3 Gifts For Everyone From the Work of bell hooks
Words to help you be rigorous, see clearly, and love simply
I had a friend who disliked eating meat for as long as she could remember. The rest of her family loved their steak and potato dinners. She was a kid long before meatless Mondays and the whole culture of animal-free protein alternatives.
She told me the experience of learning the word ‘vegetarian’ was mind-blowing. There was not only a word but an established philosophy. Many others felt the same way she did, they also hated eating flesh. In a finger snap, a pre-teen lonely truth shifted to a new sense of belonging.
When I first went to university and started learning feminist theory it felt like that. I found my people. I remember reading words on a page and shouting, mainly in my head, but sometimes out loud ‘Yes!’ again and again.
I met other women who were also exhilarated by the same sense of discovery. I joined groups, participated in wonderful (who knew?) women-only spaces, marched. It was a lively, messy time. The work of bell hooks was a key part of that awakening for me.
“Not all women, in fact, very few, have had the good fortune to live and work among women and men actively involved in the feminist movement. Many of us live in circumstances and environments where we must engage in feminist struggle alone, with only occasional support and affirmation.”
bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
Do read the online comments about this feminist.
bell hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins. She crafted her pen name to honour her forthright maternal grandmother and used the lower case to encourage a focus on the work, not the writer.
She wrote over thirty books as an academic, cultural critic, poet and activist. A quick search will reveal curated lists for starters, essays, poems, cultural critiques, children’s books, and recorded conversations. Her New York Times Obituary, one of many tributes in prominent publications to her life and work, is followed by a cascade of love and respect from students, colleagues, friends, and others moved by her work.
“I am a fortunate writer because every day of my life practically I get a letter, a phone call from someone who tells me how my work has transformed their life.”
1. Be rigorous
Where was it published? Who wrote it? What was their background? Where was the funding? Who held the power? Why did it matter then? Why does it matter now? What has changed?
Questions were always part of the academic process. But feminist analysis went a step further. As I learned it, it was always peeling back another layer. Who was being left out of this approach? What was missing from official sources? What even made a source official? How was that decided? Who was the arbiter; who declared this story mattered and this one did not?
Feminist critical analysis was a complete re-framing of the way we understood the world. Not to re-cast it as we wished it to be; no, it was pulling back the curtain on centuries of storytelling. Uncovering professional and institutional development for what it was, a creation.
Under analysis, the stories, or if you like, history, is about keeping certain stories alive. It is a way to justify why select groups have more access to resources, power, safety than other groups. Or a way of securing the idea, the perception, that some are more entitled, or deserve more than others.
Traditions were developed to support these myths. The best fictions work as they make characters, events, whole worlds appear real. They exist in our heads as solid as trees or rocks, instead of the man-made creations they are, spun like fairy floss.
“Teaching women how to defend themselves against male rapists is not the same as working to change society so that men will not rape.”
bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
A side note about facts.
The feminist challenge to objective academic truth was not flimsy or without weight. It was not based on videos constructed of stock clips with random obscure questions voiced over an instrumental track.
It was not a call for the end of facts or evidence. Nor was it a claim that every opinion can be called facts or evidence. It was a reveal. Cherry-picking certain facts could create different ‘truths’.
Facts are real and important. Experts, people who devote years to dedicated work in particular areas, have valuable contributions to make. We need more of them.
Feminist analysis was, and is, a call for more serious thinking, more facts, more analysis. What pictures do the data points make? What does it mean? Are we asking the right questions, collecting the right information? Where is the evidence coming from? Who is left out of this picture?
“As all advocates of feminist politics know most people do not understand sexism or if they do they think it is not a problem. Masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men. And a huge majority of these folks think feminism is anti-male. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media.”
bell hooks
2. See Clearly
First, we need to overcome the ways in which we have experienced our own trauma. It’s tricky when life keeps happening, and the world does not feel like a healthy place. But increased awareness of thoughtful interpretations of what is happening can help. Finding your tribe can help. Seeing your experience reflected back to you, not denied or undermined, can help.
