Language, Gender, and Culture

MODULE TEXTS

phylosophe, Judith Butler 1

The “Manly” Jobs Problem, Susan Chira 2
Honor Code, David Brooks 5
Prelude: The Barbershop, Vershawn Ashanti Young 7
Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, Audre Lorde 11

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phylosophe
By Judith Butler
Transcript of YouTube clip, February 23, 2007

1 There’s a story—that came out around, I don’t know, eight years ago—of a young man who
lived in Maine, and he walked down the street of his small town where he had lived his
entire life. And he walks with what we call a “swish”—a kind of…his hips move back and
forth in a “feminine” way. And as he grew older—14, 15, 16—that swish, that walk became
more pronounced, OK, and it was more dramatically feminine, and he started to be
harassed by the boys in the town. And soon two or three boys stopped his walk, and they
fought with him.
2 And they ended up throwing him over a bridge and they killed him.
3 So then we have to ask: Why would someone be killed for the way they walk? Why would
that walk be so upsetting to those other boys that they would feel that they must negate this
person, they must expunge the trace of this person, they must stop that walk, no matter
what, they must eradicate the possibility of that person ever walking again?
4 It seems to me that we are talking about an extremely deep panic or fear, an anxiety that
pertains to gender norms.
5 And if someone says you must comply with the norm of masculinity, otherwise you will die,
or I kill you now because you do not comply, then we have to start to question what the
relation is between complying with gender and coercion.

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The “Manly” Jobs Problem
By Susan Chira
The New York Times, February 8, 2018

1 Insults, groping—even assault. That kind of sexual harassment came along with being one
of the very few women on a construction site, in a mine, or in a shipyard. Those professions
remain male-dominated and the harassment can seem, for countless women, to be
intractable.
2 But what if the problem isn’t simply how their male co-workers behave? What if the problem
is the very way society has come to see the jobs themselves? Some jobs are “male”—not
just men’s work, but also a core definition of masculinity itself. Threatening that status quo
is not just uppity—it can be dangerous.
3 This dynamic plays out in workplaces of all classes and crosses partisan political lines. But
it is particularly stark in the blue-collar jobs that once scored a kind of manly trifecta: They
paid a breadwinner’s wage, embodied strength and formed the backbone of the American
economy.
4 As Christine Williams, a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin,
pungently put it, women in so-called men’s jobs are labeled either “sluts or dykes,” each
abused in their own ways. Although statistics are spotty, some studies have concluded that
sexual harassment is more regular and severe in traditionally male occupations. And a
Times Upshot analysis of blue-collar occupations showed that women’s presence in these
jobs stayed static or shrank between 2000 and 2016.
5 Women are so scarce in these trades that some men refuse to see them as women. The
only woman in a repair crew at wind-farm sites charged in a lawsuit that her co-workers
called her by male nicknames, from common to obscene, because they thought only a man
could handle the job. Men suggested she must have a penis or be a lesbian.
6 In interviews with more than 60 women in male-dominated trades like construction, Amy
Denissen, an associate professor of sociology at California State University at Northridge
and Abigail Saguy, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles,
found countless similar examples. While lesbians are also harassed, “in some ways women
who are lesbian are seen as less threatening,” Professor Saguy said. “They’re seen as not
fully women.”
7 Women who try to go along with the sexual banter, or who act feminine, are seen as either
coming on to men or less competent in a workplace culture where proficiency is defined in
masculine terms. “Sexual harassment is often a way in which the men reaffirm women’s
femininity, say this is who you are, back in your place,” Professor Saguy said. “At the same
time, women will play up their femininity and flirt a little bit, and play along with some of the
stereotypes of femininity to be accepted.”
8 Women as well as men can wield the weapon of sexuality in the workplace—as I saw in
months of interviews about sexual harassment at two Ford plants in Chicago. In that case,
in addition to persistent abuse by men, several women were also accused of trading sex for
better, less physically demanding jobs. Whether women were coerced into sex or gaming a

