earticle

영어

This paper analyzes mechanisms of power and their negative effects, focusing on Audre Lorde's Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, where black women are portrayed as outsiders. Lorde was shaped by multiple forms of discrimination including racism, sexism, and heterosexism within a dehumanizing social structure influenced by both biological and environmental factors. These issues are explained through the expansion of panopticism, initially proposed by Jeremy Bentham and later developed by Michel Foucault, beyond the prison system into everyday life. Power, through surveillance and punishment, suppresses individuals’ bodies and minds, maintaining social control and reinforcing its effects across networks, targeting the weak and marginalized. Lorde experienced racism from white women in the feminist movement, sexism from black men in the black movement, and homophobia from heterosexual individuals in black women's organizations. Paradoxically, the identity she forged through discrimination became a foundation for resisting oppression and engaging with intersectionality and feminism.