feminist essay hook

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Several hooks and tips for writing an essay on feminism topics

by Janis Lewis | Apr 24, 2017 | Viewpoint

A hook is a sentence that serves to attract readers’ attention from the very beginning of an essay. To write a good catchy sentence, you need to stick to some pieces of advice and look at some examples of the most winning of them.

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Several hooks and tips for writing an essay on feminism topics

Hacks and Samples

First, you need to know that not every attention grabber is fitting its real aim. Some methods are old and not creative enough to be put in your paper. Avoid copying some definitions from a dictionary because it is too smooth and boring to be eye-catching enough. Using this strategy, you will make your reader get bored, and he or she will not want to read your work anymore. Never again!

Give an anecdote that will refresh your paperwork instead and bring a deliberate, easy tone to your study.

“Some women wonder why History isn’t called Herstory?” – It is the most vivid example of a funny story connected with feminism.

However, be careful with it, as not every piece of writing can be written in a humorous tone! For this reason, you can write a historical fact or some interesting statistics.

“Did you know that the ancient humanity used to worship Goddesses and had a matriarchal society?” – Stating these words, you can put some stress on the question of why people changed their opinion and what wisdom they had in ancient times.
“About 66% of work is performed by women as well as half of the food production, so why men still consider them/us to be the weaker sex?” – Thus, you will kill two birds with one stone and represent not only a hook but some argumentation to your reader.

A student should avoid rhetorical questions as well as definition statements. Frequent usage of the mentioned method made it too obvious and dull. Replace it with a famous quotation or controversial opinion. Try to use only interesting quotes and outstanding opinions.

“You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation. –Brigham Young”
“In fact, feminism is the fight for equality. But there are still some women who think that it serves for impairment of men’s rights”

As you can see from the two statements above, not every man is against feminism and not every woman understands the phenomenon properly.

Common Mistakes

An attention grabber is not the same as a thesis statement.
Don’t put main ideas on your hook.
Different types of narration need various catchy sentences.
Don’t put this kind of statements into the conclusion or body paragraph.
Don’t think your hook sentence is the main key to success on the way to a good paper because there are other parts to concentrate on them.
Don’t compose an eye-catching statement without studying a topic and learning all aspects of it.

Stick to these rules and you will attract the attention of each and every curmudgeonly reader. Sometimes it takes a little time to make an appropriate statement, but most students prefer to write a hook after they have finished their works. It will give you more freedom for creativity.

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Perspective

With the death of bell hooks, a generation of feminists lost a foundational figure.

Lisa B. Thompson

Author and cultural critic bell hooks poses for a portrait on December 16, 1996 in New York City, New York. Karjean Levine/Getty Images hide caption

Author and cultural critic bell hooks poses for a portrait on December 16, 1996 in New York City, New York.

"We black women who advocate feminist ideology, are pioneers. We are clearing a path for ourselves and our sisters. We hope that as they see us reach our goal – no longer victimized, no longer unrecognized, no longer afraid – they will take courage and follow." bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman

Arts & Life

Trailblazing feminist author, critic and activist bell hooks has died at 69.

There are well-worn bell hooks books scattered throughout my library. She's in nearly every section – race, class, film, cultural studies – and, as expected, her books take up an entire shelf in the feminism section. I doubt I would have survived this long without her work, and the work of other Black feminist thinkers of her generation, to guide me. I've retrieved every bell hooks book today, and the unwieldy stack comforts me as I assess the impact of her loss.

If you ever heard hooks speak, it would come as no surprise that she first attended college to study drama, as she recounted in a 1992 essay. In the 1990s she blessed my college campus for a week, and I was mesmerized by lectures that were deliciously brilliant yet full of humor. Her banter with the audience during the Q&A floated easily between thoughtful answers, deep questioning and sly quips that kept us at rapt attention. Her words garner just as much attention on the page. She was a prolific writer, and her intellectual curiosity was boundless.

Discovering bell hooks changed the lives of countless Black women and girls. After picking up one of her many titles – Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center; Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics; Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism – the world suddenly made sense. She reordered the universe by boldly gifting us with the language and theories to understand who we were in an often hostile and alienating society.

She also made clear that, as Black women, we belonged to no one but ourselves. A bad feminist from the start, hooks was clearly uninterested in being safe, respectable or acceptable, and charted a career on her own terms. She implored us to transgress and struggle, but to do so with love and fearlessness. Her brave, bold and beautiful words not only spoke truth to power, but also risked speaking that same truth to and about our beloved icons and culture.

As we traversed hostile spaces in academia, corporate America, the arts, medicine and sometimes our own families, hooks not only taught us how to love ourselves, but also insisted that we seek justice. She helped us to better understand and, if necessary, forgive the women who birthed and raised us. She claimed feminism without apology, and encouraged Black women in particular to embrace feminism, and to do more than simply identify their oppression, but to envision new ways of being in the world. She called on us to honor early pioneers such as Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Church Terrell, who first claimed the mantle of women's rights.

The lower-case name bell hooks published under challenged a system of academic writing that historically belittled and ignored the work of Black scholars. She also used language that was as plain and as clear as her politics. While her writing was deeply personal, often carved from her own experiences, her ideas were relentlessly rigorous and full of citations—even though she eschewed footnotes, another refusal of the academy's standards that endeared her to those of us determined to remake intellectual traditions that denied our very humanity.

Rejecting footnotes seemed to symbolize the fact that the knowledge hooks most valued could not fit into those tiny spaces. Her writing style hinted at the fact that her ideas were always more expansive than even her books could hold. While there were no footnotes, her books were love notes to a people she loved fiercely.

No matter where she taught or lived, bell hooks always kept Kentucky and her family ties close. She frequently claimed her southern Black working-class background and an abiding love for her home. Although she was educated at prestigious schools, she always spoke with the wisdom and wit of our mothers, grandmothers and aunties. Her return to the Bluegrass State and Berea College towards the end of her career has a narrative elegance. A generation of feminists has lost a foundational figure and a beloved icon, but her legacy lives on in her writing, which will provide sustenance for generations to come.

Lisa B. Thompson is a playwright and the Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor of African & African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Follow her @drlisabthompson on Twitter and Instagram .

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To Read bell hooks Was to Love Her

bell hooks taught the world two things: how to critique and how to love. Perhaps the two lessons were both sides of the same coin. To read bell hooks is to become initiated into the power and inclusiveness of Black feminism whether you are a Black woman or not. With her wide array of essays of cultural criticism from the 1980s and 1990s, hooks dared to love Blackness and criticize the patriarchy out loud; she was generous and attentive in her analysis of pop culture as a self-proclaimed “bad girl.” Sadly, the announcement of her death this week, at 69 , adds to a too-long list of Black thinkers, artists, and public figures gone too soon. While many of us feel heavy with grief at the loss of hooks and her contributions to arts, letters, and ideas, we are also voraciously reading and rereading both in mourning and celebration of her impact as a critical theorist, a professor, a poet, a lover, and a thinker.

As a professor of Black feminisms at Cornell University, where I often teach classes featuring bell hooks’s work, I see a syllabus as having the potential to be a love letter, a mixtape for revolution. hooks’s voice was daring, cutting, and unapologetic, whether she was taking Beyoncé and Spike Lee to task or celebrating the raunchiness of Lil’ Kim. What hooks accomplished for Black feminism over decades, on and off the page, was having built a movement of inclusively cultivated communities and solidarity across social differences. Quotes and ideas of Black feminist thinkers tend to circulate across the internet as inspirational self-help mantras that can end up being surface-level engagements, but as bell hooks shows us, there has always been a vibrant radical tradition of Black women and femmes unafraid to speak their minds. bell hooks was the prerequisite reading that we are lucky to discover now or to return to as a ceremony of remembrance. Here are nine texts I’d suggest to anyone seeking to acquaint or reacquaint themselves with her work.

Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981)

Publishing over 30 books over the course of her career, perhaps the most well-known is her first, Ain’t I a Woman. Referencing Sojourner Truth’s famous words, hooks drew a direct line between herself and the radical tradition of outspoken Black women demanding freedom. Before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined “intersectionality” in 1991, hooks exemplified the importance of the interlocking nature of Black feminism within freedom movements, weaving together the histories of abolitionism in the United States, women’s suffrage, and the Civil Rights era. She refused to let white feminism or abolitionist men alone define this chapter of America’s past. Finding power and freedom in the margins, she lived a feminist life without apology by centering Black women as historical figures.

Keeping a Hold of Life: Reading Toni Morrison’s Fiction (1983)

To read bell hooks is to become enrolled as a student in her extensive coursework. Keeping a Hold of Life shows us her student writing and another side of her political formation as Black feminist literary theorist. hooks earned her Ph.D. from University of California Santa Cruz in 1983 despite having spent years teaching literature beforehand, and in her dissertation she analyzes two novels by Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye and Sula, celebrating both books’ depictions of Black femininity and kinship. For those who are students, it may be encouraging to see hooks’s dedication to learning: Before she got her degree, she had already published a field-defining text. But that wasn’t the end of her scholarly journey by a long shot.