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 system, one constant has been that in most cases, men are supervisors and have the
power to dispense threats or favors.
9 Power has been entwined with the evolution of male manufacturing jobs since the industrial
revolution, said Alice Kessler-Harris, a professor emerita of history at Columbia University.
Although many of the earliest factory jobs in places like textile mills were held by women
who could be spared from the farm, men reserved many of the highest-status, highest-
paying jobs. “It isn’t new,” Professor Kessler-Harris said of sexual harassment and male
resentment. “It’s as old as male culture. The men assumed the best jobs, the skilled jobs,
were theirs. If a woman dared to enter them, God help her.”
10 Jobs took on specifically male or female characteristics—and society valued them
accordingly. Nurses, often men in the early days of the profession, were redefined as
nurturers when women swelled their ranks; secretaries, once exclusively men, yielded to
the dexterous fingers of women who typed and were recast as “the sunshine of the office,”
Professor Kessler-Harris said.
11 These jobs often paid less, while the ones requiring physical strength paid more. When
women were needed during World War II, cutting sheet metal was likened to cutting a
pattern through cloth, and welding to opening an orange juice can, she said. Then after the
war, men reclaimed these jobs and most women were exiled back to the kitchen.
12 After 1964, as Title VII of the Civil Rights Act was gradually used to pry open industries
once largely closed to women like construction, mining and shipbuilding, some men’s rage
swelled, Professor Kessler-Harris said.
13 “I don’t think you can understand this notion of sexual harassment and men’s anger with
women, their willingness to take out on them all this sexual hostility, unless you imagine
that sense of entitlement in the job,” she said.
14 Professor Saguy said that employers played on this sense that manliness was intertwined
with such jobs. “Even if they have to tolerate bad working conditions, the compensation is
they were real men,” she said. “Then women were moving into these occupations, sowhat
does that mean? If women can do the job, maybe it’s not so masculine after all.”
15 Already, some fear a backlash to the intense focus on sexual harassment. And there are
worries that many of the prescribed remedies, from training to promoting women to
stiffening penalties, could fall short, generate more resentment or perpetuate stereotypes
that women are always victims. Lawsuits abound but seldom force upheavals in entire
systems, Professor Williams said.
16 Many scholars I interviewed argued that fundamental changes are necessary, such as
restructuring organizations to be less hierarchical and re-examining pay scales for men’s
and women’s work. “I would like to think there will be permanent changes that come out of
this,” Professor Saguy said. “I don’t see them yet.”

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17 But some who have observed or trained once-recalcitrant men cite small successes in
changing perceptions about the nature of “male” jobs. Ellen Bravo, a director of Family
Values at Work, found that male firefighters in Kansas City, Mo., had adapted to changes
they once dismissed as unmanly, such as wearing masks to protect against lung cancer or
talking about grief after witnessing death and suffering.
18 Jessica Smith, an associate professor at the Colorado School of Mines, studied the
successful experience of women in a Wyoming mine in the 2000s during a time of hiring
expansion, when women were not perceived as taking jobs from men. “They redefined what
it was to be a good miner away from this very hyperbolic masculine image,” she said. “A
good miner was someone who cared for their co-workers. They were responsible. These
were issues that women could also embody.”
19 Now that leaders of some organizations are toppling, Professor Kessler-Harris surveyed
this moment with a historian’s eye. “After 50 years when women swallowed hard and put up
with it, or quit, finally women are saying this is not acceptable anymore,” she said. “What
we’re seeing now is an attack on male power and the possibility at least of change.”
Susan Chira (@susanchira) is a senior correspondent and editor on gender issues for The New
York Times.

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Honor Code
By David Brooks
New York Times, July 5, 2012

