User:Beabeets/Bell hooks

Teaching and writing
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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.

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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, a safe space where they can develop their activist expression, education, and work. Bell hooks work and her emphasis on the importance of feminism and love serves as the inspiration and guiding principles of the center and the education it offers. The center continues to operate today and offers events and programming with an emphasis on radical feminist and anti-racist thought.

Personal life
(COPIED)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. hooks 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 states, "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."

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Buddhist Influence
Hooks was first introduced to Buddhism in her early college years through her interest in Beat poetry and after an encounter with the poet and Buddhist Gary Synder. Hooks describes herself as finding Buddhism as part of a personal journey in her youth, centered around 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, hook's incorporated it into her Christian upbringing and this combined Christian-Buddhist thought influenced her identity, activism, and writing for the remainder of her life.

Hooks' 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 an significant role in the creation of hooks' love ethic which became a major focus in both her written work and her activism.