bell hooks (1952-2021)

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By MARILÉA DE ALMEIDA*

Considerations on the thought and work of the North American intellectual

Without a doubt, Bell Hooks was one of the most important intellectuals of our time. From the 1980s to 2021, she has published more than 30 books in which, through accessible language, she expresses complex thinking, averse to simplistic formulations. A production that denounces, without subterfuge, the atavistic connections between economic imperialism, white supremacy and patriarchy. Her works are references for deepening our understanding of how the dynamics of race, class and gender are expressed in cultural, academic, subjective and everyday practices.

Faced with such a singular thinker, we ask: how were the themes of her analyzes and her narrative style constructed in her intellectual trajectory? Angled by this question, in this entry I describe in a panoramic way the life and work of Bell Hooks, especially with regard to her intellectual trajectory and the processes through which she becomes Bell Hooks. Therefore, the entry is divided into three parts. The first covers biographical aspects, focusing on its relationship with knowledge, school space and the university environment. The second articulates the work of Bell Hooks with the emergence, in the 1970s and 1980s, of black feminisms. The third part describes themes and approaches that are recurrent in her books, such as criticism of pedagogical practice, criticism of cultural production, reflections on spirituality, love and self-esteem and the dynamics of race, class and gender.

 

School and academic trajectory

Gloria Jean Watkins is the given name of Bell Hooks. She was born in 1952 in Hopkinsville, a small segregated town in the state of Kentucky, in the southern United States. She grew up in a working-class family: her father was a janitor and her mother a housewife. In addition to her parents, she was raised with five sisters and one brother. The choice of the pseudonym Bell Hooks is a tribute to his great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks, known within the family for her courage to tell the truth. A sharp-tongued, outspoken woman. When Bell Hooks starts writing, she adopts her great-grandmother's name as a way to claim this legacy, since since childhood Hooks also liked to express her ideas.

Being born a black woman in the south of the United States, in the 1950s, in a context of racial segregation and in a patriarchal family, means coming into the world in a time and space in which opportunities for existence for black women were limited to domestic work (whether inside or outside the home), marriage and children. In professional terms, girls who liked to read and study, like Hooks, could be teachers. In Wounds of Paisson: a writing life (1997), a memoir that narrates her love affair with writing, Hooks says that being a teacher in that context meant choosing a celibate life. The magisterium was seen as something almost priestly. The woman who opted for a career as a teacher renounced her love life and sex life. In general, girls were not encouraged to develop their intellect, since, as Bell Hooks' father said, “men don't like women who speak their minds” (HOOKS, 1997). As a child, for being a girl who expressed her thoughts, Hooks was often punished in the family environment.

“To build my voice I had to talk – and talk is what I did – throwing myself in and out of grown-up conversations and dialogues, answering questions that weren't directed at me, asking endless questions, giving a speech. Needless to say, the punishments for these speech acts were endless. They were intended to silence – the child, more particularly the girl. If I had been a boy, they would have encouraged me to speak, believing that I might one day be called upon to preach.” (HOOKS, 2019a, p. 32)

If in the family space his intellect was observed with distrust and was often the target of punishment. It was at the segregated school where he attended as a child that Bell Hooks found black teachers who valued his intelligence. She says that for those teachers, good education was not linked to the mere transmission of content and the preparation of students to exercise a profession (HOOKS, 2020, p.23). In contrast, Hooks experienced an education that simultaneously encouraged intellect and a commitment to social justice, especially racial equality.

“At that time, going to school was pure joy. I loved being a student. He loved to learn. School was the place of ecstasy – of pleasure and danger. Being transformed by new ideas was pure pleasure” (HOOKS, 2013, p.11)

From adolescence onwards, Bell Hooks' relationship with the school changes. School ceases to be a place where she feels powerful. This occurs when she starts attending a desegregated school. What does that mean?

