Bell hooks

Gloria Jean Watkins (September 25, 1952 – December 15, 2021), better known by her pen name bell hooks (stylized in lowercase), was an American author, theorist, educator, and social critic who was a Distinguished Professor in Residence at Berea College. She was best known for her writings on race, feminism, and class. She used the lower-case spelling of her name to decenter herself and draw attention to her work instead. The focus of hooks' writing was to explore the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she described as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She published around 40 books, including works that ranged from essays, poetry, and children's books. She published numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. Her work addressed love, race, social class, gender, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism.

She began her academic career in 1976 teaching English and ethnic studies at the University of Southern California. She later taught at several institutions including Stanford University, Yale University, New College of Florida, and The City College of New York, before joining Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, in 2004. In 2014, hooks also founded the bell hooks Institute at Berea College. Her pen name was borrowed from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks.

Early life
Gloria Jean Watkins was born on September 25, 1952, to a working-class African-American family, in Hopkinsville, a small, segregated town in Kentucky. Watkins was one of six children born to Rosa Bell Watkins (née Oldham) and Veodis Watkins. Her father worked as a janitor and her mother worked as a maid in the homes of white families. In her memoir Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (1996), Watkins would write of her "struggle to create self and identity" while growing up in "a rich magical world of southern black culture that was sometimes paradisiacal and at other times terrifying."

An avid reader (with poets William Wordsworth, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Gwendolyn Brooks among her favorites), Watkins was educated in racially segregated public schools, later moving to an integrated school in the late 1960s. This experience greatly influenced her perspective as an educator, and it inspired scholarship on education practices as seen in her book, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. She graduated from Hopkinsville High School before obtaining her BA in English from Stanford University in 1973, and her MA in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1976. During this time, Watkins was writing her book Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, which she began at the age of 19 (c. 1971) and then published (as bell hooks) in 1981.

In 1983, after several years of teaching and writing, hooks completed her doctorate in English at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a dissertation on author Toni Morrison entitled "Keeping a Hold on Life: Reading Toni Morrison's Fiction."

Influences
Included among hooks' influences is the American abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth. Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" inspired hooks' first major book. Also, the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire is mentioned in hooks' book Teaching to Transgress. His perspectives on education are present in the first chapter, "engaged pedagogy." Other influences include Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, psychologist Erich Fromm, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh, and African American writer James Baldwin.

Teaching and writing
She began her academic career in 1976 as an English professor and senior lecturer in ethnic studies at the University of Southern California. During her three years there, Golemics, a Los Angeles publisher, released her first published work, a chapbook of poems titled And There We Wept (1978), written under the name "bell hooks." She had adopted her maternal great-grandmother's name as her pen name because, as she later put it, her great-grandmother "was known for her snappy and bold tongue, which [she] greatly admired." She also said she put the name in lowercase letters to convey that what is most important to focus upon is her works, not her personal qualities: the "substance of books, not who [she is]." On the unconventional lowercasing of her pen name, hooks added that, "When the feminist movement was at its zenith in the late '60s and early '70s, there was a lot of moving away from the idea of the person. It was: Let's talk about the ideas behind the work, and the people matter less... It was kind of a gimmicky thing, but lots of feminist women were doing it."

In the early 1980s and 1990s, hooks taught at several post-secondary institutions, including the University of California, Santa Cruz, San Francisco State University, Yale (1985 to 1988, as assistant professor of African and Afro-American studies and English), Oberlin College (1988 to 1994, as associate professor of American literature and women's studies), and, beginning in 1994, as distinguished professor of English at City College of New York.

South End Press published her first major work, Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism, in 1981, though she had written it years earlier while still an undergraduate. In the decades since its publication, Ain't I a Woman? has been recognized for its contribution to feminist thought, with Publishers Weekly in 1992 naming it "One of the twenty most influential women's books in the last 20 years." Writing in The New York Times in 2019, Min Jin Lee said that Ain't I a Woman "remains a radical and relevant work of political theory. She lays the groundwork of her feminist theory by giving historical evidence of the specific sexism that black female slaves endured and how that legacy affects black womanhood today." Ain't I a Woman? examines themes including the historical impact of sexism and racism on black women, devaluation of black womanhood, media roles and portrayal, the education system, the idea of a white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy and the marginalization of black women.