Black Looks : Race and Representation (1992)

I love teaching the timeless essay “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance” from this collection above all because it is the first one of hers I read as a college sophomore. In it, she reflects on what she overhears as a professor at Yale about so-called ethnic food and interracial dating. In some ways, the through-line of hooks’s writing can be summed up here, in the way she examines what it means to consume and be consumed, especially for women of color. In another essay from the collection, “The Oppositional Gaze,” hooks taught her readers the subversive power of looking , especially looking done by colonized peoples; drawing on the writings of Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Stuart Hall, she grappled with the power of visual culture and its stakes for domination in the lives of Black women, in particular. (She mentions that she got her start in film criticism after being grossed out by Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It .) Her criticism shaped feminist film theory and continues to be celebrated as a crucial way to understand the politics of looking back.

Teaching to Transgress: Education As the Practice of Freedom (1994)

bell hooks was a diligent student of Black feminism, and she was more than happy to pass along what she learned, having taught at various points during her career at the University of Southern California, the New School, Oberlin College, Yale University, and CUNY’s City College. In turn, she often reflected on what she learned from teaching in her writings. In this volume, hooks contributes to radicalizing education theory in ways that even now have been understated: She understood schooling as a battleground and space of cultivating knowledge, writing that “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility.” In 2004, she returned to her home state, Kentucky, for her final teaching post at Berea College, where the bell hooks Institute was founded in 2014 and to which she dedicated her papers in 2017.

“ Hardcore Honey: bell hooks Goes on the Down Low With Lil’ Kim ,” Paper Magazine (1997)

In this 1997 interview, hooks vibes with Lil’ Kim and probes the rapper’s politics of desire, sex work. It’s an example of how she was invested in remaining part of the contemporary conversations around Black life and feminine sexuality. Though she described Lil’ Kim’s hyperfemme aesthetic as “boring straight-male porn fantasy” and wondered out loud who was responsible for the styling of her image as a celebrity and part of the Notorious B.I.G.’s Junior M.A.F.I.A. (“the boys in charge”), she defends Lil’ Kim against the puritanical attacks that she notes have been made against Black women time and again: In hooks’s opening question, she tells Lil’ Kim, “Nobody talks about John F. Kennedy being a ho ’cause he fucked around. But the moment a woman talks about sex or is known to be having too much sex, people talk about her as a ho. So I wanted you to talk about that a little bit.”

All About Love: New Visions (2000)

hooks was especially prolific during the 1990s, publishing about a book a year. The early aughts marked a shift in her intellectual focus away from cultural theory and toward love as a radical act. In this book, she details her personal life, drawing on romantic experiences and what she learned from experiences with boyfriends. With words from 20 years ago that remain trenchant to this day, hooks writes, “I feel our nation’s turning away from love … moving into a wilderness of spirit so intense we may never find our way home again. I write of love to bear witness both to the danger in this movement, and to call for a return to love.” For her, love was not a mere sentiment but something deeply revolutionary that should inform all of Black feminist thought.

“ Beyoncé’s Lemonade is capitalist money-making at its best ,” The Guardian (2016)

In bell hooks’s scathing review of Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade , she took issue with what she perceived as the singer’s commodification of Black sexualized femininity as liberatory. She calls out Beyoncé’s branding and links the legacy of the auction block to what hooks sees as a repetition of the valuation of Black women’s sexualized bodies, warning of the dangers of circulating such images as faux sexual liberation, dictated by capitalist marketing dollars. “Even though Beyoncé and her creative collaborators daringly offer multidimensional images of black female life,” hooks wrote, “much of the album stays within a conventional stereotypical framework, where the black woman is always a victim.” (As was to be expected, the Beyhive did not take kindly to the critique, and it remains an ideological fault line for many of the singer’s fans.)

Happy to Be Nappy (2017)

While most likely first encountered the writings of bell hooks in a college seminar on feminism or decolonization, some were introduced to bell hooks in their early years, during bedtime stories. Understanding self-esteem and image for Black children as deeply political and encoded in the way they view their hair, she wrote a children’s book for them, Happy to Be Nappy. Remembering the impact of the Doll Test — the 1940s psychological experiment cited by the NAACP lawyers behind Brown v. Board of Education , where Black children were observed to assign positive qualities to white dolls and negative ones to Black dolls — and how important representation is, writing this book was a radical act of love.

Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place (2012)

From interviews to cultural criticism to academic dissertations, bell hooks did not limit herself to a singular form of writing. She was promiscuous in genre, and her approach was to say whatever needed urgent saying about the interlocking structure of patriarchy, capitalism, and racism — however it needed to be said. Reading one of her final books, a poetry collection, helps us to return with her to Kentucky, where she spent her last years. She loved the expanse of the Black diaspora, but she held close the U.S. South, particularly Black Appalachia. Here, she paints in words the rural landscape and its local ecologies, where stolen land and stolen lives converge, touching on how the landscape of the mountains has been home to people like her, whom she describes as “black, Native American, white, all ‘people of one blood.’” It is a literary homecoming that frames her homegoing. To truly read bell hooks necessitates rereading her again and again, and this act forms its own ritual of elegy, of celebrating the life of someone whose foundational impact cannot be overstated.

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bell hooks: Exploring Intersectionality, Black Feminist Thinking & Radical Love

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First Online: 31 March 2023
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Courtney BrieAnn Morris-Coker 2

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bell hooks contributed greatly to literature and scholarship related to feminism. bell hooks’ scholarship supports the critical thinking centered in the intersectionality of race, gender, and class. Through hooks’ literary contribution, readers have been able to view social intersectionality through the lens of community, Black womanhood, activism, and feminism. bell hooks’ writings call for a feministic practice that centers the experiences of Black women and their experiences. The challenge proposed by bell hooks asked readers to consider how they make sense of their identities when thinking of their experiences of race in addition to gender and class.

This article examines bell hooks’ early life motivations and influences that fueled her critical perspectives of activism, feminist, and many other topics centered in socioeconomic class, intersectionality, and the experiences in which Black women interact with society. This article acknowledges key contributions, developing and new insights as well as rising scholars and how they find connection to bell hooks’ work through their individual practice.

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Morris-Coker, C.B. (2023). bell hooks: Exploring Intersectionality, Black Feminist Thinking & Radical Love. In: Geier, B.A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Educational Thinkers . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81037-5_155-1

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“Talking Back”: Teaching Feminist Writing with bell hooks

In the Fall of 2012, I found myself teaching bell hooks’s “talking back,” an essay from Talking Back (1989), to a class of upper-middle-class (mostly white) undergraduate students. In the piece, hooks writes about reclaiming her voice as a Black girl child in a working-class Black family in the southern United States. For hooks, “[t]o speak… when one was not spoken to was a courageous act—an act of risk and daring.” She clarifies that this “courageous act” was only applicable in the case of girl children like herself, as Black boys were “encouraged” to speak as they could find a calling in preaching at the church. Black girls were encouraged towards silence unless in the company of other Black women, where Black men were absent.

I intuitively knew what hooks meant. As a racialized girl child, who spent her pre-teen and teenage years in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, my father often asked me to subdue my voice as a writer. As a ten-year-old, when I created a Santa Claus alter ego—Suntu Clays, I called him—and my English teacher, a Goan woman, Mrs. Fernandes, encouraged “such creativity,” my father felt my unfettered writing could get me into trouble. What kind of trouble exactly was always unclear, and yet, the fear of “trouble” would always steer me away from writing anything controversial, even if it was a harmless, punny character like Suntu.

But in October of 2012, teaching hooks was a first for me, a graduate student in the Department of Gender Studies at Queen’s University, in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. I hadn’t encountered hooks before my twenties except in passing, not even during my four undergraduate years as an English student at York University, a liberal arts institution, in Toronto. Standing in that basement classroom, with bits of sunlight filtering through slats that passed for windows above my head, I squinted in the poorly lit room trying to figure out how to distill the seemingly accessible writing of a Black working-class queer feminist for a classroom of mostly white, mostly privileged students; students who had taken the “Introduction to Gender Studies” class as a mandatory elective. How do you communicate the voicelessness hooks writes about in “talking back” to students for whom that voicelessness was outside of their lived experience? How should I convey what I as a racialized queer woman intuitively understood? I didn’t know back then. As I rattled off hooks’s context and her quotes, I found blank stares meeting my animated face.

I would find myself reaching for hooks again when I taught my first proper class in the Fall of 2019, as a PhD candidate in English. It was a second-year undergraduate English class, “Contemporary Women’s Writing,” and I had carefully put together the syllabus. One week, we deep dived into Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” (1984) and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988). I explained to the class that when Spivak tried to find an example of the subaltern, she was specifically referring to the Black working-class woman in America; a figure not unlike the women hooks grew up with before she found her voice as a writer.

hooks undoes Spivak. According to Spivak, the Black American working-class woman has no voice, and as a descendent of slavery, no history. Yet, the women who gave hooks her voice were the same Black working-class women whose “language so rich, so poetic, that it felt… like being shut off from life, smothered to death if one were not allowed to participate.” When my father told me to stop being controversial, I tried to hold myself back. But like hooks, it was the voices of three generations of women—my great grandmother, grandmother, and mother—in the same space, absent of men, exchanging sassy gossip in the darkened rooms of Calcutta monsoon afternoons, speaking rapidly in Dhakai Bangla, that I leaned into the familiar sounds I couldn’t participate in. While their dialect of comfort kept me from joining their conversations, I desperately wanted to be a part of their world by being in the same space, even if it was just as a spectator who half understood what was being said.