In the United States, between 1876 and 1965, in the southern states there were the so-called "Jim Crow", laws that made the system of racial segregation official, separating blacks and whites in train seats, in drinking fountains, in schools. It was called the separate but "equal" doctrine. All of this served to keep black people in subordinate positions, denying them access to reasonable levels of education and employment. The civil rights movement, led by the American black movement, began in the 1950s and its struggle put an end to segregationist legislation, which led to the implementation of a series of affirmative actions for the American black population (CASHMORE, 2000, p.505 -508).

In this context of transformations, Bell Hooks attends the High School, desegregated. The period is narrated by her as a period of deep sadness, since black students suffered systemic racism within the school space.

“During the deep sadness of my teenage years, I would often find myself in a late-afternoon history class crying silently. Around me, students and teacher pretended not to notice. High school had recently been desegregated. To achieve this goal, black students were forced to get up earlier than usual and take the bus to the “white” school, where we would be crammed into the gymnasium and made to wait for the white students to arrive and enter the school first. By the logic of white supremacy, that was how the peace was kept. […] It was not surprising, then, that, in a classroom of all white people, with only two black students, no one wanted to acknowledge my feelings, my suffering” (HOOKS, 2020, p. 128-129).

School became the place that undermined his intellectual self-esteem.

In 1970, at the age of eighteen, Hooks entered Stanford University, California, to study English. In the university space, she also finds a hostile environment for black people, especially for women, as she details:

“We need more autobiographical accounts of first-generation black students entering predominantly white schools and universities. Imagine what it's like to be taught by a professor who doesn't believe you're fully human. Imagine what it's like to be taught by professors who believe they belong to a superior race and feel they shouldn't have to stoop to teaching students they consider incapable of learning. In general, we knew which white professors hated us, and we avoided their classes unless they were absolutely essential. Since most of us arrived at college on the heels of a powerful anti-racist struggle for civil rights, we knew we would find allies in that fight – and indeed we did. Notably, my teachers' avowed machismo was tougher than their veiled racism” (Hooks, 2020, p. 24).

At the height of the feminist movement, in 1973, Bell Hooks finished her undergraduate degree and, in 1976, completed a master's degree in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In 1983, after years of teaching and writing, she finished her Ph.D. in Literature at the University of California, with a thesis on Toni Morrison entitled Keeping a hold on life: reading Toni Morrison´s fiction.  As a university professor, she served at several institutions: University of Southern California, University of California, Yale, Orbelim College, City College of New York, among others.

Between the 1970s and 1980s, as well as other black intellectuals and activists in the United States and Latin America, Hooks witnessed, within the black movement, dominated by men, the denial of machismo, and in the feminist movement, dominated by white women, the denial of racism. This double negation was also expressed in academic productions. Indignation over the silencing of black women's experiences was central to her defining her research interests.

In this respect, in 1981, the publication of his first book is exemplary: And I'm not a woman? Black women and feminism, whose research and writing were carried out during graduation. The title of the book recovers the question asked by Sojourner Truth – abolitionist and orator – who, in the XNUMXth century, defended that all women, including black women, be given the right to vote, since at the time the discussion included only women. white and black men. In this way, Hooks updates Truth's questioning to make visible in her work Black women's experiences during slavery, the devaluation of Black womanhood, Black male sexism, racism within the feminist movement, and Black women's engagement with feminism. .

 

Bell Hooks Thought and the Emergence of Black Feminism

The motivations that led Hooks to write and publish her first book are embedded in a broader context of the emergence, in the 1970s and 1980s, of black feminism in the United States and Latin America. At that moment, the political struggle simultaneously involved the dispute for editorial and academic spaces.

In the 1960s, the publishing market in the United States found a new niche: the experience of black women, focusing mainly on the period of slavery. Several of these works, written by white people, reinforced stereotypes such as, for example, the strength of black women, based on the premise that black women manage to overcome the impact of sexist oppression by being strong. According to Bell Hooks, this tendency, which began in the feminist movement, to romanticize the lives of black women, was reflected in the culture as a whole. In this regard, Hooks states that “being strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming it” and black feminists understood that they needed to produce other narratives and at the same time recover a black female tradition of analysis of reality. Sojourner Truth, Mary Church Terrel, Ana Julia Cooper, Amanda Berry Smith, among other women who worked in the past, had their work revisited by black feminists in the 1970s and 1980s, as did Bell Hooks.