At the same time, hooks became significant as a leftist and postmodern political thinker and cultural critic. She published more than 30 books, ranging in topics from black men, patriarchy, and masculinity to self-help; engaged pedagogy to personal memoirs; and sexuality (in regards to feminism and politics of aesthetics and visual culture). Reel to Real: race, sex, and class at the movies (1996) collects film essays, reviews, and interviews with film directors. In The New Yorker, Hua Hsu said these interviews displayed the facet of hooks' work that was "curious, empathetic, searching for comrades."

In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), hooks develops a critique of white feminist racism in second-wave feminism, which she argued undermined the possibility of feminist solidarity across racial lines.

As hooks argued, communication and literacy (the ability to read, write, and think critically) are necessary for the feminist movement because without them people may not grow to recognize gender inequalities in society.

In Teaching to Transgress (1994), hooks' attempts a new approach to education for minority students. Particularly, hooks' strives to make scholarship on theory accessible to "be read and understood across different class boundaries."

In 2002, hooks gave a commencement speech at Southwestern University. Eschewing the congratulatory mode of traditional commencement speeches, she spoke against what she saw as government-sanctioned violence and oppression, and admonished students who she believed went along with such practices. The Austin Chronicle reported that many in the audience booed the speech, though "several graduates passed over the provost to shake her hand or give her a hug."

In 2004, she joined Berea College as Distinguished Professor in Residence. Her 2008 book, belonging: a culture of place, includes an interview with author Wendell Berry as well as a discussion of her move back to Kentucky. She was a scholar in residence at The New School on three occasions, the last time in 2014. Also in 2014, the Bell Hooks Institute was founded at Berea College, where she donated her papers in 2017.

During her time at Berea College, hooks also founded the bell hooks center along with professor Dr. M. Shadee Malaklou. The center was established to provide underrepresented students, especially black and brown, femme, queer, and Appalachian individuals at Berea College, a safe space where they can develop their activist expression, education, and work. The center cites hooks' work and her emphasis on the importance of feminism and love as the inspiration and guiding principles of the education it offers. The center offers events and programming with an emphasis on radical feminist and anti-racist thought.

She was inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame in 2018.

In 2020, during the George Floyd protests, there was a resurgence of interest in hooks' work on racism, feminism, and capitalism.

Personal life
Regarding her sexual identity, hooks described herself as "queer-pas-gay." She used the term "pas" from the French language, translating to "not" in the English language. She describes being queer in her own words as "not who you're having sex with, but about being at odds with everything around it." She stated, "As the essence of queer, I think of Tim Dean's work on being queer and queer not as being about who you're having sex with—that can be a dimension of it—but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and it has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live." During an interview with Abigail Bereola in 2017, hooks revealed to Bereola that she was single while they discussed her love life. During the interview, hooks told Bereola, "I don't have a partner. I've been celibate for 17 years. I would love to have a partner, but I don't think my life is less meaningful."

On December 15, 2021, bell hooks died from kidney failure at her home in Berea, Kentucky, aged 69.

Buddhism
Through her interest in Beat poetry and after an encounter with the poet and Buddhist Gary Snyder, hooks was first introduced to Buddhism in her early college years. She described herself as finding Buddhism as part of a personal journey in her youth, centered on seeking to recenter love and spirituality in her life and configure these concepts into her focus on activism and justice. After her initial exposures to Buddhism, hooks incorporated it into her Christian upbringing and this combined Christian-Buddhist thought influenced her identity, activism, and writing for the remainder of her life.

She was drawn to Buddhism because of the personal and academic framework it offered her to understand and respond to suffering and discrimination as well as love and connection. She describes the Christian-Buddhist focus on everyday practice as fulfilling the centering and grounding needs of her everyday life.

Buddhist thought, especially the work of Thích Nhất Hạnh, appears in multiple of hooks' essays, books, and poetry. Buddhist spirituality also played a significant role in the creation of love ethic which became a major focus in both her written work and her activism.

