bell hooks

Agora

bell hooks

1952–2021

A first way ina deliberate simplification – the portrait says more

Feminism must include Black and poor women, because racism, capitalism and patriarchy work as one system – and education can set people free.

Placement

Political Philosophy & Ethics (20th–21st c.) · North America · Society & History, Politics & Law, Ethics, Gender & Feminism

Writing under her great-grandmother’s name in lowercase: feminism must include Black and poor women; “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy” is one interlocking system, and education can be a practice of freedom.

Key ideas

Feminism for everybody
Interlocking systems of domination
Education as the practice of freedom

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Influence

Influenced by 4

Anna Julia Cooper

influenced by
In Ain’t I a Woman (1981) hooks drew on Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South (1892), with Mary Church Terrell, for a tradition of Black women who confronted both the racism of white feminists and the sexism of Black men; the passage has not been checked here. b. hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981); A. J. Cooper, A Voice from the South (1892)
Evidence: AI draft
Anna Julia Cooper › 1858–1964
Zora Neale Hurston

influenced by
bell hooks read Hurston as an anthropologist and writer who preserved Black folk culture and its voice (‘Saving Black Folk Culture’, in Yearning, 1990). b. hooks, “Saving Black Folk Culture: Zora Neale Hurston as Anthropologist and Writer”, in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990)
Evidence: AI draft
Zora Neale Hurston › 1891–1960
Paulo Freire

influenced by ✓
bell hooks took up Freire’s critique of ‘banking’ education and his idea of conscientisation for an engaged pedagogy, teaching as a practice of freedom (Teaching to Transgress, 1994). b. hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994); P. Freire, Pedagogia do oprimido (1968)
Evidence: also in Wikidata · Wikidata
Paulo Freire › 1921–1997
Audre Lorde

influenced by
bell hooks took up Lorde’s call to transform silence into speech as the ground of ‘talking back’, citing her ‘A Litany for Survival’ (Talking Back, 1989). b. hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989); A. Lorde, “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action” (1977); “A Litany for Survival”, in The Black Unicorn (1978)
Evidence: AI draft
Audre Lorde › 1934–1992

Influenced 2

Patricia Hill Collins

influenced
In Black Feminist Thought (1990) Collins drew on hooks’s Ain’t I a Woman (1981) and on the margin as a vantage for seeing the whole (1984). P. H. Collins, Black Feminist Thought (1990); b. hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981); Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984)
Evidence: AI draft
Patricia Hill Collins › b. 1948
Kimberlé Crenshaw

influenced
Crenshaw drew on bell hooks’ analysis of how Black women are erased in both feminist and antiracist discourse (Ain’t I a Woman, 1981) in framing intersectionality (1989). K. Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”, University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989); b. hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981)
Evidence: AI draft
Kimberlé Crenshaw › b. 1959

Criticism

Criticizes 1

Frantz Fanon

criticised
In “Feminism as a Persistent Critique of History” (1996) hooks objected that Fanon’s vision of liberation is addressed to men and leaves out Black women and love between Black people, while stressing how much his work had meant to her. b. hooks, “Feminism as a Persistent Critique of History: What’s Love Got to Do with It?”, in A. Read (ed.), The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation (1996)
Evidence: AI draft
Frantz Fanon › 1925–1961

Works

1981Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
Black women’s experience of sexism and racism, from slavery to a feminism that ignored them.
1984Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
Feminism as a movement to end sexist oppression, not a lifestyle for privileged women.

Position

Her first book, “Ain’t I a Woman”, begun while she was an undergraduate, argued that American feminism had been shaped by white middle-class women and had ignored Black women, who faced sexism and racism at once; Black liberation movements, in turn, had reproduced patriarchy. “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center” redefines feminism as “a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression”, a definition that includes men and does not depend on identity. hooks named the system she opposed “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy”, insisting that its parts interlock and cannot be fought separately. Drawing on Paulo Freire, she described teaching as a practice of freedom.

Life & context

bell hooks (1952–2021) was born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and studied at Stanford, Wisconsin and Santa Cruz. She wrote under the name of her great-grandmother, in lowercase to put the work before the author. She taught at Yale, Oberlin and the City College of New York before returning to Kentucky in 2004 to teach at Berea College, where the bell hooks Institute holds her papers.