Writing and publishing in a variety of formats was an integral part of the battle. Of note, in the 1970s, was the anthology coordinated by Toni Cade Bambara with essays and poetry by authors such as Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, Frances Beale, Carole Brown, among others. It is important to highlight the publication, in 1978, of the book Black Macho and Myth of Super Woman, by Michele Wallace. During the same period, the Combahee River Collective emerged, a black feminist and lesbian organization active in Boston, operating between 1974 and 1980. This organization understood black feminism as the important political movement to combat the multiple and simultaneous oppressions that black women faced.

From the 1980s onwards, publications continued on an increasing scale. The works of: Barbara Christian – Black Women Novelists (1980); Angela Davis – Women, Race & Class (1981); Paula Gidding – When and Where I Enter: the impact of Black Women on sex and Race in America (1984); Alice Walker – In Search of Our Mothers Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983); Barbara Smith – HomeGirls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983); Audre Lorde – Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984); Guy-Sheftall Beverly – words in the fire: an anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (1992). The list is immense, but the small sample allows us to visualize the historical conditions in which the thinking and writing of Bell Hooks is inserted. Throughout her works, she dialogues with this black feminist production. It should be noted that, of the mentioned books, only two were translated and published in Brazil: Women, race and class, by Angela Davis (2016) and outsider sister: rehearsals and conferences by Audre Lorde (2019).

In terms of conceptual discussion, from the 1990s onwards, the notion of experience becomes a central theme for feminisms. This is because the so-called third wave of feminism, marked by the claim of black, Latino and indigenous feminists, among others, questioned, above all, the naturalization of the female subject around the experiences of middle-class white women. The discussion revolved around two questions: who can narrate the experiences and the problem regarding the essentialization of subjects and their practices, that is, the idea that subjects do not precede experiences, but are constituted through discursive practices and non-discursive. (PERPICH, 2010, p. 13-34). The question that arises is the following: does the experience of oppression confer a special competence on the right to speak about oppression?

On this debate, Bell Hooks, in Teaching to transgress: education as a practice of freedom, published in the USA in 1994, is self-critical and points out ways of using experience. To this end, she narrates that, when she started teaching, she was grateful to discover the expression “authority of experience” in feminist writings. This is because the expression allowed her to narrate the experiences of black women, something she missed since her graduation. Hooks knew that black women's reality was being excluded and that there was no body of theory she could invoke to substantiate her claim. Thus, Hooks states that, in the 1980s, when “no one wanted to hear about the deconstruction of black women as a category of analysis”, the idea of ​​“authority of experience” favored her to gain listeners by publishing Ain't I a Woman; Black Women and Feminism. (Hooks, 2013, p. 122). Despite this path, Hooks recognizes that the term “authority of experience” can be used with an authoritarian and essentialist bias, as he details:

“Today I am troubled by the term 'authority of experience' and am acutely aware of how it is used to silence and exclude. But I want to have an expression that affirms the special character of those ways of knowing rooted in experience. I know that experience can be a means of knowledge and can inform how we know what we know. While I am opposed to any essentialist practice that constructs identity in an exclusive monolithic way, I do not want to relinquish the power of experience as a point of view from which to make an analysis or formulate a theory. I am disturbed, for example, when all the courses in black history or literature in some colleges and universities are taught solely by white professors; I am disturbed not because I think they cannot know these realities, but because they know them differently. […] This privileged point of view cannot be acquired through books, nor through distanced observation and the study of a given reality. For me, this privileged point of view does not arise from the “authority of experience”, but rather from the passion of experience, the passion of remembrance” (HOOKS, 2013, p. 122-123).