1 Henry V is one of Shakespeare’s most appealing characters. He was rambunctious when

young and courageous when older. But suppose Henry went to an American school.
2 By about the third week of nursery school, Henry’s teacher would be sending notes home
saying that Henry “had another hard day today.” He was disruptive during circle time. By
midyear, there’d be sly little hints dropped that maybe Henry’s parents should think about
medication for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Many of the other boys are on it, and
they find school much easier.
3 By elementary school, Henry would be lucky to get 20-minute snatches of recess. During
one, he’d jump off the top of the jungle gym, and, by the time he hit the ground, the
supervising teachers would be all over him for breaking the safety rules. He’d get in a
serious wrestling match with his buddy Falstaff, and, by the time he got him in a headlock,
there’d be suspensions all around.
4 First, Henry would withdraw. He’d decide that the official school culture is for wimps and
softies and he’d just disengage. In kindergarten, he’d wonder why he just couldn’t be good.
By junior high, he’d lose interest in trying and his grades would plummet.
5 Then he’d rebel. If the official high school culture was über-nurturing, he’d be über-crude. If
it valued cooperation and sensitivity, he’d devote his mental energies to violent video
games and aggressive music. If college wanted him to be focused and tightly ambitious,
he’d exile himself into a lewd and unsupervised laddie subculture. He’d have vague high
ambitions but no realistic way to realize them. Day to day, he’d look completely adrift.
6 This is roughly what’s happening in schools across the Western world. The education
system has become culturally cohesive, rewarding and encouraging a certain sort of
person: one who is nurturing, collaborative, disciplined, neat, studious, industrious and
ambitious. People who don’t fit this cultural ideal respond by disengaging andrebelling.
7 Far from all, but many of the people who don’t fit in are boys. A decade or so ago, people
started writing books and articles on the boy crisis. At the time, the evidence was disputable
and some experts pushed back. Since then, the evidence that boys are falling behind has
mounted. The case is closed. The numbers for boys get worse and worse.
8 By 12th grade, male reading test scores are far below female test scores. The eminent
psychologist Michael Thompson mentioned at the Aspen Ideas Festival a few days ago that
11th-grade boys are now writing at the same level as 8th-grade girls. Boys used to have an
advantage in math and science, but that gap is nearly gone.
9 Boys are much more likely to have discipline problems. An article as far back as 2004 in the
magazine Educational Leadership found that boys accounted for nearly three-quarters of
the D’s and F’s.

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10 Some colleges are lowering the admissions requirements just so they can admit a decent
number of men. Even so, men make up just over 40 percent of college students. Two
million fewer men graduated from college over the past decade than women. The
performance gap in graduate school is even higher.
11 Some of the decline in male performance may be genetic. The information age rewards
people who mature early, who are verbally and socially sophisticated, who can controltheir
impulses. Girls may, on average, do better at these things. After all, boys are falling behind
not just in the U.S., but in all 35 member-nations of the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development.
12 But the big story here is cultural and moral. If schools want to re-engage Henry, they can’t
pretend they can turn him into a reflective Hamlet just by feeding him his meds and hoping
he’ll sit quietly at story time. If schools want to educate a fiercely rambunctious girl, they
can’t pretend they will successfully tame her by assigning some of those exquisitely
sensitive Newbery award-winning novellas. Social engineering is just not that easy.
13 Schools have to engage people as they are. That requires leaders who insist on more
cultural diversity in school: not just teachers who celebrate cooperation, but other teachers
who celebrate competition; not just teachers who honor environmental virtues, but teachers
who honor military virtues; not just curriculums that teach how to share, but curriculums that
teach how to win and how to lose; not just programs that work like friendship circles, but
programs that work like boot camp.
14 The basic problem is that schools praise diversity but have become culturally
homogeneous. The education world has become a distinct subculture, with a distinct ethos
and attracting a distinct sort of employee. Students who don’t fit the ethos get left out.
15 Little Prince Hal has a lot going on inside. He’s not the unfeeling, uncommunicative,
testosterone-driven cretin of common boy stereotype. He’s just inspired by a different honor
code. He doesn’t find much inspiration in school, but he should.

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Prelude: The Barbershop
By Vershawn Ashanti Young
Preface from Your Average Nigga: Performing Race, Literacy, and Masculinity

