Printing Office, 1971.

    Google Scholar 

  • Victor, Christina. “Income Inequalities.” Growing Old in the Twentieth Century, edited by Margot Jeffreys, Routledge, 1989, pp. 117–29.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

    Elizabeth Barry

Authors
  1. Elizabeth Barry
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Elizabeth Barry .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of English, University of South Florida, Sarasota, FL, USA

    Valerie Barnes Lipscomb

  2. Department of Literature and Art, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Aagje Swinnen

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Barry, E. (2024). Audre Lorde, Black Writing, and Intersectional Aging. In: Lipscomb, V.B., Swinnen, A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Literature and Aging. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-50917-9_2

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation