The Cancer Journals

Lorde identifies as a Black lesbian feminist. How does her sense of identification differ from that of her Black women contemporaries Alice Walker, who identified as womanist (a term Walker invented), and Clenora Hudson-Weems, who identified as Africana Womanist?

How is Lorde’s emphasis on the importance of language related to Structuralist ideas and, particularly, the use of language to critique the “discourse of patriarchy?”

Compare The Cancer Journals to Susan Sontag’s Illness as a Metaphor, which was written two years before Lorde’s work. How do both works reframe the way in which society thinks about the victims of terminal maladies?