1 While sitting in the only black barbershop in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on the morning of writing
this prelude, trying to think of the best way to acquaint you with what this book is about and
who I am as the author behind it, I was struck with just how different I am from a lot of other
black men, and yet again I was compelled to acknowledge my desire to be like them. The
men I observed walked with that lanky dip I wish I could perfect; they talked casually but
passionately about sports, basketball especially, with the deep resonance that reverberates
in my hungry ears. Many spoke a spicy black lingo, the hip linguistics that even white kids
from Iowa crave. The men wore pants that sagged. Their feet were adorned with the latest
two-hundred-dollar sneakers endorsed by Allen Iverson or Shaq. Their self-assurance
made me want to mimic them, to give a gender performance that would say unequivocally
to everybody—white folks, black folks, everybody—that I too am a black male with balls.
That’s part of why I was at the barbershop—and to get that fresh bald fade, one of the
trendy hallmarks of black masculinity.
2 However, because this barbershop is located smack dab in the middle of Mostly White,
Iowa—a state that unapologetically leads in incarcerating black men—my vicarious revel in
black masculinity was sobered by the statistics: while only 2 percent of those who live in
Iowa are black, blacks comprise 25 percent of the state’s prison population. Thus in
addition to enchantment, I felt a conflicting fusion of fortune and tribulation—fortune
because my language and demeanor often mark me as educated, separating me from
those who exemplify the stigmatized (and paradoxically romanticized) black male profile,
and consequently excusing me, though certainly not always, from the plight that follows that
image. I am troubled because the black men who suffer most from the educational and
judicial systems are poor, from the underclass, from the ghetto, like me. And although many
flee the big city, looking for a small haven in mid-America, they sometimes find that their
situation gets worse. I both identify with their predicament and disidentify with it because I
am and am not exactly one of them, and both do and do not want to be.
3 To embrace my blackness, my heritage, my manliness, I identify with men who represent
the ghetto. I no longer want to deny my class background or the racial experience
associated with it. I identify to belong. I disidentify to escape racism, to avoid the structures
that oppress black men. But I also disidentify to retaliate against black men—to punish
them for what I perceive as their efforts to disown me. This ambivalence provokes me to
imitate and just as often to dissociate from the black men I envy. Both efforts fail. Neither
alleviates my racial anxiety. Instead, they heighten the angst I experience. As a result I am
hyperaware of how masculine I am (not) and how black I (don’t) act.
4 I can’t neatly explain why my visit to the barbershop brings all this to mind and spurs my
unease. I mean, the barbers are only courteous. They take me ahead of clients who come
less frequently. They even call me sir, although I’m not much older than they are and tell
them to use my first name. Still, I can’t shake the way I feel. For although I know that some
of my discomfort is self-induced, a consequence of not conversing much with the barbers
and their customers about their racial and gender performances and not allowing them to

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 give their take on mine, I also know there’s reason for my worry, that my experience is not
unique.
5 Shelly Eversley aptly summarizes part of the reason for my concern in her book The Real
Negro. Offering an anecdote about the time she felt uncomfortable in a black barbershop in
Baltimore, Eversley concludes that the barbershop is “a racial and cultural distinction” from
the university campus, the site where we both trained as intellectuals and currently work as
professors. Because we participate in both sites, we suffer from the conflict that exists
between them. So in order to get along on the (white) campus and in the barbershop, we
must alter not the color of our skin but the ways we perform race in each location. These
racial performances are most often carried out through language, the way we communicate.
6 Eversley, for instance, was “uneasy in her barber’s chair” as “she listened to the men ...
discussing their plans to [participate in and] make a political statement” during the Million
Man March. In what she terms “her best graduate-student speak,” she expressed her belief
that the march perpetuated the oppression of black women and gays. “For a few seconds,
the men ... seemed to listen,” she writes, “[but] then continued with their conversation.”
Prompted by her barber to persist (he whispered: “Try it again, college girl”), “she offered a
picture of her thoughts.” She explained that the “sexism and homophobia” of the march
“mirrored the logic of white supremacy.” As she left, the men told her she was “still 100
percent black.” As she made her way to campus, however, she says she “felt triumphant
and sad” —triumphant because, although the men “had read the education in her language
as proof of her ‘imitation whiteness,’” she was able “to shed her academic self-
consciousness” and belong, to be seen as “part of the group, as authentic.” She was sad
because, “when she arrived on campus,” her performance of black authenticity lost its
cachet; she realized that the benefits she garnered in the shop were now distinct
disadvantages.
7 Why did Eversley feel split in two? Had she become the twenty-first-century incarnation of
Du Bois’s double consciousness, an embodiment of racial schizophrenia? One moment she
spoke as an “imitation white woman,” and after a switch of the tongue, she became an
authentically black one. What endowed the barbers with the authority to make her feel race-
fake and then authentic? Did her linguistic performance really have such transformative
power? Whatever the answers to these questions are, it’s clear that Eversley was
compelled to contend with the consequence of her performance: the transformation of her
political commitments into identity ambivalence.
8 This racial ambivalence is what makes me so self-conscious about and analytical of other
men in the barbershop—because my linguistic performance is rated in relation to theirs.
And not only do I feel as if my racial performance is judged, but I know my gender
performance is too. Because the barbershop is a masculine space, the performance of
heterosexuality is the gold standard. Talking sufficiently black is not enough for me to be
heard; I must also speak and act acceptably masculine. This performance is even more
difficult for those who are gay or are taken as gay, as I sometimes am, because we are
often estranged in these spaces. Quincy Mills offers Eric as an example in this regard in his
ethnography of a black barbershop on the South Side of Chicago.

