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bell hooks in 2009.

bell hooks (September 25, 1952 – December 15, 2021) is the pen name of Gloria Jean Watkins[1] , an American educator and prolific author. She is best known for her writings on race, feminism, and class.[2][3] In writing about race, capitalism, and gender, hooks described their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression. She published around 40 books, including works that ranged from essays, poetry, and children's books. She published numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures.

Watkins began her academic career in 1976 teaching English and ethnic studies at the University of Southern California. She later taught at several institutions including Stanford University, Yale University, and The City College of New York, before joining Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, in 2004.[4] In 2014, hooks also founded the bell hooks Institute at Berea College.[5] Her pen name was borrowed from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks.[6]

Early life

Watkins was born into a working-class African-American family in the small, segregated town of Hopkinsville, Kentucky,[7][8] She was one of six children born to Rosa Bell Watkins (née Oldham) and Veodis Watkins.[9] Her father worked as a janitor, and her mother worked as a maid in the homes of white families. In her memoir Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (1996), Watkins would write of her "struggle to create self and identity" while growing up in "a rich magical world of southern black culture that was sometimes paradisiacal and at other times terrifying."[10]

An avid reader (with poets William Wordsworth, Langston Hughes, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Gwendolyn Brooks among her favorites),[11] Watkins was educated in racially segregated public schools, later moving to an integrated school in the late 1960s.[12] This experience greatly influenced her perspective as an educator, and it inspired scholarship on education practices as seen in her book, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom.[13] She graduated from Hopkinsville High School before obtaining her BA in English from Stanford University in 1973,[14] and her MA in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1976.[15] During this time, Watkins was writing her book Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, which she began at the age of 19 (Template:C. 1971)[16] and then published (as bell hooks) in 1981.[3]

In 1983, after several years of teaching and writing, hooks completed her doctorate in English at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a dissertation on author Toni Morrison entitled "Keeping a Hold on Life: Reading Toni Morrison's Fiction."[17][18]

Influences

Included among hooks' influences is the American abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth. Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" inspired hooks' first major book.[19] Also, the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire is mentioned in hooks' book Teaching to Transgress. His perspectives on education are present in the first chapter, "engaged pedagogy."[20] Other influences include Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez,[21] psychologist Erich Fromm,[22] playwright Lorraine Hansberry,[23] Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh,[24] and African American writer James Baldwin.[25]

Teaching and writing

She began her academic career in 1976 as an English professor and senior lecturer in ethnic studies at the University of Southern California.[26] During her three years there, Golemics, a Los Angeles publisher, released her first published work, a chapbook of poems titled And There We Wept (1978),[27] written under the name "bell hooks." She had adopted her maternal great-grandmother's name as her pen name because, as she later put it, her great-grandmother "was known for her snappy and bold tongue, which [she] greatly admired."[6] She also said she put the name in lowercase letters both to honor her great-grandmother[28] and to convey that what is most important to focus upon is her works, not her personal qualities: the "substance of books, not who [she is]."[29] On the unconventional lowercasing of her pen name, hooks added that, "When the feminist movement was at its zenith in the late '60s and early '70s, there was a lot of moving away from the idea of the person. It was: Let's talk about the ideas behind the work, and the people matter less... It was kind of a gimmicky thing, but lots of feminist women were doing it."[30]

In the early 1980s and 1990s, hooks taught at several post-secondary institutions, including the University of California, Santa Cruz, San Francisco State University, Yale (1985 to 1988, as assistant professor of African and Afro-American studies and English),[31] Oberlin College (1988 to 1994, as associate professor of American literature and women's studies), and, beginning in 1994, as distinguished professor of English at City College of New York.[32][33]

South End Press published her first major work, Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism, in 1981, though she had written it years earlier while still an undergraduate.[12] In the decades since its publication, Ain't I a Woman? has been recognized for its contribution to feminist thought, with Publishers Weekly in 1992 naming it "One of the twenty most influential women's books in the last 20 years."[34] Writing in The New York Times in 2019, Min Jin Lee said that Ain't I a Woman "remains a radical and relevant work of political theory. She lays the groundwork of her feminist theory by giving historical evidence of the specific sexism that black female slaves endured and how that legacy affects black womanhood today."[31] Ain't I a Woman? examines themes including the historical impact of sexism and racism on black women, devaluation of black womanhood,[35] media roles and portrayal, the education system, the idea of a white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy and the marginalization of black women.[36]

At the same time, hooks became significant as a leftist and postmodern political thinker and cultural critic.[37] She published more than 30 books,[2] 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 aesthetics and visual culture). Reel to Real: race, sex, and class at the movies (1996) collects film essays, reviews, and interviews with film directors.[38] In The New Yorker, Hua Hsu said these interviews displayed the facet of hooks' work that was "curious, empathetic, searching for comrades."