As I spoke of hooks in 2019, I saw the knowing in the room full of mostly women and non-binary students, many racialized. After our discussion on “Bloodchild,” an intricately timeless story borne of the genius of another Black woman writing around the same time, they knew what I meant. They intuitively understood the precarious position of a racialized girl child who could talk, but not “talk back,” who could write secretly but was mocked when found out by her other female siblings or other women, and a woman whose book Ain’t I a Woman? (1981) received harsh criticism from many who attempted to silence her forever. But it isn’t easy to silence one who finds joy in the very act of speaking. In hooks’s case, her joy lay in the “intensity and intimacy” between her mother and her mother’s mother, sisters, and women friends. hooks describes this “intensity and intimacy” as “loud talk, angry words, women with tongues quick and sharp, tender sweet tongues;” speech that became hooks’s reason to make speech her “birthright.”

Even such a birthright comes at a cost. Despite the joy that lies in temporary spaces absent of men, there is punishment for those who speak when their voice is not meant to be heard, or heard only when spoken to, or heard in very specific contexts. For when hooks spoke before she found her voice, she was often punished by her parents; they “often spoke about the necessity of breaking [her] spirit” and they reconceptualised her speech as madness in a world where “mad women” were often institutionalized. When I put together the syllabus of voices for my class, I deliberately chose those voices that fought against this breaking of spirit and thrived despite being silenced both within and without fraught, secret spaces: Vivek Shraya, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Cherie Dimaline, Roxane Gay, Carmen Maria Machado, Gloria Anzaldúa, among others. hooks became the basis of these other feminist women’s voices in my fall term class.

Born Gloria Jean Watkins, hooks took up a pseudonym to create a “writer-identity that would challenge and subdue all impulses” rooted in the patriarchal need to silence women’s voices. Her untimely passing leaves behind a rich body of words and ideas that still hold true for the racialized female writer. And as racialized feminist women, it is up to us to use that wisdom to make speech our birthright not only on the page, but also the classroom and in conversation, with or without men.

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The Wide-Angle Vision, and Legacy, of bell hooks

The pioneering feminist scholar, who died this week, wrote about women, race, love, healing, pop culture and much more, always keeping Black women at the center.

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By Jennifer Schuessler

The news that bell hooks had died at 69 spread quickly across social media on Wednesday, prompting a flood of posts featuring favorite quotes about love, justice, men, women, community and healing, as well as testimonials about how this pioneering Black feminist writer had changed, or saved, lives.

If the outpouring felt more intense than the usual tributes to departed scholars, admirers say that merely reflected the extraordinary way she mixed the emotional with the intellectual in her quest to make the experiences of Black women not just visible, but central to a sweeping reimagining of society.

“I think we can’t overstate her influence,” Imani Perry, a professor of African American studies at Princeton said. “For so many people, bell hooks was their first introduction to social theory, critiques of patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism.”

But even more, she said, hooks’s writing — and her impact — was personal.

“She came from this really sophisticated world of cultural theory, but she connected it to her very particular experience of growing up in Jim Crow Kentucky,” Perry said. “She had all the chops to write in this more traditional, drier academic style, but she chose differently because she wanted to connect with everyday people.”

Perry first met hooks in the early 1990s. She was working as an intern at South End Press, which had published “Ain’t I a Woman,” hooks’s groundbreaking 1981 book about the impact of both racism and sexism on Black women.

It was a book about intersectionality, before there was a word for it — just one example of how the more than 30 books she wrote anticipated debates and concepts, from self-care to cultural appropriation , that are mainstays today.

Kimberlé Crenshaw, the legal scholar who coined the term “intersectionality” in 1989 , said that hooks’s work gave theoretical ballast to political organizing that was happening on the ground. It helped make it possible to critique both white-led feminism and the male-dominated antiracism movement “without feeling like a traitor.”

“Sometimes people say things, or write things, that so capture your experience that you forget never not knowing it or thinking it,” Crenshaw said. “bell is one of those people.”

“Ain’t I a Woman,” which hooks began writing when she was 19, was part of a wave of Black women’s writing in the 1970s, from Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” and Toni Cade Bambara’s anthology “The Black Woman” (both from 1970), through Alice Walker’s landmark 1975 essay “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston” and Angela Davis’s 1981 “Women, Race and Class.” (“bell hooks” was the pen name of Gloria Watkins, derived from the name of her great-grandmother, and written in lowercase letters to shift identity from herself to her ideas.)

In her next book, “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center,” hooks gave a crisp definition of feminism as “the struggle to end sexist oppression.” If she was critical of “white, bourgeois, hegemonic dominance of feminist movements,” she also warned against using such critiques to “trash, reject or dismiss” feminism itself.

In the late 1980s, hooks came to broader prominence in the heyday of a new generation of university-based Black public intellectuals, and she was the rare woman in a circle seemingly defined by male scholars like Henry Louis Gates Jr., Michael Eric Dyson and Cornel West (with whom she wrote “Breaking Bread” in 1991).

But while hooks spent her entire career in the academy, teaching at Yale, Oberlin, Berea College in Kentucky and other institutions, she was not solely of it. For her, theory wasn’t an abstract exercise, but a tool for self-understanding and survival.

“I came to theory because I was hurting,” she wrote in her 1991 essay Theory as Liberatory Practice. “I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend — to grasp what was happening around and within me.”

She saw the university setting, which was dismissed by some as an elitist space, instead as a site of revolutionary possibility. But she also engaged with popular culture, in essays that could be as rhetorically blunt as they were intellectually serpentine.

In “Madonna: Plantation Mistress or Soul Sister?,” included in her 1992 book “Black Looks: Race and Representation,” she unpacked the singer’s groin-grabbing appropriation of “phallic Black masculinity,” which she used to “taunt” white men with what they lack. (“Madonna may hate the phallus, but she longs to possess its power,” hooks wrote.)

In another chapter, she criticized the 1991 documentary “Paris Is Burning” for failing to “interrogate whiteness,” and instead glorifying and sanitizing a drag culture grounded in “the fantasy that ruling-class white culture is the quintessential site of unrestricted joy, freedom, power and pleasure.” But her critiques of Black culture were more complicated than the bite-size quotes in media interviews might have suggested. In a 1993 article in The New York Times about the boiling controversy over gangsta rap, she likened it to crack. “It’s like we have consumed the worst stereotypes white people have put on Black people,” she said.

But later, she lamented that a 1993 interview she did with Ice Cube in Spin magazine had been “cut to nothing,” as part of a “mass media setup” all too familiar to Black thinkers.

“To white-dominated mass media, the controversy over gangsta rap makes a great spectacle,” she wrote . Journalists and producers that called seeking “the hard-core ‘feminist’ trash of gangsta rap,” she noted, usually lost interest when they encountered instead “the hard-core feminist critique of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”

She was not without her critics, including among other Black feminists. In a 1995 article in The Village Voice, Michele Wallace (whose 1979 book “Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman” came out two years before “Ain’t I a Woman”) derided what she saw as her repetitive, dogmatic style.

“Without the unlovely P.C. code phrases, ‘white supremacy,’ ‘patriarchal domination’ and ‘self-recovery,’ hooks couldn’t write a sentence,” Wallace wrote.

And in 2016, hooks’s critical remarks about Beyoncé’s visual album “Lemonade,” which she described as “capitalist moneymaking at its best,” caused a furor among fellow Black feminist scholars and writers.

“It’s all about the body, and the body as commodity,” she wrote in The Guardian. “This is certainly not radical or revolutionary. From slavery to the present day, black female bodies, clothed and unclothed, have been bought and sold.”

To some, hooks had grown “detached from the hearts and minds of Black women,” as a writer for Ebony put it. But as with her earlier criticisms of Beyoncé as being complicit in the visual “construction of herself as a slave,” hooks’s assessment was more nuanced than the headline-making quotes suggested.

And if her criticisms seemed out of step with the evolving pop-culture-savvy Black feminist thought she had helped birth, they also illustrated its depth.

“We learned we could disagree with her,” the historian Anthea Butler, who was critical of hooks at the time, wrote this week at msnbc.com. “Looking back, hooks’s criticism of Beyoncé was a moment to embrace how feminists, specifically Black feminists, embrace other paradigms of feminist power.”

hooks became intellectually famous mostly the old-fashioned way: by writing. She was on television infrequently (and only briefly on Twitter ), but her work resonated with younger, very online feminists. In 2015, the feminist site Jezebel declared that “saved by the bell hooks,” which added (rigorously footnoted) quotes from her books to screenshots from the white-bread television show “Saved by the Bell,” was the Tumblr account of the year.

Perry, the Princeton professor, said that students she knew were just as likely to come to hooks’s work through personal reading as through course assignments. That may have been particularly true for her books on love, a subject she turned to in the early 2000s in a series of books including “All About Love” “Communion” and “The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity and Love.” (Feminist writing, hooks said in the book, too often “did not tell us about the deep inner misery of men.”)

Today, those titles are often shelved in bookstores under self-help. And on the internet, hooks can seem to share the double-edged canonization of one of her childhood muses, Emily Dickinson, another radical woman writer whose words lend themselves to decontextualized poster-ready #inspo .

But if interpersonal relationships struck some as an unserious subject, hooks was unfazed. Love, she said in a 2017 interview with the website Shondaland, “requires integrity, that there be a congruency between what we think, say and do.”

Love, she said, “is first and foremost about knowledge.”