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9 Mills describes Eric as “one of the regulars in the shop.” But unlike other patrons, “his
identity is shrouded in suspicion and innuendo,” because “the barbers and many customers
assume that Eric is gay.” As a result, unlike other regulars who become key players in the
discourse community, Mills writes that Eric “is silenced as an agenda setter ........ When [he]
would initiate conversations, the men would turn away, ignore him, or patronize him for a
short while only to move quickly to other topics.” Instead of engaging Eric, they would “act
annoyed by his mannerisms and voice.”
10 Mills doesn’t describe the particulars of Eric’s voice and manner, but it’s conclusive that for
the others his masculine performance is insufficiently heterosexual. What’s interesting
about the other men’s perception of Eric’s sexuality is that it’s not based on facts but on
how he acts. On this Mills is clear: “Eric never came out to me” or to the other men, he
says. “There was no confirmation of his sexual identity in the months I spent at the shop.”
Eric’s insufficient heterosexual performance cast him “outside the boundaries of blackness
because his demeanor and speech,” Mills writes, “are beyond the narrow definitions of
masculinity.”
11 My personal history is replete with anecdotes like Eversley’s and experiences like Eric’s,
and I’m trying to keep them from adding up, which is why I keep my mouth closed in the
barbershop. It’s also why I was nervous about reading the novel I brought with me to help
pass the wait. It’s not that novel reading itself is off-limits in the shop. I’ve seen other men
read. But given my past, my profession, and my dubious masculine performance, I hesitate.
12 Literacy habits, like reading novels of a certain kind and speaking what might appear to be
standard English, have always made me seem more queer, more white identified, and more
middle class than I am. When I fail to meet the class, gender, and racial notions that others
ascribe to me, I’m punished. In some ways, living in a mostly white town and being an
assistant professor at a Big Ten school heightens—not lessens, as I had hoped—the
conflict that stems from the sometimes converging, but oftentimes diverging, racial and
gender expectations that are held out for black men and that we hold for each other.
13 I recognize the problem, and I’m working so that it doesn’t consume me. “Hell,” I say to
encourage myself, “I’m an English professor; that justifies my reading a novel in a
barbershop. And what’s this nonsense of trying to fit in, to avoid alienation, to avoid name-
calling: ‘Sissy!’ ‘Faggot!’” But I wonder: What does not fitting in cost me? This issue of trying
to fit in but never succeeding, of being perpetually on the margins of various communities
and never finding a way into any one of them, is the trope of my life, making me something
of a black Sisyphus. Academic literacy is my heavy rock.
14 You see, my Sisyphean experience in Iowa is a continuation of troubles that began while I
was growing up in Chicago, in the late 1970s and ’80s, in the notorious Governor Henry
Horner Homes, the same site that Alex Kotlowitz writes about in his journalistic
ethnography, There Are No Children Here. In fact, as Kotlowitz was gathering material for
his book, I was still living there. But unlike his subjects, Lafeyette and Pharoah, who are
portrayed as boys who must fight the criminalizing lure of the ghetto in order to succeed in
school, I was seen as an anomaly. Kotlowitz sees Lafeyette and Pharoah as having
identities compatible with the ghetto even as he describes their striving to get out. My
identity, however, was atypical, alienating me from my neighbors and hood and excluding
me from representations of “authentic” ghetto life. Thus I didn’t have to fight to get out of the
ghetto. I was kicked out.

