Audre Lorde challenges dominant White feminist frameworks by insisting that race, class, and sexuality are essential intersectional perspectives for disrupting enduring patriarchal structures. The American feminist agenda has historically dismissed the voices of marginalized women, and these exclusions erase any possibility of genuine collective struggle. Lorde critiques the contradiction of analyzing a racist patriarchy through the very tools produced by that same racist patriarchy, highlighting how such approaches only reinforce existing power relations. To counter this, she calls for the active participation and leadership of lesbian women and Third World women, whose experiences and perspectives offer the foundations necessary for building a form of feminism that is truly transformative.

“I urge each one of us here to reach down into that deep place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.”