Legacy and impact
Bell hooks' influence extends far beyond her Kentucky roots, marking her as one of the foremost feminist voices of contemporary times. Recognized as a visionary by Utne Reader in 1995 and acknowledged among TIME magazine's "100 Women of the Year" in 2020, hooks has earned acclaim as a rare blend of public intellectual and rock star. With a literary repertoire comprising over 30 books and contributions to prominent magazines such as Ms., Essence, and Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, hooks commands attention with her blend of social commentary, autobiography, and feminist critique. Regardless of the subject matter, her writings consistently display scholarly rigor conveyed through accessible prose.

Prior to her tenure at Berea College, hooks held teaching positions at esteemed institutions like Stanford, Yale, and The City College of New York. Her influence transcends academia, as evidenced by her residencies both in the United States and abroad. In 2014, St. Norbert College dedicated an entire year to celebrating her contributions with "A Year of bell hooks."

Hooks' relevance surged amidst the racial justice movements ignited by the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in 2020, with her work All About Love: New Visions becoming essential reading for those seeking clarity amidst societal upheaval. She continues to serve as a guiding voice, offering perspectives on the path towards justice and love in turbulent times. <!--Commenting out the following as it is entirely original research. Small portions could be incorporated into the narrative on her writing, but secondary sources are preferable.

Influences
Figures who influenced hooks include African-American abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth (whose speech Ain't I a Woman? inspired her first major work), Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (whose perspectives on education she embraces in her theory of engaged pedagogy), Peruvian theologian and Dominican priest Gustavo Gutiérrez, psychologist Erich Fromm, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, African-American writer James Baldwin, Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, African-American black nationalist leader Malcolm X, and African-American civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. (who addresses how the strength of love unites communities). She said of Martin Luther King Jr.'s notion of a beloved community, "He had a profound awareness that the people involved in oppressive institutions will not change from the logics and practices of domination without engagement with those who are striving for a better way."

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom
In her 1994 book Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, hooks writes about a transgressive approach in education where educators can teach students to "transgress" against what she sees as racial, sexual, and class boundaries. She sees the classroom as a source of constraint but also a potential source of liberation. She argues that teachers' use of control and power over students dulls the students' enthusiasm and teaches obedience to authority, "confin[ing] each pupil to a rote, assembly-line approach to learning." She advocates that universities should encourage students and teachers to transgress, and seeks ways to use collaboration to make learning more relaxing and exciting. She describes teaching as a performative act and teachers as catalysts that invite everyone to become more engaged and activated. According to hooks, the performative aspect of learning "offers the space for change, invention, spontaneous shifts, that can serve as a catalyst drawing out the unique elements in each classroom." She dedicates a chapter of the book to Paulo Freire, written in a form of a dialogue between herself, Gloria Watkins, and her writing voice, Bell Hooks. In the last chapter of the book, hooks raises the question of eros or the erotic in classroom environments. According to hooks, eros and the erotic do not need to be denied for learning to take place. She argues that one of the central tenets of feminist pedagogy has been to subvert the mind-body dualism and allow oneself as a teacher to be whole in the classroom, and as a consequence wholehearted.

Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope
In 2004, 10 years after the success of Teaching to Transgress, Bell Hooks published Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. In this book, hooks offers advice about how to continue to make the classroom what she sees as a place that is life-sustaining and mind expanding, a place of liberating mutuality where teacher and student together work in partnership. She writes that education as a practice of freedom enables us to confront feelings of loss and restore our sense of connections and consequently teaches us how to create community.

Feminist Theory
In 1984, hooks published Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Here she argues that popular feminist theory has marginalized diverse voices, and states: "To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body." She argues that it is impossible for feminism to make women equal to men because in Western society not all men are equal. She says, "Women in lower class and poor groups, particularly those who are non-white, would not have defined women's liberation as women gaining social equality with men since they are continually reminded in their everyday lives that all women do not share a common social status."

She offers what she sees as a new, more inclusive feminist theory. Her theory encourages the long-standing idea of sisterhood, but advocates that women acknowledge their differences while accepting each other. She urges feminists to consider gender's relation to race, class, and sex, a concept which came to be known as intersectionality. She argues for the importance of male involvement in the movement toward equality, as necessary for change to occur. She calls for a restructuring of the cultural framework of power to one that does not find the oppression of others necessary.

