bell hooks (born Gloria Jean Watkins)

Overview

Bell Hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins, is an American writer, professor and social critic. She has published at least thirty books, a considerable volume of academic and mainstream articles, featured in several documentary films and continues to lecture publicly around the world. Working predominantly through a post-modern perspective, her focus rests on the function of race, class and gender in contemporary culture.

Hooks early felt the sting of race and class inequality. She was born and grew up in a small segregated town in rural Kentucky to a working class family with seven children. Her father worked as a janitor and her mother a maid for wealthy white families. Initially educated in a segregated public school, Bell was moved to an integrated school by the late 1960’s. She later wrote of the great challenge regarding this transition; where her peers and teachers were overwhelmingly white.

She began writing her first book (Ain’t I A Woman) at 19, which, once published ten years later, defined her as an important name in the feminist debate. It became a principal text in the discussion of racism and sexism and was ranked by Publishers Weekly as among the “twenty most influential women’s books of the previous twenty years”. Meanwhile, her early critical essays on systems of domination had developed for her a significant reputation. This, coupled with her ethos of the importance of ideas over personalities, compelled her to write under a pseudonym. “Bell Hooks”, the name of her maternal great-grandmother, was adopted out of admiration; for her grandmother “was known for her snappy and bold tongue”.

Qualities as a writer

• Accessible - language is understandable
• Fair - considers all viewpoints
• Presentable - She has interrogated her body politic and speech patterns to formulate a style of speaking and writing which opens up meaningful dialogue

Youtube video: Bell Hooks – Cultural Criticism (Pt. 8 - Rap Music)

• Specific example but articulates the interplay between race and gender frameworks

Primary ideas

• Popular culture is where the learning of notions of race, gender and class occurs
• The commoditization of blackness and the interplay of this with white notions of blackness and black representation.
• That the above maintains the status quo: blackness is the sign of transgression which allows whiteness to remain static and conservative; and its conservative thrust to remain unnoticed.

Primary concerns regarding the critique of black creative products

• Whether it counter acts hegemonic culture
• Whether it asserts black agency
• Whether it challenges conventional understandings of racism – helping change larger frameworks
• Racism as white supremacy – not overt discrimination and separation but that everyday life is determined by white supremacy; the construction of American history excludes black and native agendas.

On feminism

• Identified the lack of solidarity within the movement - how some feminist thinkers have put down other feminist thinkers
• The notion of ‘Power Feminism’ – critical of feminist thinkers that do not recognise race and class as defining factors that inherently shape what it is to be female. Exclusive: white, privileged feminism. Eg. Naomi Wolf, wrote Fire with Fire book – devalued other feminist ideas including bells. Bell thought her way of speaking and writing used strategies for gaining power in a very patriarchal manner – winning through intimidation.

- Written by Athena Thebus & Iason Yannakos