In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), hooks develops a critique of white feminist racism in second-wave feminism, which she argued undermined the possibility of feminist solidarity across racial lines.[39]

As hooks argued, communication and literacy (the ability to read, write, and think critically) are necessary for the feminist movement because without them people may not grow to recognize gender inequalities in society.[40]

In Teaching to Transgress (1994), hooks' attempts a new approach to education for minority students.[41] Particularly, hooks' strives to make scholarship on theory accessible to "be read and understood across different class boundaries."[42]

In 2002, hooks gave a commencement speech at Southwestern University. Eschewing the congratulatory mode of traditional commencement speeches, she spoke against what she saw as government-sanctioned violence and oppression, and admonished students who she believed went along with such practices.[43][44] The Austin Chronicle reported that many in the audience booed the speech, though "several graduates passed over the provost to shake her hand or give her a hug."[43]

In 2004, she joined Berea College as Distinguished Professor in Residence.[45] Her 2008 book, belonging: a culture of place, includes an interview with author Wendell Berry as well as a discussion of her move back to Kentucky.[46] She was a scholar in residence at The New School on three occasions, the last time in 2014.[47] Also in 2014, the bell hooks Institute was founded at Berea College,[3] where she donated her papers in 2017.[48]

During her time at Berea College, hooks also founded the bell hooks center along with professor Dr. M. Shadee Malaklou.[49] The center was established to provide underrepresented students, especially black and brown, femme, queer, and Appalachian individuals at Berea College, a safe space where they can develop their activist expression, education, and work.[50] The center cites hooks' work and her emphasis on the importance of feminism and love as the inspiration and guiding principles of the education it offers. The center offers events and programming with an emphasis on radical feminist and anti-racist thought.[49]

She was inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame in 2018.[2][51]

In 2020, during the George Floyd protests, there was a resurgence of hooks' work on racism, feminism, and capitalism.[52]

Personal life

Regarding her sexual identity, hooks described herself as "queer-pas-gay."[53][54][55] She used the term "pas" from the French language, translating to "not" in the English language. hooks describes being queer in her own words as "not who you're having sex with, but about being at odds with everything around it."[56]  She states, "As the essence of queer, I think of Tim Dean's work on being queer and queer not as being about who you're having sex with—that can be a dimension of it—but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and it has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live."[57] During an interview with Abigail Bereola in 2017, hooks revealed to Bereola that she was single while they discussed her love life. During the interview, hooks told Bereola, "I don't have a partner. I've been celibate for 17 years. I would love to have a partner, but I don't think my life is less meaningful."[58]

On December 15, 2021, bell hooks died from kidney failure at her home in Berea, Kentucky, aged 69.[2]

Buddhism

Through her interest in Beat poetry and after an encounter with the poet and Buddhist Gary Snyder, hooks was first introduced to Buddhism in her early college years.[59] She described herself as finding Buddhism as part of a personal journey in her youth, centered on seeking to recenter love and spirituality in her life and configure these concepts into her focus on activism and justice.[60] After her initial exposures to Buddhism, hooks incorporated it into her Christian upbringing and this combined Christian-Buddhist thought influenced her identity, activism, and writing for the remainder of her life.[61]

She was drawn to Buddhism because of the personal and academic framework it offered her to understand and respond to suffering and discrimination as well as love and connection. She describes the Christian-Buddhist focus on everyday practice as fulfilling the centering and grounding needs of her everyday life.[62]

Buddhist thought, especially the work of Thích Nhất Hạnh, appears in multiple of hooks' essays, books, and poetry.[61] Buddhist spirituality also played a significant role in the creation of love ethic which became a major focus in both her written work and her activism.[63]

Films

Awards and nominations

Published works

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Adult books

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Children's books

Book sections

Provenance

Some content on this page may previously have appeared on Wikipedia.