In this context, it was fundamental for black feminism to produce concepts that made the uniqueness of black women visible. In 1970, for example, Frances Beale created the concept “Double Jeopardy” to describe how racial and gender oppressions intertwine in black women's experiences. (BEALE, 1970). In 1989, jurist Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the concept intersectionality  to describe the various ways in which race and gender interact to form a multiple dimension of black women's experiences in the workforce, exploring the various ways in which the intersection of race and gender structurally shapes aspects of violence against black women. (CRENSHAW, 1989). It is worth noting that the intersectional approach has been used by black women for a long time without the practice being named that way. In Brazil, authors such as Lélia Gonzalez, Beatriz Nascimento, Luiza Bairros, Helena Theodoro, Sueli Carneiro, among others, also drew attention to the specificity of black women, articulating race, class, gender and sexuality in their conceptual creations. Although Bell Hooks does not use the concept intersectionalityand in her work, she follows a black feminist tradition of analyzing how race, class, and gender dynamics intersect. For this, she uses the notion imperialist white capitalist supremacist patriarchy [white supremacist imperialist patriarchy].

The route taken so far allows us to visualize that the become bell hooks it is inserted in a vigorous context of production of black feminisms.

 

Recurring themes and approaches

In his works, Bell Hooks shows how the subjective dimensions are articulated to structural issues such as racism, capitalism, imperialism, patriarchy. This favors that it mobilizes numerous debates. Therefore, it is an arduous task to map recurrent themes in her work. Thus, just for didactic purposes, I divide his production into four analytical axes:

1 – Criticism of the pedagogical practice

2 – Criticism of cultural production

3 – Reflections on spirituality, love and self-esteem

4 – Dynamics of race, class and gender.

It is important to point out that it is common for her to resume experiences in different books. This is to say that these thematic axes are found transversally in countless of her works. But there are books in which Bell Hooks deals specifically with some of these themes.

Regarding the criticism of pedagogical praxis, Hooks performs these analyzes mainly in the so-called teaching trilogy: Teaching to transgress: education as a practice of freedom (USA: 1994/Brazil: 2013); Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (USA:2003/Brazil: in press by Editora Elefante); Teaching critical thinking: practical wisdom (USA:2010/Brazil:2020). In these works, Paulo Freire's inspiration in his reflections stands out. Again and again Bell Hooks narrates how her theoretical encounter with the Brazilian educator was something of an epiphany, especially when she becomes a teacher. This is explained by her desire to build democratic pedagogical practices that value difference, without running away from conflicts, but based on respect for human dignity. This does not mean that Hooks does not criticize the sexism present in Freire's work. In this regard, Hooks declared: “The presence of Paulo Freire inspired me. Not that I didn't see sexist behavior on his part." (HOOKS, 2013, p. 80)

With regard to cultural criticism, Hooks addresses the theme in at least four works. Two published in Brazil: Desires: race, gender and cultural politics (USA: 1990/Brazil: 2019); Black looks: race and representation (USA: 1992/Brazil: 2019). Two published in the US: art on mind: visual politics (USA: 1995); Reel to real: race, sex, and class at the movies (USA: 1996). In these works, Bell Hooks makes blunt analyses, drawing attention to the need to decolonize our gaze and our desire. At the same time, she spares no criticism of the cultural industry, nor is she condescending towards those black productions that, in her opinion, reinforce stereotypes. Madonna, Spike Lee, Wim Wenders and, more recently, Beyonce, among many others, are objects of her analyses. Hooks' analytical lens is anchored in a radical critique of imperialism, white supremacy and patriarchy. As a cultural critic, it teaches that it is possible to examine a work without destroying it, demonstrating that to criticize is to put cultural production in perspective.

The third recurring thematic axis in Bell Hooks' works concerns analyzes of love, spirituality and self-esteem. About love, the trilogy stands out: All About Love: New Vision (USA:2000/ Brazil:2021); Salvation: Black People and Love (USA: 2001) and Communion: the female search for love (USA: 2002). About self-esteem, she details the theme in the book rock my soul: Black People and Self-Steem (USA: 2003). The concern with spirituality runs through many of his writings, but Hooks addresses the theme especially in the books on love, education and self-esteem. Drawing on these three themes, Hooks makes a unique critique of capitalist modes of subjectivation focused on individualism, hedonism and competition. Love, spirituality and self-esteem are addressed as political practices in which self-care is not separated from community care

The fourth axis of analysis, that is, the dynamics of race, class and gender, does not concern a specific theme, but refers to an approach that runs through all his books; it is not by chance that she coined the concept of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy [imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy] to describe how class, race, and gender oppressions are intertwined.

