1. it began with Audre Lorde.
It began with Audre Lorde, hardly a ghosted presence.
As I followed her through the conferences of the late 1970s, I kept bumping into shadows.
Lorde, relegated to the role of “commentator" at the closing session “The Personal and the Political” of the 1979 The Second Sex Thirty Years Later Conference delivered what would become The Master's Tools.
I began initially attempting to determine who specifically Lorde addressed in these remarks. According to her biographer Alexis de Veaux, Lorde's remarks refered to "papers written by Linda Gordon, Camille Bristow, Bonnie Johnson, Manuela Fraire, and the conference coordinator, Jessica Benjamin — as embodying the limitations of the conference's scope.”
I began initially attempting to determine who specifically Lorde addressed in these remarks. According to her biographer Alexis de Veaux, Lorde's remarks refered to "papers written by Linda Gordon, Camille Bristow, Bonnie Johnson, Manuela Fraire, and the conference coordinator, Jessica Benjamin — as embodying the limitations of the conference's scope.”
As I track the panelists I realized that two African American women, Bonnie Johnson and Camille Bristow, gave a paper “Both And"described as "reflections on being black feminists."
Was Lorde criticizing them when she said
A total of five sessions and two concurrent groupings of fifteen workshops occurred at the conference.
Lorde's specific references to “existentialism, the erotic, women’s culture and silence, developing feminist theory, or heterosexuality and power” are the individual "sessions" not to the concurrent "workshops." Yet it would also seem that she did not include Bristow and Johnson in her condemnation as she remarked "what does it mean in personal and political terms when even the two black women who present here were literally found at the last hour?"
However, as I trace the The Master's Tools from audio tape to feminist periodicals to This Bridge Called My Back (1981) and Sister Outsider (1984 below), I see that by 1981 Lorde excises Johnson and Bristow's names from her text, referring to them only as Black Panelists.
What do I do with this knowledge? I set out to find out why black lesbian feminists appear largely as sister outsider ghostly presences in the footnotes of academic books, and I find that Audre Lorde herself took their names out?
Who were these women? Camille Bristow I identified easily, but Bonnie Johnson, with her not uncommon name, proved more difficult.
Discussion of "1. it began with Audre Lorde."
Add your voice to this discussion.
Checking your signed in status ...