Starting to pull back the layers and see the holes in the stories also means becoming aware of the inevitable blind spots. It is a lifelong reckoning. For everyone, including (especially?) white feminists bell hooks pointed out truths that are necessary to confront.
I am a Canadian from the far North. After high school, I studied mainly in Australia. When hooks addresses the reality of black women in America I find myself thinking of what I lived with, saw, and studied where indigenous peoples navigate Commonwealth colonialism.
The specific histories are diverse. The problematic and pervasive constructions of whiteness are common ground. So, what hooks observes about American women may, I believe, be drawn out to white women in general.
“American women have been socialized, even brainwashed, to accept a version of American history that was created to uphold and maintain racial imperialism in the form of white supremacy and sexual imperialism in the form of patriarchy. One measure of the success of such indoctrination is that we perpetuate both consciously and unconsciously the very evils that oppress us.”
bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
One sunny day.
On one of those bright university days I remember when an Australian friend, Hannah was late meeting a group of us in the city. She arrived distressed by an incident on the train. The story was long and complex. The details were disjointed, difficult to follow.
Hannah tried to help an Aboriginal woman who lost a crucial document, necessary for a housing appointment the next day. Hannah had clearly formed a connection with the woman. Shaken, almost in a state of mild shock, there was one sentence Hannah repeated a few times through her tears, ‘That was the first time I ever spoke to an Aboriginal woman’.
“To be an oppressor is dehumanizing and anti-human in nature, as it is to be a victim.”
bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
It was a moment when a series of realities that had been shielded from her hit home. How does one begin to process the discrepancies? Thousands of big government policies and tiny human actions were exposed.
There are times when a rip in the social fabric becomes glaringly obvious, even personal. Maybe you have had those moments? Where what you are taught about the world, at home, at school, on the TV news, does not match what you see with your own eyes.
“In a racially imperialist nation such as ours, it is the dominant race that reserves for itself the luxury of dismissing racial identity while the oppressed race is made daily aware of their racial identity. It is the dominant race that can make it seem that their experience is representative.”
bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
At those moments hooks gives us a starting point to consider both the complexities and the simple plain (racist) truth. And for those of us who are white, it is only a starting point.
There is much more work to be done. I have learnt through having the privilege to take part in some First Nations events and ceremonies in Canada, the work of reconciliation is not for the indigenous people, not alone, not at all.
I wish I could say that I learnt that in school, or popular culture but I did not. It is the work of settler populations, colonisers to find ways to own, to come to terms with the shameful realities of the past and present, and ultimately work towards change.
“Since we live in a society that promotes faddism and temporary superficial adaptation of different values, we are easily convinced that changes have occurred in arenas where there has been little or no change.”
bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
3. And Love Simply
There is so much to be angry about. When I was studying theatre we looked closely at the emotional range, how rage mirrors love. Once the problems, the injustices have been exposed there is no going back. If you know the game, the trick, it’s hard not to see it again and again. There are always more layers to uncover, but there is no return to a place of ignorance.
What should we fear most? Anger with all its messes and unpredictability? Or the absolute shutdown of indifference, coaxed with endless distraction?
Again, hooks provides a place to go. Love. It’s both a journey and a destination. For a platitude-free, honest look at it and the need for more check out her book All About Love, New Visions.
Her words reflect — often unacknowledged — lived experience. She provides space and light for the heaviness of anger, disbelief, and shame that fester in the lousy gap between decency and reality.
There have been many excellent feminist theorists, academics and activists. hooks encourages us to ask more difficult questions, then to shift vantage points and ask again. She found ways to challenge that genuinely connected with people and popular culture.
Her work was not just about books or ideas, but the beating hearts of living beings. Her success was not only in laying down beautiful words one after another, it was in meaningfully impacting all kinds of lives.
Gloria Watkins chose to spend the last years of her life reading, writing and meditating. One way to pay homage, to show respect for her legacy may be to seek quiet, to choose to build more moments of reading, of reflection, into our own lives.
“Living simply makes loving simple.”
bell hooks
hooks created so many brilliant, relevant contributions across decades and genres. The work encourages healthy questions, reflects heartbreaking realities with candour, and helps to source deep wells of self-empowering love — no matter who you are.