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15 It might seem like a good thing that I was kicked out. It might seem as if this exile expedited
the leave I was seeking. But the problem that this bit of personal history presents, the
problem that my monograph theorizes, the problem that my trip to the barbershop illustrates
is this: because I ain’t no homeboy—though I long to be and would do anything short of
killing to gain that identity—I’m not ghetto enough for the ghetto. Because I’m not a white
boy, I’m not white enough for white folks. And because I wasn’t born into the middle class,
I’m not completely accepted by the mainstream. And sometimes, if you can believe it, I’m
not ghetto enough for the mainstream or middle class enough for the ghetto or black
enough for white folks! The psychoemotional pain that this liminal existence creates, the
pain of negotiating multiple cultural and racial worlds, is far too great for many. I’ve been
doing it for a long time and have been able to cope only by transforming my personal
problem into an intellectual one. In some ways I’m chipping away at the burden. But far too
many are not able to do this. And why should they have to?
16 Perhaps some black men in that barbershop are also trying to avoid racial and cultural
punishment. Instead of negotiating two worlds, maybe they have chosen to live in only
one—a microcosm, a subculture of white society that accepts and mandates a certain
sociolinguistic performance of masculinity. Because they have chosen and are accepted by
a community, perhaps they have no need to envy me as I do them. But then what do they
lose when they don’t try to imitate what I represent? It’s my desire to reconcile my ghetto
past with my middleclass aspirations and possibly be of assistance to others in the process.
I want to expose the factors that make black racial identity incompatible with literacy,
especially for males. Thus masculine panic, racial anxiety, and their relation to language
and academic literacy (as the prescribed means for class climbing) constitute the three-part
theme that I explore in this book.

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The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action*
By Audre Lorde
An excerpt from Sister Outsider, 1984

1 I would like to preface my remarks on the transformation of silence into language and action
with a poem. The title of it is “A Song for Many Movements” and this reading is dedicated to
Winnie Mandela. Winnie Mandela is a South African freedom fighter who is in exile now
somewhere in South Africa. She had been in prison and had been released and was picked
up again after she spoke out against the recent jailing of black school children who were
singing freedom songs, and who were charged with public violence... “A Song for Many
Movements”:
2 Nobody wants to die on the way
caught between ghosts of whiteness
and the real water
none of us wanted to leave
our bones
on the way to salvation
three planets to the left
a century of light years ago
our spices are separate and particular
but our skins sing in complimentary keys
at a quarter to eight mean time
we were telling the same stories
over and over and over.
3 Broken down gods survive
in the crevasses and mudpots
of every beleaguered city
where it is obvious
there are too many bodies
to cart to the ovens
or gallows
and our uses have become
more important than our silence
after the fall
too many empty cases
of blood to bury or burn
there will be no body left
to listen
and our labor
has become more important
than our silence.
4 Our labor
has become more important
than our silence.

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5 I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be
spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.
That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect. I am standing here as a black
lesbian poet, and the meaning of all that waits upon the fact that I am still alive, and might
not have been. Less than two months ago, I was told by two doctors, one female and one
male, that I would have to have breast surgery, and that there was a 60 to 80 percent
chance that the tumor was malignant. Between that telling and the actual surgery, there
was a three week period of the agony of an involuntary reorganization of my entire life. The
surgery was completed, and the growth was benign.
6 But within those three weeks, I was forced to look upon myself and my living with a harsh
and urgent clarity that has left me still shaken but much stronger. This is a situation faced
by many women, by some of you here today. Some of what I experienced during that time
has helped elucidate for me much of what I feel concerning the transformation of silence
into language and action.
7 In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and
wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly
etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever
been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we
all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change, or end. Death,
on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly, now, without
regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself
into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else’s words.
And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge
that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave
me great strength.
8 I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My
silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word
spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking,
I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which
we all believed, bridging our differences. And it was the concern and caring of all those
women which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living.
9 The women who sustained me through that period were black and white, old and young,
lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual, and we all shared a war against the tyrannies of
silence. They all gave me a strength and concern without which I could not havesurvived
intact. Within those weeks of acute fear came the knowledge—within the war we are all
waging with the forces of death, subtle and otherwise, conscious or not—I am not only a
casualty, I am also a warrior.
10 What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies
you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of
them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your
fears. Because I am woman, because I am black, because I am lesbian, because I am
myself, a black woman warrior poet doing my work, come to ask you, are you doing yours?

