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Bell Hooks

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Bell Hooks (or bell hooks, as she prefers her name to be written) was born Gloria Jean Watkins, on September 25, 1952. hooks is an African-American author, feminist, and social activist. Her writing has focused on the interconnectivity of race, class, and gender and their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and domination. She has published over thirty books and numerous scholarly and mainstream articles, appeared in several documentary films and participated in various public lectures. Primarily through a postmodern female perspective, she has addressed race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality, mass media and feminism.

Biography

Early life

hooks was born on September 25, 1952 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. She grew up in a working class family with five sisters and one brother. Her father, Veodis Watkins, was a custodian and her mother, Rosa Bell Watkins, was a homemaker. Throughout her childhood, she was an avid reader.

hooks's early education took place in racially segregated public schools, and she wrote of great adversities when making the transition to an integrated school, where teachers and students were predominantly white. She graduated from Crispus Attucks High School in Hopkinsville, earned her B.A. in English from Stanford University in 1973 and her M.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1976. In 1983, after several years of teaching and writing, she completed her doctorate in the literature department from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a dissertation on author Toni Morrison.

Career

hooks began her teaching 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 (Los Angeles) released her first published work, a chapbook of poems titled "And There We Wept" (1978), written under her pen name, "bell hooks". She adopted the names from her mother and grandmother. According to her, the name's unconventional lowercasing signifies what is most important in her works: the "substance of books, not who I am.

hooks taught at several post-secondary institutions in the early 80s, including the University of California, Santa Cruz and San Francisco State University. South End Press (Boston) published her first major work, Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism in 1981, written while she was an undergraduate student. In the decades since its publication, "Ain't I a Woman?" has gained widespread recognition as an influential contribution to postmodern feminist thought.

Ain’t I a Woman? examines several recurring themes in her later work: the historical impact of sexism and racism on black women, devaluation of black womanhood; media roles and portrayal, the education system, the "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy", the marginalization of black women; and the disregard for issues of race and class within feminism.

Since the publication of Ain’t I a Woman?, she has become eminent as a leftist and postmodern political thinker and cultural critic. She targets and appeals to a broad audience by presenting her work in a variety of media using various writing and speaking styles. As well as having written books, she has published numerous scholarly and mainstream magazines, lectures at widely accessible venues, and appears in various documentaries.

hooks has published over thirty 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 aesthetic/visual culture). A prevalent theme in her most recent writing is the community and communion, the ability of loving communities to overcome race, class, and gender. In three conventional books and four children's books, she demonstrates that communication and literacy (the ability to read, write, and think critically) are the quintessential to developing healthy communities and relationships that are not marred by race, class, or gender inequalities.

hooks has held positions as Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and English at Yale University, Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and American Literature at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, and as Distinguished Lecturer of English Literature at the City College of New York.

hooks gave a controversial commencement speech in 2002 at Southwestern University. Eschewing the congratulatory mode of traditional commencement speeches, she spoke of government-sanctioned violence and oppression, and admonished students who went with the flow. The speech was booed by many in the audience, though "several graduates passed over the provost to shake hooks's hand or give her a hug. Many parents of graduates have refused to donate money to the university since that time, and President Jake Schrum's refusal to address the issue has alienated many former supporters of the university.

In 2004 she joined forces with Berea College in Berea, Kentucky as Distinguished Professor in Residence, where she participated in a weekly feminist discussion group, "Monday Night Feminism", a luncheon lecture series, "Peanut Butter and Gender" and a seminar, "Building Beloved Community: The Practice of Impartial Love".

bell hooks is currently working on a book entitled "Kentucky". This book is to include a very candid interview with author Wendell Berry.

Influences

hooks's influences include abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth (whose speech Ain't I a Woman? inspired hooks's first major work), Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (whose perspectives on education hooks embraces in her theory of engaged pedagogy), theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, psychologist Erich Fromm, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, writer James Baldwin, black nationalist leader Malcolm X, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr (who addresses how the strength of love unites communities).

Criticism

hooks has attracted a measure of criticism from other writers; David Horowitz made light of her statement that "it is difficult not to hear in standard English always the sound of slaughter and conquest" (Teaching to Transgress, p.169), while Peter Schweizer has accused her of hypocrisy in sexual politics.