Jennifer Schuessler is a culture reporter covering intellectual life and the world of ideas. She is based in New York. More about Jennifer Schuessler

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The Revolutionary Writing of bell hooks

Before she became bell hooks, one of the great cultural critics and writers of the twentieth century, and before she inspired generations of readers—especially Black women—to understand their own axis-tilting power, she was Gloria Jean Watkins, daughter of Rosa Bell and Veodis Watkins. hooks, who died on Wednesday, was raised in Hopkinsville, a small, segregated town in Kentucky. Everything she would become began there. She was born in 1952 and attended segregated schools up until college; it was in the classroom that she, eager to learn, began glimpsing the liberatory possibilities of education. She loved movies, yet the ways in which the theatre made us occasionally captive to small-mindedness and stereotype compelled her to wonder if there were ways to look (and talk) back at the screen’s moving images. Growing up, her father was a janitor and her mother worked as a maid for white families; their work, rife with minor indignities, brought into focus the everyday power of an impolite glare, or rolling your eyes. A new world is born out of such small gestures of resistance—of affirming your rightful space.

In 1973, Watkins graduated from Stanford; as a nineteen-year-old undergraduate, she had already completed a draft of a visionary history of Black feminism and womanhood. During the seventies, she pursued graduate work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California, Santa Cruz. In the late seventies, she began publishing poetry under the pen name bell hooks—a tribute to her great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. (The lowercase was meant to distinguish her from her great-grandmother, and to suggest that what mattered was the substance of the work, not the author’s name.) In 1981, as hooks, she published the scholarship she began at Stanford, “ Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism ,” a landmark book that was at once a history of slavery’s legacy and the ongoing dehumanization of Black women as well as a critique of the revolutionary politics which had arisen in response to this maltreatment—and which, nonetheless, centered the male psyche. True liberation, she believed, needed to reckon with how class, race, and gender are facets of our identities that are inextricably linked. We are all of these things at once.

In the eighties and nineties, hooks taught at Yale University, Oberlin College, and the City College of New York. She was a prolific scholar and writer, publishing nearly forty books and hundreds of articles for magazines, journals, and newspapers. Among her most influential ideas was that of the “oppositional gaze.” Power relations are encoded in how we look at one another; enslaved people were once punished for merely looking at their white owners. hooks’s notion of a confrontational, rebellious way of looking sought to short-circuit the male gaze or the white gaze, which wanted to render Black female spectators as passive or somehow “other.” She appreciated the power of critiquing or making art from this defiantly Black perspective.

I came to her work in the mid-nineties, during a fertile era of Black cultural studies, when it felt like your typical alternative weekly or independent magazine was as rigorous as an academic monograph. For hooks, writing in the public sphere was just an application of her mind to a more immediate concern, whether her subject was Madonna, Spike Lee, or, in one memorably withering piece, Larry Clark’s “Kids.” She was writing at a time when the serious study of culture—mining for subtexts, sifting for clues—was still a scrappy undertaking. As an Asian American reader, I was enamored with how critics like hooks drew on their own backgrounds and friendships, not to flatten their lives into something relatably universal but to remind us how we all index a vast, often contradictory array of tastes and experiences. Her criticism suggested a pulsing, tireless brain trying to make sense of how a work of art made her feel. She modelled an intellect: following the distant echoes of white supremacy and Black resistance over time and pinpointing their legacies in the works of Quentin Tarantino or Forest Whitaker’s “Waiting to Exhale.”

Yet her work—books such as “ Reel to Real ” or “ Art on My Mind ,” which have survived decades of rereadings and underlinings—also modelled how to simply live and breathe in the world. She was zealous in her praise—especially when it came to Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust,” a film referenced countless times in her work—and she never lost grasp of how it feels to be awestruck while standing before a stirring work of art. She couldn’t deny the excitement as the lights dim and we prepare to surrender to the performance. But she made demands on the world. She believed criticism came from a place of love, a desire for things worthy of losing ourselves to.

She reached people, and that’s what a generation of us wanted to do with our intellectual work. She wrote children’s books ; she wrote essays that people read in college classrooms and prisons alike. Picking up “Reel to Real” made me rethink what a book could be. It was a collection of her film essays, astute dissections of “Paris Is Burning” or “Leaving Las Vegas.” But the middle portion consists of interviews with filmmakers like Wayne Wang and Arthur Jafa, where you encounter a different dimension of hooks’s critical persona—curious, empathetic, searching for comrades. “Representation matters” is a hollow phrase nowadays, and it’s easy to forget that even in the eighties and nineties nobody felt that this was enough. She was at her sharpest in resisting the banal, market-ready refractions of Blackness or womanhood that represent easy, meagre progress. (One of her most famous, recent works was a 2016 essay on Beyoncé’s self-commodification , which provoked the ire of the singer’s fans. Yet, if the essay is understood within the broader context of hooks’s life and intellectual project, there are probably few pieces on Beyoncé filled with as much admiration and love.)

This has been a particularly trying time for critics who came of age in the eighties and nineties, as giants like hooks, Greg Tate , and Dave Hickey have passed. hooks was a brilliant, tough critic—no doubt her death will inspire many revisitations of works like “Ain’t I a Woman,” “ Black Looks ,” or “ Outlaw Culture .” Yet she was also a dazzling memoirist and poet. In 1982, she published a poem titled “in the matter of the egyptians” in Hambone , a journal she worked on with her then partner, Nathaniel Mackey . It reads:

ancestral bodies buried in sand sun treasured flowers press in a memory book they pass through loss and come to this still tenderness swept clean by scarce winds surfacing in the watery passage beyond death

In 2004, hooks returned to Kentucky to teach at Berea College, where she also founded the bell hooks Institute. Over the past two decades, hooks’s published criticism turned from film and literature to relationships, love, sexuality, the ways in which members of a community remain accountable for one another. Living together was always a theme in hooks’s work, though now intimacy became the subject, not the context. Much like the late Asian American activist and organizer Grace Lee Boggs , who turned to community gardening in later years, hooks’s twenty-first-century writings about love as “an action, a participatory emotion,” and companionship were prophetic, a return to the basis for all that is meaningful. The social and political systems around us are designed to obstruct our sense of esteem and make us feel small. Yet revolution starts within each of us—in the demands we take up against the world, in the daily fight against nihilism.

“If I were really asked to define myself,” she told a Buddhist magazine in the early nineties, “I wouldn’t start with race; I wouldn’t start with blackness; I wouldn’t start with gender; I wouldn’t start with feminism. I would start with stripping down to what fundamentally informs my life, which is that I’m a seeker on the path. I think of feminism, and I think of anti-racist struggles as part of it. But where I stand spiritually is, steadfastly, on a path about love.”

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Women, Gender, and Families of Color

Honoring bell hooks’s legacy: humanist, feminist, public intellectual, social critic, and educator.

The essays constituting this online special issue, organized in memoriam, reflect on bell hooks’s influence on the contributors’ evolving relationships to their writing and work as well as deep connections to feminism, mothers, students, regions, ecologies, cultures, and the academy, among other facets of their lives. In taking up hooks’s mantle, the authors nuance literary forms and offer various expressions of gratitude to explore their struggles, growth, and healing as a result of hooks’s prolific career and generative activism.

The essays were gathered by guest editors Cécile Accilien, Manisha Desai, and Luz María Gordillo, who also serve as members of the journal’s editorial board. Instead of a written preface, they elected to engage in a virtual conversation about the meaning of hooks’s life and work to their trajectories as scholars and feminists of color during the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s.

You can find a link to the guest editors’ recorded introduction here and the 21 collected essays honoring bell hooks below.

“Talking Back: Remembering bell hooks” by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

“bell hooks said ‘No Black woman writer…can write too much’: A Black Feminist Reflection” by Letisha Engracia Cardoso Brown

“Rebirthing My Girlhood Space: What bell hooks Taught Me about Writing and Love” by Rebecca Covarrubias

“Returning Home: Reflections on bell hooks’s Practice of Black Sustainability” by Mysia Anderson

“Land, Kinship, and Healing” by Tabitha Robin

“’Coming to Voice’ or Blatant Disrespect? An Epistolary Offering to My Mother for Understanding and Our Freedom” by Khahlia Sanders

“Teaching to Refuse and Reclaim: A Letter of Gratitude to bell hooks” by Courtney B. Cook

“A Collective Call to Rupture Academic English: Reflections on ‘Language: Teaching New Worlds/New Words'” by Sara L. Chase Merrick

“bell hooks’s Memoirs” by Anne Donadey

“bell hooks: Feminism as the Transformational Work of Love” by Elizabeth Ann Bartlett

“Decolonial Love as a Foundation for Creative Business Practice” by Alia Fortune Weston

“Trusting in the Power of Compassion” by Leah Milne

“Coming of Age in Black Feminism and the Influence of bell hooks” by Angelyn Mitchell

“To Be A Feminist: In Honor of bell hooks” by Zakiya R. Adair

“Teaching to Transgress” by Margaret Stetz

“Observations of Knowledge and Landscape from the Margins: An Indigenous Bunun Woman-Centered Perspective” by adus palalavi

“Examining Blackness” by Ebony Aya

“bell hooks: In Life, In Memoriam, and A Few Lessons She Taught Me as a Feminist Educator and Black Gay Man” by David B. Green Jr.

