bell hooks

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bell hooks
Born Gloria Jean Watkins
September 25, 1952 (1952-09-25) (age 59)
Hopkinsville, Kentucky, USA
Pen name bell hooks
Occupation Author, social activist
Notable work(s) Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism
All About Love: New Visions
We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

Gloria Jean Watkins (born September 25, 1952), better known by her pen name bell hooks (intentionally uncapitalized),[1][2] is an American author, feminist, and social activist.

Her writing has focused on the interconnectivity of race, class, and gender and what she describes as 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 perspective, hooks has addressed race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality, mass media and feminism.

Contents

[edit] Biography

[edit] Early life

Gloria Jean Watkins 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.

Her 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 Hopkinsville High School in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, earned her B.A. in English from Stanford University in 1973, and earned 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. She also taught at Yale.

[edit] Career

Her teaching career began 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 her grandmother's name as her pen name because her grandmother "was known for her snappy and bold tongue, which [she] greatly admired." She put the name in lowercase letters "to distinguish [herself] from her grandmother." Her name's unconventional lowercasing signifies what is most important in her works: the "substance of books, not who I am."[3]

She taught at several post-secondary institutions in the early 1980s, 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, though it was written years earlier, while she was an undergraduate student.[4] In the decades since its publication, Ain't I a Woman? has gained widespread recognition as an influential contribution to postmodern feminist thought.[5]

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 idea of a 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 in numerous scholarly and mainstream magazines, lectures at widely accessible venues, and appears in various documentaries.

She is frequently cited by feminists[who?] as having provided the best solution to the difficulty of defining something as diverse as "feminism", addressing the problem that if feminism can mean everything, it means nothing. She asserts an answer to the question "what is feminism?" that she says is "rooted in neither fear nor fantasy... 'Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression'".[6]

She has published more than 30 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 inequalities. In three conventional books and four children's books, she suggests that communication and literacy (the ability to read, write, and think critically) are crucial to developing healthy communities and relationships that are not marred by race, class, or gender inequalities.

She has held positions as Professor of African and African-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.

A commencement speech hooks gave in 2002 at Southwestern University was considered controversial. 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. Many in the audience booed the speech, though "several graduates passed over the provost to shake her hand or give her a hug."[7]

In 2004 she joined forces with Berea College in Berea, Kentucky as Distinguished Professor in Residence,[8] 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".

Her most recent book is entitled belonging: a culture of place, which includes a very candid interview with author Wendell Berry as well as a discussion of her move back to Kentucky.

[edit] Influences

Writers who have influenced hooks include African-American abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth (whose speech Ain't I a Woman? inspired her first major work), Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (whose perspectives on education she embraces in her theory of engaged pedagogy), Peruvian theologian and Dominican priest Gustavo Gutierrez, psychologist Erich Fromm, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, African-American writer James Baldwin, Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, African-American black nationalist leader Malcolm X, and African-American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr (who addresses how the strength of love unites communities).[9][10]

[edit] Teaching to Transgress

In her book Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, hooks investigated the classroom as a source of constraint but also a potential source of liberation. She argued that teachers' use of control and power over students dulls the students' enthusiasm and teaches obedience to authority, "confin[ing] each pupil to a rote, assembly-line approach to learning.”[11] She advocated that universities encourage students and teachers to transgress, and sought ways to use collaboration to make learning more relaxing and exciting. She described teaching as “a catalyst that calls everyone to become more and more engaged”.[12]

[edit] Criticism

She has attracted a measure of criticism, often from conservative writers. Peter Schweizer has accused her of hypocrisy in sexual politics.[13] Writer David Horowitz has specifically objected to a passage in the first chapter of Killing Rage,[14] in which hooks states that she is "sitting beside an anonymous white male that [she] long[s] to murder" because he was complicit in a boarding pass misunderstanding that resulted in the harassment of her black, female friend.[15] Of these kind of "irrational, violent impulses," hooks states, "My irrational impulse to want to kill people who bore me or whose ideas are not very complex clearly has to do with an exaggerated response to situations where I feel powerless."[16]

[edit] 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"

[edit] Select bibliography

[edit] 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)

[edit] Further reading

[edit] References

  1. ^ hooks, bell, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (South End Press, 1989) ISBN 0896083527
  2. ^ Dinitia Smith (September 28, 2006). "Tough arbiter on the web has guidance for writers". The New York Times: p. E3. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/28/books/28chic.html. "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." 
  3. ^ Heather Williams. "bell hooks Speaks Up". The Sandspur (2/10/06). http://www.thesandspur.org/media/storage/paper623/news/2006/02/10/News/Bell-Hooks.Speaks.Up-1602355.shtml?norewrite200609102135&sourcedomain=www.thesandspur.org. Retrieved September 10, 2006. 
  4. ^ Teaching to Transgress, 52.
  5. ^ Google Scholar shows 894 citations of Ain't I a Woman (as of August 30, 2006)
  6. ^ bell hooks, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics Pluto Press, 2000
  7. ^ The Austin Chronicle: News: Hooks Digs In
  8. ^ Berea.edu
  9. ^ Notes on IAPL 2001 Keynote Speaker, bell hooks
  10. ^ Building a Community of Love, bell hooks & Thich Nhat Hanh
  11. ^ (hooks, Teaching to Transgress 12)
  12. ^ (hooks, 11)
  13. ^ Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy, Peter Schweizer, Doubleday, 2005, p.9 . ISBN 0385513496. OCLC 62110441. 
  14. ^ David Horowitz (February 13, 2006). "Top 10 Most Dangerous Academics in America". Human Events. http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=12331. Retrieved September 20, 2011. 
  15. ^ hooks, bell. Killing Rage, p. 8-9. Henry Holt & Co. New York, NY. 1995 . ISBN 0805037829. OCLC 32089130. 
  16. ^ Lawrence Chua (1994). "bell hooks by Lawrence Chua". BOMB Magazine. http://bombsite.com/issues/48/articles/1789. Retrieved September 20, 2011. 

[edit] External links

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