GEEK OUTSIDER

On all things geeky, from the margins to the center.

About/Contact

Calling Card: GeekOutsider [at] gmail.com*

*We do accept review copies. Please spend some time on our site to see the topics we cover before submitting a request.

What is Geek Outsider?

In 1984 Feminist, poet, civil rights warrior, generally awesome revolutionary and fighter Audre Lorde collected, in a volume she titled Sister Outsider, several of her powerful essays and speeches on topics ranging from racism, sexism, homophobia to class, education, globalism, and the power of poetry.

As an artist and an activist, she saw no separation between her craft and her calling. She called upon art to awaken the hearts of those who would be indifferent, and she put minds to work with bold challenges in her essays and speeches and in her own existence as a woman, a Black woman, a queer Black woman with not a single inclination of keeping quiet as long as injustice lives anywhere.

In Sister Outsider, Lorde both decries the systems that would itemize and monetize the clash of identities and the fear of difference:

“Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people. As members of such an economy,we have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing…But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals. As a result, those differences have been misnamed and misused in the service of separation and confusion.”

And celebrates difference as a way of expanding community:

“When we define ourselves, when I define myself, the place in which I am like you and the place in which I am not like you, I’m not excluding you from the joining – I’m broadening the joining.”

Taking Lorde‘s work as inspiration, this is what Geek Outsider seeks to do…

— to hunt down and shine a bright glaring light on those systems that would reinforce the barriers that estrange and isolate outsiders.

–to celebrate difference; to bring in the outsiders who will only expand and enrich the intellectual/artistic/cultural realms we geek.