Part of this restructuring involves accepting men into the feminist movement, so that a separatist ideology is discouraged in favor of an inclusive one. Additionally, hooks wants feminism to move away from the predominant views of bourgeois white women and toward a movement of varied social classes, and both genders, for the raising up of women.

Another part of restructuring the movement involves education: hooks observes that there is an anti-intellectual bias among the masses. Poor people do not want to hear from intellectuals, according to hooks, because they are different and have different ideas. This bias against intellectuals leads the poor to shun those people of poor backgrounds who have risen up to graduation from post-secondary education, because they are no longer like the rest of the masses. In order for society to achieve equality, hooks says people must be able to learn from those who have been able to break these stereotypes. This separation of the poor from their potential teachers leads to further inequality, according to hooks, and in order for the feminist movement to succeed, it must be able to bridge the education gap and relate to those at the lower end of the economic sphere. In the chapter "Rethinking The Nature of Work", hooks criticizes those in the feminist movement who "do not have radical political perspectives" and accept the existing economic structure, especially when they are successful within it.

Reel to Real
In her book Reel to Real, hooks discusses the effect that movies have on the individual, with specific emphasis on the black female spectator. She argues that, although we know that movies are not real life, "no matter how sophisticated our strategies of critique and intervention, [we] are usually seduced, at least for a time, by the images we see on the screen. They have power over us, and we have no power over them."

She focuses on what she sees as problematic racial representations. She describes her experiences growing up watching mainstream movies and other media and believes that film's representations have largely negated the black female. She states, "Representation is the 'hot' issue right now because it's a major realm of power for any system of domination. We keep coming back to the question of representation because identity is always about representation".

Black Looks: Race and Representation
In her book Black Looks: Race and Representation, in the chapter "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators", hooks discusses what she calls an "oppositional gaze". She describes it as a way for black people, especially black women, to develop a critical approach to mass media. Writing that for her this "gaze" had always been political, hooks says that the idea began when she thought about incidents of black slaves being punished merely for gazing at their white owners. She wondered how much such experience had been absorbed and carried through the generations to affect black spectatorship and black parenting. hooks writes that because she remembered how she had dared to look at adults as a child, even though she was forbidden to, she knew that slaves had looked too. Drawing on Michel Foucault's thoughts about power always coexisting with the possibility of resistance, hooks discusses this looking as a form of resistance, as a way of finding voice and declaring: "Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality."

She writes that when black people started watching films and television in the United States, they realized that mass media was part of the system of white supremacy, and thus watching became a space for black people to develop a critical spectatorship; an oppositional gaze. Prior to racial integration, according to hooks, black viewers "... experienced visual pleasure in a context where looking was also about contestation and confrontation." However, she avers that this spectatorship was quite different for black women than for black men. According to hooks, black men could renounce the racism of the screen images while also imagining "phallocentric" power by objectifying the white female cast as the object of male desire; privately rebelling against a reality in which black men were punished for publicly gazing at white women.

For hooks, black women's spectatorship was more complicated. In a media environment that was both racist and sexist, black female bodies were largely absent from early motion pictures and, when present, were there in maidservant roles to "... enhance and maintain white womanhood as object of the phallocentric gaze." The response of many black women, according to hooks, was to turn away in alienation from such images. Another was to evade conflict and be entertained by identifying with the white female object of desire. A third possibility was the oppositional gaze, a willingness to stare critically at the on-screen images with the intent to change reality.