“What bell hooks Taught Me…” by Leslie Morrow

“Penning Balm” by Leah Fulton

“An Offering of Gratitude” by Dominique M. Brown and Devin M. Moran

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education, community-building and change

bell hooks on education

The picture of bell hooks was sourced from Wikimedia Commons and is believed to be in the public domain (Cmongirl): Bellhooks.jpg

bell hooks on education. Barry Burke assesses the contribution that bell hooks has made to thinking about education and sets this within the context of her biography and work.

Contents: introduction · bell hooks on education · hooks and freire · relationships, power and media · conclusion · bibliography · how to cite this article.

My hope emerges from those places of struggle where I witness individuals positively transforming their lives and the world around them. Educating is always a vocation rooted in hopefulness. As teachers we believe that learning is possible, that nothing can keep an open mind from seeking after knowledge and finding a way to know. (hooks 2003 p.xiv)

bell hooks (1952- ) (nee Gloria Watkins) was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. She came from a poor working class family and worked her way up the academic ladder to become Distinguished Professor of English at City College in New York. Her early schooling she describes as ‘sheer joy’. The all-black school she went to as a young girl she writes of as being ‘a place of ecstasy – pleasure and danger’. She loved being a student. She loved learning.

To be changed by ideas was pure pleasure. But to learn ideas that ran counter to values and beliefs learned at home was to place oneself at risk, to enter the danger zone. Home was the place where I was forced to conform to someone else’s image of who and what I should be. School was the place where I could forget that self and, through ideas, reinvent myself. (hooks 1994 p3).

Almost all of bell hooks’ teachers were black women who she feels were on a mission. They were committed to nurturing intellect so that their pupils could become scholars, thinkers or cultural workers (what she refers to as ‘black folks who used our minds’) (see hooks 1996a). She decided from very early on that she wanted to become a teacher and a writer.

When school integration was introduced in the 1960s, bell hooks transferred to an integrated school that was the complete opposite of her first school. Here she was confronted with an institution of all-white teachers who she judged were not interested in transforming the minds of their pupils but simply transferring irrelevant bodies of knowledge. She writes that the knowledge they were supposed to soak up bore no relation to how they lived or behaved. ‘Bussed to white schools’, bell hooks recalls, ‘we soon learned that obedience, and not zealous will to learn, was what was expected of us’. Too much eagerness to learn she regarded as something that could easily be seen as a threat to white authority (see hooks 1996a and 1996b)

However, learn she did. bell hooks went on to gain a scholarship to Stanford University where, in 1973 she obtained her BA. From there she went to the University of Wisconsin where she was awarded an MA in 1976 and then her PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1983.

bell hooks became a teacher and a writer – writing about one book a year. Her use of a pseudonym arose from a desire to honour her grandmother (whose name she took) and her mother, and a concern to establish a ‘separate voice’ from the person Gloria Watson.

Her first major book (1981) Ain’t I a woman : Black women and feminism established her as a formidable critic and intellectual and set out some of the central themes around culture, gender, race and class that have characterized her work. In this book bell hooks looked ‘at the impact of sexism on the black woman during slavery, the devaluation of black womanhood, black male sexism, racism within the recent feminist movement, and the black woman’s involvement with feminism’ (1981: 13). She drew attention to the extent to which ‘the dominant white patriarchy and black male patriarchy conveyed to black women the message that to cast a vote in favour of social equality of the sexes i.e. women’s liberation, was to cast a vote against black liberation’ (1981: 185). hooks remains an outspoken feminist, an anti-racist, a democrat. A central aspect of her work is that she sees discrimination and domination not in separate categories but all interconnected. She sees no hierarchy of discrimination. Gender, race and class distinctions are not viewed as one being more important than the other.

bell hooks’ first major book on education, Teaching to Transgress , was published in 1994. It is a collection of essays exploring her ideas. She writes in a very personal style, often anecdotal giving examples from her own experiences. This is quite deliberate as she intended the book to be read by a diverse audience covering anyone interested in the practice of education. She argued for a progressive, holistic education – engaged pedagogy:

To educate as the practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn. That learning process comes easiest to those of us who teach who also believe that there is an aspect of our vocation that is sacred; who believe that our work is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students. To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin (hooks 1994: 13)

She goes on to stress the demands this places upon educators in terms of authenticity and commitment.

Progressive, holistic education, “engaged pedagogy” is more demanding that conventional critical or feminist pedagogy. For, unlike these two teaching practices, it emphasizes well-being. That means that teachers must be actively involved committed to a process of self-actualization that promotes their own well-being if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students. (hooks 1994: 15)

Teaching to Transgress is characterized by attention to emotion and feeling (including an exploration of the place of eros and eroticism in the classroom.

Nearly ten years after the publication of Teaching to Transgress , hooks produced a sequel entitled Teaching Community with a subtitle of A Pedagogy of Hope . This book develops themes in the earlier book and in particular the process of building community in the classroom.

hooks and Freire

bell hooks is heavily influenced by Paulo Freire whom she met and worked with on a number of occasions. She uses a quote from him at the beginning of Teaching Community to illustrate its subtitle. ‘It is imperative that we maintain hope even when the harshness of reality may suggest the opposite’ bell hooks writes. She claims that she was like a person dying of thirst when she first encountered Freire and although she did not agree with everything he said, she maintains that ‘the fact that there was some mud in my water was not important.’ Freire has had a profound effect on her thinking and on bell hooks’ practice, particularly around the concepts of literacy and consciousness raising.

hooks is a feminist and for her, literacy is essential to the future of the feminist movement because the lack of reading, writing and critical skills serves to exclude many women and men from feminist consciousness. Not only that, it excludes many from the political process and the labour market. She regards literacy as more than being able to read and write, however. For her, it allows people, particularly those who are marginalized and discriminated against in society to acquire a critical consciousness. Freire’s concept of critical consciousness has been particularly important to her work. She also promotes a notion of praxis in a similar way to Freire i.e. a combination of reflection and action and regards her notion of ‘engaged pedagogy’ as one which requires praxis on the part of not only students but also teachers. Teachers must be aware of themselves as practitioners and as human beings if they wish to teach students in a non-threatening, anti-discriminatory way. Self-actualisation should be the goal of the teacher as well as the students.

bell hook’s pedagogy is one that is responsive to the specific situation of each particular group of students and she sees education as taking place not only in the classroom but also wherever people are. She refers in her new book to ‘communities of resistance’ as places where democratic educators can work.

Relationships, power and media

She acknowledges that within the teaching and learning relationship , more often than not, the question of power and authority raises its head. In an conversation she had with Gary Olson, she said that what she tries to do is acknowledge her authority and the limitations of it and then think of how both teacher and students can learn together in a way that no one acquires the kind of power to use the classroom as a space of domination. She also makes the point that this domination is not restricted to the teacher/student relationship but where there is diversity amongst the students particularly around the issues of race and gender and sexual practice, it is possible for everyone to engage in power struggles and, in fact, ‘for certain students to have potentially the power to coerce, dominate and silence’. In order to create a learning environment within the classroom she aims to diffuse hierarchy and create a sense of community. hooks maintains that the classroom should be ‘a place that is life-sustaining and mind-expanding, a place of liberating mutuality where teacher and student together work in partnership’ (hooks 2003 p.xv).

Although much of her criticism of the educational world is aimed at the traditional educationalist and what Freire refers to as the banking concept of education, she is also very aware that much of the ideology of modern society arises from the mass media. She is particularly scathing about the power and the effect of television on the American public. ‘No one, no matter how intelligent and skilful at critical thinking, is protected against the subliminal suggestions that imprint themselves on our unconscious brain if we are watching hours and hours of television’ (hooks 2003 p11). She sees parents and students fearing alternative ways of thinking. She maintains that it is vital to challenge all the misinformation that is constantly directed at people and poses as objective unbiased knowledge. She sees this as an essential educational task. She refers in her writing to the importance of the ‘decolonisation of ways of knowing’ (hooks 2003 p3). She makes the point that what is needed are mass-based political movements calling on citizens to uphold democracy and the rights of everyone to be educated, to work on behalf of ending domination in all of its forms – to work for justice, changing the educational system so that schooling is not the site where students are indoctrinated to support what she refers to as ‘imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ or any ideology, but rather where they learn to open their minds, to engage in rigorous study and to think critically.

bell hooks concern with the interlacing dynamics of ‘race’, gender, culture and class and her overall orientation to the whole person and to their well-being when connected with her ability to engage with educational practice in a direct way set her apart from the vast bulk of her contemporaries. Hers is a unique voice – and a hopeful one:

The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom with all its limitations remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labour for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom. (hooks 1994: 207)

Bibliography

Florence, N. (1998) Bell Hooks’ Engaged Pedagogy: A Transgressive Education for Critical Consciousness , New York: Greenwood Press. 246 pages. Explores bell hooks’ social and educational theory with a focus on Teaching to Transgress.

hooks, bell (1982) Ain’t I a Woman. Black women and feminism , London: Pluto Press. 205 pages.

hooks, bell (1989) Talking back: thinking feminist, thinking black, Toronto: Between the Lines.

hooks, bell (1994) Teaching to Transgress. Education as the practice of freedom , London: Routledge. 216 + x pages. Draws on Freire but looks to developing a feminist, engaged pedagogy relevant to multicultural contexts.

hooks, bell (1996a) Killing rage, ending racism , London: Penguin. 273 pages. Passionate collection of essays arguing that racism and sexism can only be eradicated in they are confronted together.

hooks, bell (1996b) Bone Black: memories of girlhood , New York: Holt.

hooks, bell (1997) Wounds of passion: a writing life , New York: Holt.

hooks, bell (2003) Teaching Community. A pedagogy of hope , New York: Routledge. 160 pages.

hooks, bell (2006) Outlaw Culture . London: Routledge.

hooks, bell and Raschka, Chris (2005) Skin Again , Jump at the Sun.

bell hooks resources : good starting point for resources on the web.

