bell hooks

Scholar

• Born: September 25, 1952
• Birthplace: Hopkinsville, Kentucky
• Died: December 15, 2021
• Deathplace: Berea, Kentucky

A popular lecturer and prolific writer, hooks brought women of color into the feminist movement. Despite her academic pedigree, she wrote books aimed at general audiences in hopes of effecting change in the real world.

Early Life

bell hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, to Veodis and Rosa Bell Watkins. Her father worked for the US Post Office and her mother was a domestic worker. hooks grew up with five sisters and one brother. An avid reader, she was very fond of poetry and sought to become a writer. hooks received her early education in segregated schools. With the aid of scholarships, she attended Stanford University, where she studied with the feminist Tillie Olsen. At Stanford, she noticed the lack of attention to race in the feminist movement. She graduated in 1973.

In 1976, hooks earned a master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin. Her first published book was a small collection of poems, And There We Wept (1978). She published it under the pseudonym bell hooks, the name of her maternal great-grandmother, a woman known for her defiance. hooks admired this trait and adopted the name as a tribute to her ancestor. She chose to use a lowercase spelling to place emphasis on her work rather than her identity. In 1981, hooks published Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, a book of theory begun while she was still an undergraduate. The title is taken from a classic speech by the abolitionist Sojourner Truth. In 1983, hooks earned a doctorate from the University of California at Santa Cruz, with a dissertation on Toni Morrison.

Life’s Work

Shortly after earning her doctorate, hooks published a second work of theory, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984). She began her first full-time teaching position, as assistant professor of Afro-American studies and English at Yale University, in 1985. In 1988, she moved to Oberlin College in Ohio, serving as associate professor of women’s studies and American literature. Her third book of theory, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, appeared in 1989. In 1994, she was named a distinguished professor of English at City College of the City University of New York, where she enjoyed working with diverse students. She returned to Kentucky in 2004, accepting a position as distinguished professor in residence of Appalachian studies at Berea College. That same year she published We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, a series of critical essays that examine the ways Black men have been marginalized in White American culture.

Influenced by the work of Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, hooks published her first work on education, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, in 1994. This work was followed by two companion books: Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003) and Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom (2009). In Belonging: A Culture of Place (2008), hooks writes about her return to Kentucky and in the process ruminates on the meaning of home, community, and belonging, and the connections between race, class, and environmentalism. Similar themes can be found in the poems of Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place (2012).

A practicing Buddhist, Hooks turned to spiritual concerns and the concept of love in Woman’s Mourning Song (1992), All About Love: New Visions (2000), Salvation: Black People and Love (2001), Communion: The Female Search for Love (2002), and When Angels Speak of Love: Poems (2007). Hooks also published a number of children’s books: Happy to Be Nappy (1999), Homemade Love (2001), Be Boy Buzz (2002), Skin Again (2004), and Grump Groan Growl (2008). Although most of hooks’s works contained autobiographical elements, she also published full autobiographical works: Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (1997), Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life (1997), and Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work (1999). In Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice (2012) hooks offers engaging personal and critical essays on racism, sexism, and violence, as well as ways to counter oppression through diversity, solidarity, self-determination, and love.

In addition to writing and teaching, hooks was a popular speaker who preferred question-and-answer sessions in which she could interact with her audience. Although rooted in academia, her books were written for a broad audience and were distinguished by a lack of footnotes, frequent autobiographical references, and a personable, intimate voice. She taught at several colleges and universities, including Yale University and Berea College in Kentucky.

hooks’s influence has been recognized by several publications. Utne Reader included her in its list of “One Hundred Visionaries Who Could Change Your Life.” The Atlantic Monthly named her one of our nation’s leading public intellectuals. Publishers Weekly called Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism “one of the twenty most influential women’s books in the last twenty years.” hooks died on December 15, 2021, in Berea, Kentucky. She was sixty-nine years old.

Significance

With Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, hooks filled a gap that she identified while an undergraduate at Stanford: the exclusion of Black women from the feminist movement. Much of her work also focused on the significance of literacy, especially for women of color. As an activist interested in effecting change, hooks mainly wrote for a general audience rather than for fellow academics. Although much of her early work dealt with matters of race and gender, she went on to explore liberation from all forms of domination, especially in the classroom.

Bibliography

Bauer, Michelle. “Implementing a Liberatory Feminist Pedagogy: Bell Hooks’s Strategies for Transforming the Classroom.” Melus 25, nos. 3/4 (Fall/Winter, 2000): 265–274.

Davidson, Maria del Guadalupe, and George Yancy, eds. Critical Perspectives on Bell Hooks. New York: Routledge, 2009.

Hooks, Bell. “A Conversation with Bell Hooks.” Interview by George Brosi. Appalachian Heritage (2012): 102–109. Literary Reference Center Plus. Web. 22 Sept. 2015.

Hooks, Bell. Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work. New York: Henry Holt, 1999.

Lee, Min Jin. "In Praise of bell hooks." The New York Times, 28 Feb. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/books/bell-hooks-min-jin-lee-aint-i-a-woman.html. Accessed 19 July 2021.

Olson, Gary A., and Elizabeth Hirsh, eds. “Feminist Praxis and the Politics of Literacy: A Conversation with Bell Hooks.” In Women Writing Culture. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.

Risen, Clay. "Bell Hooks, Pathbreaking Black Feminist, Dies at 69." The New York Times, 15 Dec. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/books/bell-hooks-dead.html. Accessed 27 Jan. 2022.