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11 And, of course, I am afraid—you can hear it in my voice—because the transformation of
silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation and that always seems fraught
with danger. But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, “Tell
them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s
always that one little piece inside of you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep
ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out
one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth.”
12 In the cause of silence, each one of us draws the face of her own fear—fear of contempt, of
censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I
think, we fear the very visibility without which we also cannot truly live. Within this country
where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, black women
have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been
rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism. Even within the women’s
movement, we have had to fight and still do, for that very visibility which also renders us
most vulnerable, our blackness. For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america,
we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson— that we were never meant to survive.
Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, black or not. And that
visibility which makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest
strength. Because the machine will try to grind you into dust anyway, whether or not we
speak. We can sit in our corners mute forever while our sisters and our selves are wasted,
while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned, we can sit in our
safe corners mute as bottles, and we still will be no less afraid.
13 In my house this year we are celebrating the feast of Kwanza, the African- American festival
of harvest which begins the day after Christmas and lasts for seven days. There are seven
principles of Kwanza, one for each day. The first principle is Umoja, which means unity, the
decision to strive for and maintain unity in self and community. The principle for yesterday,
the second day, was Kujichagulia—self-determination—the decision to define ourselves,
name ourselves, and speak for ourselves, instead of being defined and spoken for by
others. Today is the third day of Kwanza, and the principle for today is Ujima— collective
work and responsibility—the decision to build and maintain ourselves and our communities
together and to recognize and solve our problems together.
14 Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language
and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made
to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally
necessary for each one of us to establish or examine her function in that transformation,
and to recognize her role as vital within that transformation.
15 For those of us who write, it is necessary to scrutinize not only the truth of what we speak,
but the truth of that language by which we speak it. For others, it is to share and spread
also those words that are meaningful to us. But primarily for us all, it is necessary to teach
by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding.
Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative
and continuing, that is growth.

CSU Expository Reading and Writing Curriculum 13

16 And it is never without fear; of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps judgment,
of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death.
And I remind myself all the time now, that if I were to have been born mute, or had
maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I
would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective.
17 And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our
responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in
their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that
have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own: for instance, “I can’t
possibly teach black women’s writing—their experience is so different from mine,” yet how
many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another:
“She’s a white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?” Or, “She’s a
lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?” Or again, “This woman writes of
her sons and I have no children.” And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves
of ourselves and each other.
18 We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to
work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than
our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury
of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.
19 The fact that we are here and that I speak now these words is an attempt to break that
silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which
immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.
* Originally given as a speech, December 28, 1977, at the Lesbian and Literature Panel of the
Modern Language Association.
“A Song for Many Movements” was originally published in The Black Unicorn in 1978.

Language, Gender, and Culture 14

Module Attributions
Brooks, David. “Honor Code.” The New York Times, New York edition, 6 July 2012, p. A23. From
The New York Times. ©2009 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used under license.
Chira, Susan. “The ‘Manly’ Jobs Problem.” The New York Times, 8 Feb. 2018,
[Link]/2018/02/08/sunday-review/[Link]. From
The New York Times. ©2018 The New York Times. All rights reserved. Used under license.
Lorde, Audre. “Transformation of Silence into Language and Action.” Sister Outsider,
Crossing/Penguin Random House, 1984, pp. 28-32. Acknowledgment to Sister Outsider by
Audre Lorde, published by Crossing Press. Copyright ©1984, 2007 by Audre Lorde. Used
herein by permission of the Charlotte Sheedy Literary Agency.

Language, Gender, and Culture 14