Acknowledgement

The picture of bell hooks was sourced from Wikimedia Commons and is believed to be in the public domain (Cmongirl): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bellhooks.jpg

How to cite this article : Burke, B. (2004) ‘bell hooks on education’, The encyclopedia of pedagogy and informal education , www.infed.org/mobi/bell-hooks-on-education.htm .

Last Updated on September 12, 2019 by infed.org

Essay on Feminism

500 words essay on feminism.

Feminism is a social and political movement that advocates for the rights of women on the grounds of equality of sexes. It does not deny the biological differences between the sexes but demands equality in opportunities. It covers everything from social and political to economic arenas. In fact, feminist campaigns have been a crucial part of history in women empowerment. The feminist campaigns of the twentieth century made the right to vote, public property, work and education possible. Thus, an essay on feminism will discuss its importance and impact.

Importance of Feminism

Feminism is not just important for women but for every sex, gender, caste, creed and more. It empowers the people and society as a whole. A very common misconception is that only women can be feminists.

It is absolutely wrong but feminism does not just benefit women. It strives for equality of the sexes, not the superiority of women. Feminism takes the gender roles which have been around for many years and tries to deconstruct them.

This allows people to live freely and empower lives without getting tied down by traditional restrictions. In other words, it benefits women as well as men. For instance, while it advocates that women must be free to earn it also advocates that why should men be the sole breadwinner of the family? It tries to give freedom to all.

Most importantly, it is essential for young people to get involved in the feminist movement. This way, we can achieve faster results. It is no less than a dream to live in a world full of equality.

Thus, we must all look at our own cultures and communities for making this dream a reality. We have not yet reached the result but we are on the journey, so we must continue on this mission to achieve successful results.

Impact of Feminism

Feminism has had a life-changing impact on everyone, especially women. If we look at history, we see that it is what gave women the right to vote. It was no small feat but was achieved successfully by women.

Further, if we look at modern feminism, we see how feminism involves in life-altering campaigns. For instance, campaigns that support the abortion of unwanted pregnancy and reproductive rights allow women to have freedom of choice.

Moreover, feminism constantly questions patriarchy and strives to renounce gender roles. It allows men to be whoever they wish to be without getting judged. It is not taboo for men to cry anymore because they must be allowed to express themselves freely.

Similarly, it also helps the LGBTQ community greatly as it advocates for their right too. Feminism gives a place for everyone and it is best to practice intersectional feminism to understand everyone’s struggle.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

Conclusion of the Essay on Feminism

The key message of feminism must be to highlight the choice in bringing personal meaning to feminism. It is to recognize other’s right for doing the same thing. The sad part is that despite feminism being a strong movement, there are still parts of the world where inequality and exploitation of women take places. Thus, we must all try to practice intersectional feminism.

FAQ of Essay on Feminism

Question 1: What are feminist beliefs?

Answer 1: Feminist beliefs are the desire for equality between the sexes. It is the belief that men and women must have equal rights and opportunities. Thus, it covers everything from social and political to economic equality.

Question 2: What started feminism?

Answer 2: The first wave of feminism occurred in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It emerged out of an environment of urban industrialism and liberal, socialist politics. This wave aimed to open up new doors for women with a focus on suffrage.

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18 Essential Feminist Reads, According to 6 Feminist Authors

A collage of 12 Essential Feminist reads

As the great bell hooks stated, “feminism is for everybody.” Indeed, every person on earth is affected by the patriarchy in some way—though certainly, some more so than others. Thanks to the work of renowned professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, society has begun to understand the myriad ways in which race, class, sexual orientation, and other individual characteristics intersect to aggravate oppression. But the point is, we are all tasked with the responsibility of creating a new, just reality in which sexism and oppression have no place.

So where to begin when seeking to learn the ins and outs of the feminist movement? And what books can someone turn to when yearning to go deeper into its implications? To help us chart a way forward, we asked six feminist authors—across a wide array of backgrounds and literary genres—to share a few of the books they regard as essential reading for understanding both the myriad manifestations of the female experience and the sustained importance of feminism. Here are their suggested must-reads —in their own words.

Kate Baer, Author of What Kind of Woman and I Hope This Finds You Well

Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay : By now, most have heard of writer, feminist, and cultural critic Roxane Gay. Known for her funny, insightful, and moving essays, her reach is ever expanding and necessary. This book in particular has become my go-to recommendation for anyone searching for memoir, humor, or essays on intersectional feminism. Gay also stands out for her acceptance of imperfection, noting, “I am a bad feminist. I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all.” [It’s a] phenomenal read.

Feminism Is for Everybody by bell hooks: This book should be required reading for every high school student, every first-time mother and father, every woman, and every man. Pair it with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists , and you’ll find the perfect place to start if you’re interested in feminist studies and [desire to be] well-read on the subject. This book is literally for everyone.

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Diving Into the Wreck: Poems 1971-1972 by Adrienne Rich: Reading any Adrienne Rich is like taking a shot of feminine rage—it leaves a burning in your belly and a face flushed with indignation. This collection in particular calls the reader to examine how both men and women contribute to a harmful patriarchy. “You worship the blood you call it hysterical bleeding / you want to drink it like milk / you dip your finger into it and write / you faint at the smell of it / you dream of dumping me into the sea.” To know Rich’s poetry is to know the power of language.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou: Angelou’s 1969 autobiography turned American classic is perhaps one of our country’s most important reads on racism, sexism, and identity. Not only is this book a master class on prose, it gives readers a poignant and nuanced look into the upbringing of a remarkable American woman. Incredible and worth a reread if it’s been a decade or two.

Leah Thomas , Author of The Intersectional Environmentalist

All About Love by bell hooks: This is one of the most transformational books I’ve read, which explores the question “What is love?,”—love for ourselves, for others, for society. For Black women living in a patriarchal society built on racism, learning to love ourselves is a revolutionary act. Taking the time to assess generational trauma and unhealthy relational dynamics, [working toward] receiving healthy love between ourselves, our communities, and others is crucial to promoting a society rooted in love vs. oppression. bell hooks is a feminist icon, and this book demonstrates how love can be a healing tool for not only ourselves, but society as a whole.

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston: Black feminism flows throughout this book, even though it’s not explicitly stated. But the experiences of the main character, Janie, demonstrate the struggles of Black women navigating both gender-based and racial discrimination and their ongoing quest for respect, rights, and dignity in the U.S. It also touches on colorism and lateral oppression, dynamics that occur within a minority group; through Janie’s struggles and experiences, she gets closer and closer to expressing her independence and finding empowerment in a patriarchal and racist society.

Rebecca Solnit, Author of Men Explain Things to Me and Recollections of My Nonexistence

Women and Power by Mary Beard: Mary Beard’s “The Public Voice of Women” [from] her small volume Women and Power is a great summary of the history of the problem of unequal voices—unequal in who is allowed to speak, who is listened to, who is believed and respected—all central to questions of inequality.

Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her by Susan Griffin: Susan Griffin’s furious, lyrical Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her still gives us valuable ways to think about gender in relationship to speed, technology, violence, domestic animals, to all the metaphors and analogies that stitch our world together in often-constricting ways.

How to Raise a Feminist Son by Sonora Jha: I love Sonora Jha’s How to Raise a Feminist Son because it addresses something really important, that how we raise children to see themselves, others, and the world is a central act in making a better world, and so feminism is taking place in a billion tiny acts every day, everywhere.

Know My Name by Chanel Miller: Chanel Miller’s memoir Know My Name describes how an act of violence and violation against an individual can ripple through dozens of lives, how the legal system often serves as a long episode of punishment and degradation following the original attack, and how a young woman can find her voice and use it to define herself, reach out to others, and claim the power she deserves.

Gabriela García, Author of Of Women and Salt

The Selected Works of Audre Lorde edited by Roxane Gay: I first encountered Audre Lorde’s essays and speeches as a young woman coming into my own feminist politic, particularly Sister Outsider , often quoted but sometimes divorced of its radical underpinnings. But I’d never read her essays alongside her poetry as in this new collection, and I was struck by the resonances between them—how theory grounded in the communal makes way for poetics of yearning, seething, loving that is painstakingly personal yet grounded in collaborative liberation and care.

Diving Into the Wreck by Adrienne Rich: I turn to Adrienne Rich’s poems often, and almost half a century after its publication, Diving Into the Wreck still strikes me as an utterly relevant exploration of both patriarchal power and mythology, and the complicated contours of feminine interiority. Rich explored varied territory–motherhood, the figure of daughter-in-law, the mechanical processing of a sexual assault by a cop–with language that was precise, incisive, and nuanced; the poems in this collection yield new insights each time I revisit.