In all her works, Hooks details how these dynamics interfere even in subjective issues such as the ability to express ideas and create, in the configurations of femininity and masculinity, in feminist theories and in the relationships we establish with physical and subjective spaces. There are numerous works: And I'm not a woman? Black women and feminism (USA: 1981/Brazil: 2019); Feminist theory; from the edge to the center (USA: 1984/Brazil: 2019); Raise your voice: think feminist, think black (USA: 1989/Brazil: 2019); Feminism is for everyone (USA: 2000/Brazil: 2018); We're real cool: black men and masculinity (USA: 2004); The will to change: men, masculinity, and love (USA: 2004); Belonging: a culture of place (USA: 2009); Appalachian elegy: poetry and place (USA: 2012); Writing beyond race: living theory and practice (USA: 2013). And the children published in Brazil: my hair is like a queen (USA: 1999/Brazil: 2019); My dance has history (USA: 2002/Brazil: 2019).

The production of Bell Hooks invites us to rethink the world around us and our actions. They are theorizations built close to the body, in which form and content are at the service of ethical transformations. She manages to denounce oppression without slipping into Manichaeism and essentialism. A narrative practice that, even when dealing with complex subjects, invites people to talk and meet. In reading her works, we go through painful and pleasurable paths of this crossroads that is become bell hooks.

*Marilea de Almeida holds a doctorate in history from Unicamp.

Originally published on Unicamp science blog.

 

References


BAMBARA Toni Cade (ed). The Black Woman: An Anthology. New York: Washington Square Press, 1970. 

BEALE, Frances. Double Jeopardy: to be black and female. In: The Black Woman: An Anthology. New York: Washington Square Press, 1970, p. 109-122.  

CASHMORE, Ellis. Jim Crow. In: Dictionary of ethnic-racial relations. São Paulo: Selo Negro, 2000, p. 505-508

CRENSHAW, Kimberle W.. "Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex; A black feminist critique of discrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics". legal forum, University of Chicago, 1989 [1981], p. 139-167.

DAVIDSON, Maria del Guadalupe; YANCY, George. Critical Perspectives on Bell Hooks. New York and London: Routledge, 2013.

Hooks, bell. raise your voice: think like a feminist, think like a black woman. Translation by Cátia

Bocaiuva Maringolo. São Paulo: Elephant, 2019a.

_____. black eyes: race and representation. Translation by Stephanie Borges. São Paulo:

Elephant, 2019b. 

_____. Desires: race, gender and public policy. Jamille Pinheiro translation. São Paulo: Elephant, 2019c.

_____. teaching critical thinkingthe: practical wisdom. Translation: Bhuvi Libanio. Sao Paulo: Elephant, 2020.

_____. feminist theory :dthe edge to the center. Translation Rainer Patriota. São Paulo: Perspective, 2019.

_____. teaching to transgress: education as a practice of freedom. São Paulo: Editora Martins Fontes, 2013.

_____. Feminism is for everyone: sweeping politics. Translation: Ana Luiza Libâneo. Rio de Janeiro: Rose of the Times, 2018.

_____.And I'm not a woman? Black women and feminism. Translation Bhuvi Libânio. Rio de Janeiro: Rose of the Times, 2019.

___. Rock my soul: Black People and Self-Steem. New York: Washington Square Press, 2003.

_____. All about love: New visions. New York: William Morrow, 2000.

_____. Wounds of Passion: a writing life. New York: New York and London: Routledge, 1997.

PERPICH, Diane. “Black Feminism, Poststructuralism, and the Contested Character of Experience”. In: DAVIDSON, Maria del Guadalupe, Kathryn T. Gines, and Donna-Dale L. Marcano Eds. Convergences: Black Feminism and Continental Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010, p. 13-34.

SMITH, Barbara. HomeGirls: the feminist anthology. New York: Women of Color Press, 1983.