References

Citations

  1. Smith, Dinitia. Tough arbiter on the web has guidance for writers, The New York Times, September 28, 2006, p. E3. “But the Chicago Manual says it is not all right to capitalize the name of the writer bell hooks because she insists that it be lower case.”
  2. 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 Knight, Lucy. bell hooks, author and activist, dies aged 69, The Guardian, December 15, 2021. Retrieved on December 15, 2021.
  3. 3.0 3.1 3.2 Tikkanen, Amy (27 November 2019). bell hooks | American scholar (en). Stanford University.
  4. 4.0 4.1 Get to Know bell hooks (en-US).
  5. About the bell hooks institute., via archive.org
  6. 6.0 6.1 hooks, bell, "Inspired Eccentricity: Sarah and Gus Oldham" in Sharon Sloan Fiffer and Steve Fiffer (eds), Family: American Writers Remember Their Own, New York: Vintage Books, 1996, p. 152.Template:Pb hooks, bell, Talking Back, Routledge, 2014 [1989], p. 161.
  7. Risen, Clay. bell hooks, Pathbreaking Black Feminist, Dies at 69, The New York Times, December 15, 2021. (in en-US)
  8. Medea, Andra (1997). “hooks, bell (1952–)”, Facts on File Encyclopedia of Black Women in America. New York: Facts on File, 100–101. ISBN 0-8160-3425-7. OCLC 35209436. 
  9. Cite error: Invalid <ref> tag; no text was provided for refs named :1
  10. Bone Black. Kirkus Reviews (August 15, 1996).
  11. Busby, Margaret. bell hooks obituary | Trailblazing writer, activist and cultural theorist who made a pivotal contribution to Black feminist thought, December 17, 2021.
  12. 12.0 12.1 Le Blanc, Ondine E. (1997). “bell hooks 1952–”, Contemporary Black Biography. Gale, 125–129. ISBN 978-1-4144-3543-5. OCLC 527366247. 
  13. Teaching to Transgress – Books (en-GB) (July 14, 2020).
  14. 14.0 14.1 (2007) “hooks, bell 1952–”, Something about the Author. Gale, 112–116. ISBN 978-1-4144-1071-5. OCLC 507358041. 
  15. Scanlon, Jennifer (1999). Significant Contemporary American Feminists: A Biographical Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 125–132. ISBN 978-0313301254. 
  16. Remembering bell hooks (1952-2021) (December 2021).
  17. Template:Cite thesis WorldCat.
  18. hooks, bell (1983). Keeping a Hold on Life: Reading Toni Morrison's Fiction. University of California, Santa Cruz. 
  19. Lee, Min Jin. In Praise of bell hooks, The New York Times, 2019-02-28. (in en-US)
  20. hooks, bell (1994). Teaching to transgress : education as the practice of freedom. ISBN 0-415-90807-8. OCLC 30668295. 
  21. Sarkar, Somnath (2021-07-11). Aint I a Woman? | Feminist Theory of Bell Hooks (en-US).
  22. Richards, Aleta (2000-09-22). "All About Love. (Book reviews: love everybody right now)" (in en). Civil Rights Journal 5 (1): 58–61.
  23. Trescott, Jacqueline. A WOMAN OF HER WORDS, 1999-02-09. (in en-US)
  24. bell hooks tells the story of the first time she met Thich Nhat Hanh - Lions Roar (en-US) (December 21, 2017).
  25. hooks, bell. Why James Baldwin Is Important: Books, Quotes, Essays, Poems, Movie, Biography * bell hooks Books (en-US).
  26. Hampton, Bonita (2007). “hooks, bell (1952–)”, Encyclopedia of Activism and Social Justice. SAGE Publishing, 704–706. DOI:10.4135/9781412956215.n418. ISBN 978-1-4129-1812-1. 
  27. Glikin, Ronda (1989). Black American Women in Literature: A Bibliography, 1976 through 1987. McFarland & Company. ISBN 0-89950-372-1. OCLC 18986103. 
  28. McGrady, Clyde. Why bell hooks didn't capitalize her name, 2021-12-15. (in en-US) “Early on, hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins, wanted a way to honor her maternal great-grandmother while detaching herself from her work. She wrote dozens of books using her great-grandmother's name but didn't capitalize it.”
  29. Williams, Heather (March 26, 2013). bell hooks Speaks Up. The Sandspur.
  30. Lowens, Randy (2018-02-14). How Do You Practice Intersectionalism? An Interview with bell hooks (en-US).
  31. 31.0 31.1 Lee, Min Jin. In Praise of bell hooks, The New York Times, February 28, 2019. (in en-US)
  32. Leatherman, Courtney (May 19, 1995). The Real bell hooks.
  33. "bell hooks." Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2010. Literature Resource Center. Retrieved June 12, 2018.
  34. (August 28, 2015) The Kentucky African American Encyclopedia (in en). University Press of Kentucky. ISBN 978-0-8131-6067-2. 
  35. (1983) "Black Women and Feminism: Two Reviews". Phylon 44 (1): 84. DOI:10.2307/274371. Research Blogging.
  36. (June 19, 2013) The Routledge Companion to Critical and Cultural Theory. Routledge, 241–242. DOI:10.4324/9780203520796. ISBN 978-1-134-12327-8. 
  37. bell hooks (en-US) (January 1, 1995).
