The Lordean Ruse

Since its publication, Audre Lorde’s “The Master’s Tools” became a key text within intersectional feminism and across other interdisciplinary fields. It has entered everyday parlance and mobilized as shorthand for struggle beyond academic circles. Lorde deploys the “master” as a metonym for slavery as a protest calling for interracial solidarity amongst women. To speak of and to the problem of value of slavery’s metaphoricity for Lorde, I contend, one must first address the status of the slave and blackness in her polemic. This paper discusses that the significance of her speech is already subtended by antiblackness’ operative and animating force at the level of the unconscious.