Angela Garbes, Author of Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy and Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change (Forthcoming May 2022)

Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong: Reading Minor Feelings in early 2020, just after it was published, I experienced the rare, intense pleasure of realizing, with each page, that it would be canonical to me. Here was the confusion, hypervigilance, desire, and pride and painful self-awareness that defines my (I thought) illegible, private journey into consciousness excised and biopsied with microscopic precision. Each essay is specific to Hong's experience as a Korean American woman, but as a Filipina American I am equally included and implicated. Here too, is anger—anger Asian women are not publicly entitled to, that increasingly threatens to consume us—finally directed outward, sublimated into powerful, destabilizing art.

“Welfare is a Women’s Issue,” essay by Johnnie Tillmon: Since the 1960s, mainstream American feminism has preached satisfaction and self-expression through work outside the home, a “lean-in” approach that values personal growth and gain. The beneficiaries have primarily been white women, as this empowerment has relied on outsourcing domestic labor to women of color at low wages. We hear a lot about Betty Friedan and The Feminine Mystique but far less about women such as Johnnie Tillmon and the National Welfare Rights Organization who, working at the same time, developed a platform for a Guaranteed Adequate Income to benefit all Americans. This essay, published in Ms. Magazine in 1972, shows that true feminism—inclusive and aimed at capitalist patriarchy’s root—can change everything. That, in Tillmon’s words, “Maybe it is we poor welfare women who will really liberate women in this country.”

“Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” from Sister Outsider , by Audre Lorde: “ As women, we have come to distrust that power which rises from our deepest and nonrational knowledge,” Lorde writes. “Uses of the Erotic” instantly clarified something I had always suspected as a young woman: that the feeling of being “too much,” too emotional, too dark, too big, too sensitive, was not actually a problem. That it may actually be my great power. This essay is a loving, sensual invitation for all of us to see that we are not in conflict with ourselves, but with a culture that insists we'd be better off without our bodies. It’s true that all of Sister Outsider is essential reading, but I recommend doubling down and going deep on “Uses of the Erotic,” a short essay so densely packed with provocations and dares to live a full, embodied, and pleasurable physical life that I still marvel at it—and Lorde’s power—with every reading.

Zaina Arafat, Author of You Exist Too Much

Master of the Eclipse , Etel Adnan: The stories in Lebanese poet Etel Adnan’s Master of the Eclipse subversively resist an ingrained patriarchy through romantic relationships and female friendships. What results is a cauldron of displacement, nostalgia, love, and loss, all manifested in the trajectories of empowered female characters.

Meaty: Essays by Samantha Irby: This book, like so much of Irby’s work, delves into the unruly and at times uncooperative female body, along with love of food. By unabashedly displaying societally deemed “shameful” acts and realities, Irby empowers us to do the same, and to embrace our own bodily chaos and appetites.

Chloe Caldwell, The Red Zone: A Love Story (forthcoming April 2022): The necessity and urgency of The Red Zone made me wonder how I—or any woman—had lived so long without it. Through the lens of PMDD [premenstrual dysphoric disorder] and the female body, Caldwell refracts every issue imaginable, from relationships to hormones to queerness to stepmotherhood to blended families, all with hilarity, intimacy, and depth. Feeling seen by this book is an understatement; it’s a survival guide.

CAS138-007 Civic Issues

“Feminist Politics: Where We Stand” (Bell Hooks)

Click to access hooks.pdf

Hooks’ definition of feminism is exactly what feminism should be: a movement fueled not by the hatred of men, but by the desire to end sexism and obtain equality. I identified strongly while reading this text because when I was younger, I believed feminism meant a movement for women who wanted to be superior to men. This is a common preconceived notion many people have, which is why it’s important to educate others about the realities of feminism.

Hooks does a good job at explaining why some people think feminism is tied to misandry when. She explains that in the early stages of feminism, female activists did, in fact, express anger and hatred towards male dominance. This early attitude might be the reason so many people brand feminists as “man-haters.” Feminists detested the sexism that was usually accompanied by males. However, once they realized that women were capable of adopting sexist attitudes as well, the majority dismissed anti-male sentiments. When women adopt sexist attitudes towards each other, they are only reinforcing the oppressive environment prevalent in our society. Women should support each other and use competition as a motivator to reach success.

During the first wave of feminism, early activists fought against race and class injustice as well. In the text, Hooks describes the early types of feminism: reformist (who chose to emphasize gender equality) and revolutionary (who saw beyond gaining women’s rights and instead focused on ending the patriarchy and sexism as well). Nowadays, the majority of us will probably identify more as revolutionary feminists. We have succeeded in gaining women’s rights (although that seems fickle now under the new government) throughout the years, and now we are more invested in ending societal sexism.

However, feminists aren’t limited to either reformist or revolutionary categories. In her essay, Hooks explains what “lifestyle feminism” is: “the notion that there could be as many versions of feminism as there were women.” This is a tricky concept because it is inherently suggesting that feminism has no clear boundaries. This is a term I’m having trouble over myself. I believe that lifestyle feminism is effective in spreading and advocating for feminism in general, but it lacks key structural components that explicitly identify what feminists should be like. For example, you can be a feminist while being pro-life, yet believing that a woman’s body is her choice. This juxtaposition of contradictory beliefs blurs the line between what’s considered feminist and what isn’t. It is because of this that there is so much uncertainty on what makes a feminist a feminist.

I’m interested in knowing what everyone else thinks about feminism. There are many categories that branch out of feminism (whether you’re pro-life or pro-choice, feminist sexualities and stereotypes, whether you can support Trump and still call yourself a feminist, etc.) and I’m interested in learning all of them. I personally believe that the core element of feminism is what Hooks explained: a movement to end sexism and obtain equality.

One thought on “ “Feminist Politics: Where We Stand” (Bell Hooks) ”

I would love to learn more about feminism – its history, its different “waves,” and its varying branches. Not only is it interesting to see how feminist values have changed and developed over time, but I think it’s also absolutely crucial to understand them well in order to be able to address modern misconceptions and stereotypes, such as “feminism is man-hating.” I’ve already learned a lot from reading your blog, and I’m looking forward to exploring feminism in the future and figuring out how it fits into my belief systems.

Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

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Preface 1-Chapter 2

Chapters 3-5

Chapters 6-8

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Key Figures

Index of Terms

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

In what ways does bell hooks disagree with the feminist movement at the time of writing Feminist Theory: From Margins to Center ? Choose three aspects of the feminist movement that hooks aims to reform and explain the changes she argues for.

hooks frequently quotes major feminist texts, post-colonial texts, and social criticism within her own writing. How does this reflect her understanding of community, education, and solidarity?

Explain hooks’s understanding of solidarity. How would it change the feminist movement? How does hooks propose bringing about this solidarity within the movement?

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44 Student Essay Example: Feminist Criticism

The following student essay example of femnist criticism is taken from Beginnings and Endings: A Critical Edition . This is the publication created by students in English 211. This essay discusses Ray Bradbury’s short story ”There Will Come Soft Rains.”

Burning Stereotypes in Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains”

By Karley McCarthy

Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” takes place in the fallout of a nuclear war. The author chooses to tell the story though a technologically advanced house and its animatronic inhabitants instead of a traditional protagonist. The house goes about its day-to-day as if no war had struck. It functions as though its deceased family is still residing in its walls, taking care of the maintenance, happiness, and safety of itself and the long dead family. On the surface, Bradbury’s story seems like a clear-cut warning about technology and humanity’s permissiveness. Given that the short story was written in the 1940s, it’s easy to analyze the themes present and how they related to women of the time. Bradbury’s apt precautionary tale can be used as a metaphor for women’s expectations and role in society after World War II and how some women may have dealt with the fallout of their husbands coming back home with psychological trauma.

To experience “There Will Come Soft Rains” from a feminist perspective, readers must be aware of the societal norms that would have shaped Bradbury’s writing. “Soft Rains” takes place in the year 2026. Yet the house and norms found throughout were, “modeled after concept homes that showed society’s expectations of technological advancement” (Mambrol). This can be seen in the stereotypical nuclear family that once inhabited the house as well as their cliché white home and the hobbies present. According to writer Elaine Tyler May’s book Homeward Bound, America’s view of women’s role in society undertook a massive pendulum swing during the World War II era as the country transitioned through pre-war to post-war life. For example, in a matter of decades support for women joining the workforce shifted from 80% in opposition to only 13% (May 59). Despite this shift, the men coming back from the war still expected women to position themselves as the happy housewife they had left behind, not the newfound career woman architype. Prominent figures of the 40s, such as actress Joan Crawford, portrayed a caricature of womanhood that is subservient to patriarchal gender roles, attempting to abandon the modern idea of a self-sufficient working-class woman (May 62-63). Keeping this in mind, how can this image of the 1940s woman be seen in Bradbury’s work?

Throughout Bradbury’s life he worked towards dismantling clichés in his own writing. A biography titled simply “Ray Bradbury” mentions that even in his earlier work, he was always attempting to “escape the constrictions of stereotypes” found in early science fiction (Seed 13). An example of him breaking constrictions could be his use of a nonhuman protagonist. Instead, Bradbury relies on the personification of the house and its robotic counterparts. Bradbury describes the house as having “electric eyes” and emotions such as a, “preoccupation with self-protection which bordered on a mechanical paranoia,” something that would make the house quiver at the sounds of the outside world (2-3). While these descriptions are interesting, Bradbury’s use of personification here is a thought-provoking choice when one breaks down what exactly the house is meant to personify.