According to hooks, the more black women are able to construct themselves as subjects rather than objects in daily life, the more they are likely to develop an oppositional gaze. This process is affected in turn by the representation of black women in mass media. Thus, hooks stresses the importance of black female film makers such as Julie Dash, Ayoka Chenzira, and Zeinabu Davis among others. -->

Films

 * Black is... Black Ain't (1994)
 * Give a Damn Again (1995)
 * Cultural Criticism and Transformation (1997)
 * My Feminism (1997)
 * Voices of Power (1999)
 * BaadAsssss Cinema (2002)
 * I Am a Man: Black Masculinity in America (2004)


 * Happy to Be Nappy and Other Stories of Me (2004)
 * Is Feminism Dead? (2004)
 * Fierce Light: When Spirit Meets Action (2008)
 * Occupy Love (2012)
 * Hillbilly (2018)

Awards and nominations

 * Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics: The American Book Awards / Before Columbus Foundation Award (1991)
 * bell hooks: The Writer's Award from the Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Fund (1994)
 * Happy to Be Nappy: NAACP Image Award nominee (2001)
 * Homemade Love: The Bank Street College Children's Book of the Year (2002)
 * Salvation: Black People and Love: Hurston/Wright Legacy Award nominee (2002)
 * bell hooks: Utne Reader's "100 Visionaries Who Could Change Your Life"
 * bell hooks: The Atlantic Monthly's "One of our nation's leading public intellectuals"
 * bell hooks: Time 100 Women of the Year, 2020

Adult books

 * Excerpted in
 * With Cornel West,
 * With Amalia Mesa-Bains,
 * With Stuart Hall, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue, Foreword by Paul Gilroy. New York, NY: Routledge. 2018. ISBN 978-1138102101.
 * With Cornel West,
 * With Amalia Mesa-Bains,
 * With Stuart Hall, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue, Foreword by Paul Gilroy. New York, NY: Routledge. 2018. ISBN 978-1138102101.
 * With Amalia Mesa-Bains,
 * With Stuart Hall, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue, Foreword by Paul Gilroy. New York, NY: Routledge. 2018. ISBN 978-1138102101.
 * With Amalia Mesa-Bains,
 * With Stuart Hall, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue, Foreword by Paul Gilroy. New York, NY: Routledge. 2018. ISBN 978-1138102101.
 * With Amalia Mesa-Bains,
 * With Stuart Hall, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue, Foreword by Paul Gilroy. New York, NY: Routledge. 2018. ISBN 978-1138102101.
 * With Amalia Mesa-Bains,
 * With Stuart Hall, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue, Foreword by Paul Gilroy. New York, NY: Routledge. 2018. ISBN 978-1138102101.
 * With Amalia Mesa-Bains,
 * With Stuart Hall, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue, Foreword by Paul Gilroy. New York, NY: Routledge. 2018. ISBN 978-1138102101.
 * With Amalia Mesa-Bains,
 * With Stuart Hall, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue, Foreword by Paul Gilroy. New York, NY: Routledge. 2018. ISBN 978-1138102101.
 * With Amalia Mesa-Bains,
 * With Stuart Hall, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue, Foreword by Paul Gilroy. New York, NY: Routledge. 2018. ISBN 978-1138102101.
 * With Amalia Mesa-Bains,
 * With Stuart Hall, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue, Foreword by Paul Gilroy. New York, NY: Routledge. 2018. ISBN 978-1138102101.
 * With Amalia Mesa-Bains,
 * With Stuart Hall, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue, Foreword by Paul Gilroy. New York, NY: Routledge. 2018. ISBN 978-1138102101.
 * With Amalia Mesa-Bains,
 * With Stuart Hall, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue, Foreword by Paul Gilroy. New York, NY: Routledge. 2018. ISBN 978-1138102101.
 * With Amalia Mesa-Bains,
 * With Stuart Hall, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue, Foreword by Paul Gilroy. New York, NY: Routledge. 2018. ISBN 978-1138102101.
 * With Stuart Hall, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue, Foreword by Paul Gilroy. New York, NY: Routledge. 2018. ISBN 978-1138102101.
 * With Stuart Hall, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue, Foreword by Paul Gilroy. New York, NY: Routledge. 2018. ISBN 978-1138102101.
 * With Stuart Hall, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue, Foreword by Paul Gilroy. New York, NY: Routledge. 2018. ISBN 978-1138102101.
 * With Stuart Hall, Uncut Funk: A Contemplative Dialogue, Foreword by Paul Gilroy. New York, NY: Routledge. 2018. ISBN 978-1138102101.

Book sections

 * Pdf.
 * Pdf.
 * Pdf.
 * Pdf.