One passage Horowitz specifically objected to is a discussion in the first chapter of Killing Rage, in which hooks states that she is "sitting beside an anonymous white male that [she] long[s] to murder". She explains that her impulse was occasioned by a ticket/boarding pass dispute involving her black and female friend. To hooks, the dispute was symbolic of the role of racism and sexism in American society. hooks and her companion had used vouchers to upgrade from coach to first class, however hooks's companion had received an incorrect boarding pass and was assigned to coach instead. She took the seat next to hooks anyway, and when the man holding the correct boarding pass for that seat arrived, he found hooks's companion in it and asked her to move. She would not, so he asked a stewardess to get her to move, which she eventually did. "I stare him down with rage, tell him that I do not want to hear his liberal apologies, his repeated insistence that 'it was not his fault.' I am shouting at him that it is not question of blame, that the mistake was understandable, but that the way K was treated was completely unacceptable, that it reflected both racism and sexism." hooks then wrote the opening chapter of the book while sitting next to him:

Awards and nominations

  • Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics: The American Book Awards/ Before Columbus Foundation Award (1991)
  • Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism: "One of the twenty most influential women’s books in the last 20 years" by Publishers Weekly (1992)
  • 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"

Select bibliography

  • Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism (1981) ISBN 0-89608-129-X
  • Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984) ISBN 0-89608-614-3
  • Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989) ISBN 0-921284-09-8
  • Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990) ISBN 0-921284-34-9
  • Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (1991) (with Cornel West) ISBN 0-89608-414-0
  • Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992) ISBN 0-89608-433-7
  • Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-recovery (1993) ISBN 1-896357-99-7
  • Teaching to Transgress: Education As the Practice of Freedom (1994)ISBN 0-415-90808-6
  • Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (1994) ISBN 0-415-90811-6
  • Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (1995) ISBN 1-56584-263-4
  • Killing Rage: Ending Racism (1995) ISBN 0-8050-5027-2
  • Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (1996) ISBN 0-8050-5512-6
  • Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies (1996)
  • Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life (1997) ISBN 0-8050-5722-6
  • Happy to be Nappy (1999) ISBN 0-7868-0427-0
  • Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work (1999) ISBN 0-8050-5910-5
  • All About Love: New Visions (2000) ISBN 0-06-095947-9
  • Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2000) ISBN 0-89608-629-1
  • Where We Stand: Class Matters (2000) ISBN-13: 9780415929134
  • Salvation: Black People and Love (2001) ISBN 0-06-095949-5
  • Communion: The Female Search for Love (2002) ISBN 0-06-093829-3
  • Homemade Love (2002) ISBN 0-7868-0643-5
  • Be Boy Buzz (2002) ISBN 0-7868-0814-4
  • Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-esteem (2003) ISBN 0-7434-5605-X
  • The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (2003) ISBN 0-7434-5607-6
  • Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003) ISBN 0-415-96817-8
  • We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity(2004) ISBN 0-415-96926-3
  • Skin Again (2004) ISBN 0-7868-0825-X
  • Space (2004) ISBN 0-415-96816-X
  • Soul Sister: Women, Friendship, and Fulfillment (2005) ISBN 0-89608-735-2
  • Witness (2006) ISBN 0-89608-759-X
  • Justice: Childhood Love Lessons (2000)

Film appearances

  • Black Is, Black Ain't (1994)
  • Give a Damn Again (1995)
  • Cultural Criticism and Transformation (1997)
  • My Feminism (1997)
  • I am a Man: Black masculinity in America (2004)
  • Voices of Power (1999)
  • Baadasssss Cinema (2002)
  • Writing About a Revolution: A talk (2004)
  • Happy to Be Nappy and other stories of me (2004)
  • Is Feminism Dead? (2004)

References

Further reading

  • Florence, Namulundah. Bell Hooks's Engaged Pedagogy. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1998. ISBN 0-89789-564-9
  • Leitch et al, eds. "Bell Hooks." ''The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. 2475-2484. ISBN 0-393-97429-4
  • South End Press Collective, eds. "Critical Consciousness for Political Resistance"Talking About a Revolution.Cambridge: South End Press, 1998. 39-52. ISBN 0-89608-587-2
  • Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto, ed. Other Sisterhoods: Literary Theory and U.S. Women of Color. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998. ISBN 0-252-02361-7
  • Wallace, Michelle. Black Popular Culture. New York: The New Press, 1998. ISBN 1-56584-459-9

External links



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