  38. Winchester, James (1999). "Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies". The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57 (3): 388. DOI:10.2307/432214. Research Blogging.
  39. Isoke, Zenzele (December 2019). "bell hooks: 35 Years from Margin to Center – Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. By bell hooks. New York: Routledge, [1984] 2015. 180 pp. 23.96 (paperback)." (in en). Politics & Gender 15 (4). DOI:10.1017/S1743923X19000643. ISSN 1743-923X. Research Blogging.
  40. Olson, Gary A. (1994). "bell hooks and the Politics of Literacy: A Conversation". Journal of Advanced Composition 14 (1): 1–19. ISSN 0731-6755.
  41. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom * bell hooks Books (en-US).
  42. What bell hooks taught me (en) (2021-12-31).
  43. 43.0 43.1 Apple, Lauri (May 24, 2002). bell hooks Digs In.
  44. Kilker, Jean (May 24, 2002). Postmarks – Southwestern Graduation Debacle.
  45. Faculty and Staff. Berea College.
  46. hooks, bell (January 1, 2009). Belonging: a culture of place (in en). Routledge. ISBN 9780415968157. OCLC 228676700. 
  47. bell hooks returns for Third Residency at The New School. The New School (September 18, 2014).
  48. Burke, Minyvonne (December 15, 2021). Acclaimed author and activist bell hooks dies at 69. NBC News.
  49. 49.0 49.1 The bell hooks center at Berea College - Feminism is for everybody (en-US).
  50. About the bell hooks center (en-US).
  51. Potter, Leslie (January 31, 2018). Four Kentucky authors were inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.
  52. Bernstein, Sharon. Black feminist writer and intellectual bell hooks dies at 69, Reuters, 2021-12-15. (in en)
  53. Ring, Trudy. Queer Black Feminist Writer bell hooks Dies at 69, The Advocate, December 15, 2021. Retrieved on December 15, 2021.
  54. Goodman, Elyssa. How bell hooks Paved the Way for Intersectional Feminism, them., 12 March 2019.
  55. Peake, Amber (December 16, 2021). 'Queer-pas-gay' identity meaning explored as bell hooks dies aged 69. The Focus.
  56. bell hooks - Are You Still a Slave? Liberating the Black Female Body | Eugene Lang College. The New School (May 7, 2014).
  57. Peake, Amber. 'Queer-pas-gay' identity meaning explored as bell hooks dies aged 69, TheFocus, December 16, 2021.
  58. Bereola, Abigail. Tough Love With bell hooks, Shondaland, December 13, 2017.
  59. Tworkov, Helen (January 9, 2017). Agent of Change (en).
  60. hooks, bell (March 24, 2017). Building a Community of Love – Lion's Roar (en-US).
  61. 61.0 61.1 Medine, Carolyn M. Jones Medine. "bell hooks, Black Feminist Thought, and Black Buddhism: A Tribute." Journal of World Philosophies. 7 (Summer 2022): 187-196.
  62. Yancy, George (2015-12-10). bell hooks: Buddhism, the Beats and Loving Blackness (en).
  63. Medine, C. M. J. "Bell Hooks, Black Feminist Thought, and Black Buddhism: A Tribute". Journal of World Philosophies, vol. 7, no. 1, July 2022, pp. 187–196, https://scholarworks.iu.edu/iupjournals/index.php/jwp/article/view/5479 .
  64. Guthmann, Edward. Riggs' Eloquent Last Plea for Tolerance, Hearst, May 5, 1995.
  65. "FeMiNAtions: Despite the pleas and its promotional tone, My Feminism makes a valid point", The Globe and Mail, May 23, 1998, p. 18. Template:ProQuest.
  66. Voices of Power: African-American Women. Series Title: I Am Woman. The Pennsylvania State University.
  67. Happy to Be Nappy and Other Stories of Me. Turner Classic Movies.
  68. Is Feminism Dead?. Films Media Group.
  69. "Best Bets", The Daytona Beach News-Journal, December 3, 2010, p. E6. Template:ProQuest.
  70. "Occupying your heart: Documentary looks at roots behind global activism movement", The Cairns Post, April 10, 2013, p. 31. Template:ProQuest.
  71. Crust, Kevin (October 3, 2018). Review: Documentary 'Hillbilly' takes on media stereotypes of Appalachia (en-US). Los Angeles Times.
  72. The American Book Awards / Before Columbus Foundation. American Booksellers Association (2013).
  73. 10 Writers Win Grants, December 22, 1994.
  74. Happy to Be Nappy. Alkebu-Lan Image.
  75. bell hooks. The Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning.
  76. Footlights, The New York Times, August 21, 2002. (in en-US)
  77. 77.0 77.1 Rappaport, Scott (April 25, 2007). May 10 bell hooks event postponed. UC Santa Cruz, Regents of the University of California.
  78. hampton, dream. bell hooks: 100 Women of the Year, March 5, 2020. (in en)

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Template:Radical feminism Template:American Book Awards Template:Authority control {{#related: Patriarchy}} {{#related: Feminism}} {{#related: Toni Morrison}}