Lessons from Audre Lorde’s The Uses of Anger: UCONN Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at 50

Audre Lorde’s now classic, “The Uses of Anger,” was first delivered at UCONN, Storrs in 1981. One of two keynote lectures, it offered Lorde’s address of the National Women’s Studies Association conference topic of “women responding to racism.” In their introduction, Gordon, Orozco Mendoza, and Zane reflect on the inheritance, lessons, and responsibilities that UCONN Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies must grapple with if it is to deepen and fulfill its radical mission. Guided by the imperative to look backward to understand the present and forge a future, the book closes with a sankofic interview with M. Jaqui Alexander and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, conducted by Briona Simone Jones.

Audre Lorde (1934-1992) defined herself as "black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, mother, warrior, poet." Born in Harlem to Caribbean parents, she published nine volumes of poetry (including Coal and The Black Unicorn), five works of prose (including The Cancer Journals and Sister Outsider), and a biomythography (Zami: A New Spelling of My Name). Jane Anna Gordon teaches at UCONN, where she is a core affiliate with Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. She is, most recently, author of Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement, co-editor, with Drucilla Cornell, of Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg, and executive editor, with Lewis R. Gordon, of Philosophy and Global Affairs. Briona Simone Jones teaches English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UCONN. She is editor of Mouths of Rain: An Anthology of Black Lesbian Thought, the most comprehensive anthology centering Black Lesbian thought to date. Jones developed the concept of "Black Lesbian Aesthetics" to describe the heretical shift in self-definition that transpired after the groundbreaking formation of the Combahee River Collective in 1974. Elva Orozco Mendoza teaches Political Science and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UCONN. A 2020 Junior Faculty Fellow at The Institute for Citizens & Scholars, her work has been published in Theory and Event, New Political Science, The Journal of Latin American Perspectives, and Philosophy and Global Affairs. Orozco Mendoza is currently completing a book manuscript where she theorizes the concept of the maternal contract. Sherry Zane is Interim Director of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at UCONN, which has quadrupled the size of its faculty under her leadership. In 2018 she published "'I did it for the Uplift of Humanity and the Navy': Same-Sex Acts and the Origins of the National Security State, 1919-1921" (New England Quarterly) and is currently co-authoring (with Elva Orozco Mendoza and Bhakti Shringarpure) a grant-funded book titled, Insurgent Murals, on feminist insurgent murals in Argentina, Northern Ireland, and Sudan.