With her iconic name purposefully spelled in lowercase letters, it is easy to sometimes gloss over bell hooks and her moniker. Nevertheless, the woman, her prose, and her presence in academia are much too great to ignore.
Born Gloria Jean Watkins on September 25, 1952, bell hooks was a Black feminist author, professor, poet, and bonafide public intellectual. She chose her name as an homage to her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks: a fitting choice for a woman who wrote eloquently about identity and what it meant specifically for Black women to live in and survive the intersections of racism, sexism, and classism, and to do so without losing themselves. She wrote prolifically about the connections between race, gender, and class and actually started working on her first full-length book, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism at the age of 19.
hooks was born and raised in Hopkinsville, a segregated town in Kentucky, USA, by a working-class family. She was one of six children, born to Rosa and Veodis, a maid and janitor, respectively. hooks named Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks as her favourite poets to read when she was young. She would grow up to teach and write, studying at Stanford and the University of Wisconsin. Her PhD dissertation in English from the University of California, Santa Cruz, was on the work of another iconic Black woman, Toni Morrison.
Apart from Ain’t I a Woman, hooks also wrote Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre (1984) and Teaching to Transgress (1994) and, of course, one of her most iconic books, All About Love (1999). Through her writing, hooks would become known as a prolific cultural critic, taking a sharp knife to the curtain that is drawn over the ways popular culture and media have perpetuated oppression against the most marginalised, cutting through it for all of us to bear witness.
The first and considerably powerful “truth” that hooks’s work investigated was the idea of a “universal female experience,” applying the matrix of intersectionality of Black feminists before her and taking it one step further to include the ways class and media affect the lives of women. Her analysis was interpreted as radical at the time since the idea that all women share a common background has been understood as the bedrock of mainstream feminism. Still, hooks emphasized the complexity of women’s lives and identities and how that further complicated the concept of sisterhood within feminism. In a 2013 essay on Sheryl Sandberg for The Feminist Wire, she clarified her analysis, writing about how the politics of representation has its limits and how “formation of genuine female solidarity” depends on “a solidarity based on awareness of difference as well as the all-too-common gendered experiences women share.”
Laura Mulvey, a British feminist film theorist, established the theory of the “male gaze” to illustrate how ways of observing and interpreting images, particularly in mainstream film, are produced with a male, heteronormative motivation. bell hooks understood quite profoundly the power of the gaze, of “looking,” and more importantly, the effects of the gaze on those being watched—specifically Black people. She introduced the idea of the “oppositional gaze,” arguing that “looking” is a political act and that those at the other end of the gaze are not passive but rather capable of challenging their surveillants. Black people, hooks wrote, can use the “oppositional gaze” to critique their oppressors, and all oppressed people can authorise themselves to gaze back at society and rebel against injustice. “By courageously looking, we defiantly declared,” she wrote, “Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality.”
hooks passed away from kidney failure on December 15, 2021, at the age of 69. She left behind over 40 books and articles, forever changing academia. At a time when feminist and gender studies only centered on white women and a particular capitalist perspective, she rose above superficial analysis to delineate a feminist practice that is rooted in solidarity between those of all races, gender identities, and socioeconomic positions. Her work deeply impacted women and gender studies, pedagogy, language, and writing.
What made hooks so unique is the place her writing came from: love. It is one thing to write about oppression and injustice—to write about racism and misogyny—in a way that is clinical, to diagnose society’s ills. It is another thing to write from a place of deep intimacy, favouring more accessible language than academic jargon but never sacrificing clarity or acuity. When assessing structures of power in our society, hooks refused to write from a place of “doom” and instead chose to not only interpret injustices but provide us with the roadmap to destroying them. Scholarly writing can feel so very antiseptic, distant, and even cold, but hooks loved us, devoting her life and academic career to saying so unabashedly. She assembled a scholarly tradition that asks, “who are you writing for?” and “can they hear you?”
Poet Danez Smith, scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw, author Naomi Jackson, and journalist Kaila Philo each cite hooks as an inspiration for their work. As Ivie Ani, editor-in-chief and director of Amaka Studio told The Cut, “She made theory accessible, concise, and digestible to everybody — and did so with a sense of urgency. She gave out what she knew, when she knew it, so that we could, too. She was a light.”
In Teaching to Transgress, she writes, quoting the great American feminist poet, Adrienne Rich, “No wonder, then, that we continue to think, ‘This is the oppressor’s language yet I need to talk to you.’” She spoke to Black women, people, all of us, reminding us that within each of us lies the power to assess the world around us and disobey its violent and oppressive limits and expectations. bell hooks preferred to spell her name in all lowercase letters to encourage us to focus attention on her message rather than herself, and it is safe to say we heard her, loud and clear.
