Trailblazer bell hooks passes
“If we are always fearful of judgement, we can never take the risks that make it possible for us to be fully self-actualized.”
The trailblazing author, poet, feminist, cultural critic and professor, bell hooks died Wednesday, December 15, at age 69. She preferred to spell her name with no capital letters in order to de-emphasize her individual identity. bell hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins as the fourth of seven children in Hopkinsville, Kentucky on September 25, 1952. Her pen name was a tribute to her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks.
She was the author of more than 30 books, encompassing literary criticism, children’s fiction, self-help, memoir and poetry. Her influential book Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism was titled after Sojourner Truth's speech. hooks examined the effect of racism and sexism on Black women, the civil rights movement, and feminist movements from suffrage to the 1970s. Three years later, her Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center explored and criticized the feminist movement's propensity to center and privilege white women's experiences. “A devaluation of Black womanhood occurred as a result of the sexual exploitation of Black women during slavery that has not altered in the course of hundreds of years,” she wrote.
Frequently, hooks' work addressed the deep intersections of race, gender, class, sexuality and geographic place. She wrote about her native Appalachia and growing up there as a Black girl in the critical-essay collection Belonging: A Culture of Place and in the poetry collection Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place. Womanhood. Womanhood, Ms. hooks said, could not be reduced to a singular experience, but had to be considered within a framework encompassing race and class. She called for a new form of feminism, one that recognized differences and inequalities among women as a way of creating a new, more inclusive movement.
In a 2000 interview with NPR's All Things Considered, hooks spoke about the life changing power of love, the act of loving and how love is far broader than romantic sentiment. "I'm talking about a love that is transformative, that challenges us in both our private and our civic lives," she said. "I'm so moved often when I think of the civil rights movement, because I see it as a great movement for social justice that was rooted in love and that politicized the notion of love, that said: Real love will change you. . . I tell this to young people, you know, that we can love in a deep and profound way that transforms the political world in which we live in."
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