One analysis of this story notes that the house’s personification, “replaces the most human aspects of life,” for its inhabitants (Mambrol). Throughout the story, the house acts as a caretaker, records a schedule, cooks, cleans, and even attempts to extinguish an all-consuming fire. While firefighting is not a traditionally feminine career or expectation from the 1940s (more on that later), most of the house’s daily tasks are replacing jobs that were traditionally held by a household’s matriarch. Expanding further on this dichotomy of male/woman tasks, a chore mentioned in the story that is ‘traditionally’ accepted as a masculine household duty—mowing the law—is still assigned as a male task. This is feels intentional to the house’s design as Bradbury is, “a social critic, and his work is pertinent to real problems on earth” (Dominianni 49). Bradbury’s story is not meant to commentate on just an apocalypse, but society at large. Bradbury describes the west face of the house as, “black, save for five places” (Bradbury 1-2). These “five places” are the silhouettes of the family who had been incinerated by a nuclear bomb. The family’s two children are included playing with a ball, but the mother and father’s descriptions are most important. The mother is seen in a passive role, picking flowers, while the father mows the lawn. The subtext here is that the man is not replaceable in his mundane and tedious task. Only the woman is replaced. While this is a small flash into the owners’ lives, what “human aspect” or autonomy of the father’s life has been replaced by the house’s actions if the house is mainly personifying only the traditional 1940s female-held positions? The message here is that a man’s position in society is irreplaceable while a woman’s is one of mere support.

While this dynamic of husband vs subordinate is harmful, wives supporting their partners is nothing new. Homeward Bound explains that life after World War II for many women meant a return to their previous position as a housewife while many men came home irreparably damaged by years of warfare. PTSD, known then as shellshock, affected countless men returning from the war. Women were often expected to mend the psychological damage as part of their domestic responsibilities, even if they were unprepared for the realities of the severe trauma their husbands had faced (May 64-65). The psychological effects of the war came crashing into women’s lives the same way that the tree fell into the autonomous house in “Soft Rains”. As mentioned earlier, firefighting is not a task someone from the 40s would expect of women, but the house’s combustion and its scramble to save itself can be seen as a metaphor for women attempting to reverse the cold reality that the war had left them with. The picturesque family they had dreamed of would forever be scarred by the casualties that took place overseas. While Bradbury may not have meant for women to be invoked specifically from this precautionary tale, it’s obvious that him wanting his science fiction to act as, “a cumulative early warning system against unforeseen consequences,” would have impacted women of the time as much as men (Seed 22). The unforeseen consequences here is the trauma the war inflicted on families.

While men were fighting on the front lines, women back home and in noncombat positions would still feel the war’s ripples. In “Soft Rains” the nuclear tragedy had left, “a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles” (Bradbury 1). Despite the destruction, the house continues its routine as though nothing had happened. This can be seen as a metaphor for how women responded to the trauma their husbands brought back from the war. Women were urged to, “preserve for him the essence of the girl he fell in love with, the girl he longs to come back to. . .The least we can do as women is to try to live up to some of those expectations” (May 64). Following this, many could have put their desires and personal growth to the side to act as a secondary character in their husband’s lives.

The final line can be read as the culmination of similarities between post-war women and Bradbury’s house. The violence and destruction that fell upon the house in its final moments leaves little standing. What’s remarkable is how the house still attempts to continue despite its destruction. The final lines of the short story exemplify this: “Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam: ‘Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…’” (Bradbury 5). The house is acting just like the women from the 40s, clinging to their past in an attempt to preserve something that had already been lost, society’s innocence. One analysis points out that, “The house is depicted in this way because it represents both humanity and humanity’s failure to save itself” (Mambrol). While it might be wrong to say that women were unable to save themselves in this situation, this quote does touch on an idea present in the feminist metaphor for “Soft Rains”. The preservation of “the essence of the girl he fell in love with, the girl he longs to come back to” was a failure (May 64). The same way that the house cannot preserve itself from destruction, women cannot preserve an image of themselves that had already dissolved. As mentioned earlier, women had already entered the workforce, a huge step towards removing sexist stereotypes around women’s worth. After garnering work-based independence, it seems impossible that the idea of women solely as men’s support would not immolate.

While Bradbury’s “Soft Rains” can be viewed as an apt precautionary tale with real modern world issues at hand, in many ways it is a period piece. As a writer in the 1940s, it’s hard to imagine that Bradbury’s story would not have been influenced by the framework of a nuclear family and the stereotypical expectations of this time. Bradbury’s use of personification opens dialogue about gender roles in the 1940s and how war had complicated patriarchal expectations. Despite his attempt to bypass science fiction stereotypes, his story is full of metaphor for gender stereotypes. Using a feminist lens to analyze the story allows it to be read as a metaphor for war and its effects on married women. The standard analysis appears to say that, “machine no longer served humanity in “There Will Come Soft Rains”; there humanity is subservient to machinery” (Dominianni 49). From a feminist perspective, instead of machine, the house represents patriarchy and gender norms. While men suffered greatly during World War II, women often put their wants and futures on hold to support their husbands. This is a selfless act that shows the resilience of women despite their society’s wish to downplay their potential and turn them into mere support.

Works Cited

Bradbury, Ray. “August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains.” Broome-Tioga BOCES, 1950, pp. 1-5. btboces.org/Downloads/7_There%20Will%20Come%20Soft%20Rains%20by%20Ray%20Bradbury.pdf.

Dominianni, Robert. “Ray Bradbury’s 2026: A Year with Current Value.” The English Journal , vol. 73, no. 7, 1984, pp. 49–51. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/817806

Mambrol, Nasrullah. “Analysis of Ray Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains.” Literary Theory and Criticism , 17 Jan. 2022.

May, Elaine Tyler. “War and Peace: Fanning the Home Fires.” Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. 20th ed., Basic Books, 2008, pp. 58-88.

Seed, David. “Out of the Science Fiction Ghetto.” Ray Bradbury (Modern Masters of Science Fiction). University of Illinois, 2015, pp. 1-45.

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Several hooks and tips for writing an essay on feminism topics
Frequent usage of the mentioned method made it too obvious and dull. Replace it with a famous quotation or controversial opinion. Try to use only interesting quotes and outstanding opinions. "You educate a man; you educate a man. You educate a woman; you educate a generation. -Brigham Young". "In fact, feminism is the fight for equality.
Women, Gender, and Families of Color
In her groundbreaking essay "Feminism: A Transformational Politic," bell hooks boldly declares, "Embedded in the commitment to feminist revolution is the challenge to love" (hooks 1989, 26). These words, and her recognition of love as the defining quality of feminism, resonated with me immediately and drew me deeply to her work.
The impact of bell hooks' writing on feminism and radical ...
Author and cultural critic bell hooks poses for a portrait on December 16, 1996 in New York City, New York. "We black women who advocate feminist ideology, are pioneers. We are clearing a path for ...
bell hooks Reading List: Essential Books and Essays
Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981) Publishing over 30 books over the course of her career, perhaps the most well-known is her first, Ain't I a Woman. Referencing Sojourner Truth ...
bell hooks: Exploring Intersectionality, Black Feminist Thinking
Abstract. bell hooks contributed greatly to literature and scholarship related to feminism. bell hooks' scholarship supports the critical thinking centered in the intersectionality of race, gender, and class. Through hooks' literary contribution, readers have been able to view social intersectionality through the lens of community, Black ...
"Talking Back": Teaching Feminist Writing with bell hooks
In the Fall of 2012, I found myself teaching bell hooks's "talking back," an essay from Talking Back (1989), to a class of upper-middle-class (mostly white) undergraduate students. In the piece, hooks writes about reclaiming her voice as a Black girl child in a working-class Black family in the southern United States.
The Wide-Angle Vision, and Legacy, of bell hooks
The pioneering feminist scholar, who died this week, wrote about women, race, love, healing, pop culture and much more, always keeping Black women at the center. The writer bell hooks, in 1996 ...
The Revolutionary Writing of bell hooks
The Revolutionary Writing of bell hooks. Through her scholarship and criticism, hooks, who died this week, rewrote our understanding of Black feminism and womanhood, and gave a generation of ...
bell hooks: 35 Years from Margin to Center
bell hooks's insistence that feminism be a commitment to ending all forms of violence, oppression, and domination by upending the status quo is one of the more overlooked insights of her work. Her fearless commentary on topics as varied as rape culture, parenting, teaching, sexual politics, academic racism, motherhood, media literacy, family ...
PDF An Essay Review: Implementing a Liberatory Feminist Pedagogy: Bell
In another early essay, "Educating Women: A Feminist Agenda," hooks pointed out that most information about feminism has been circulated in written form in such materials as books, pamphlets, and flyers. However, there are many women and men who are denied a means of access to feminist consciousness because they are illiterate.
bell hooks
Black Women and Feminism (1981) Gloria Jean Watkins (September 25, 1952 - December 15, 2021), better known by her pen name bell hooks, [1] was an American author, theorist, educator, and social critic who was a Distinguished Professor in Residence at Berea College. She was best known for her writings on race, feminism, and class.
Rethinking Bell Hooks: A Critical Analysis of Patriarchy and ...
Bell Hooks, a well-known Black feminist writer of the second half of the 20th century to the beginnings of the 21st century, has been able to grab my attention recently. Her writings consist of a ...
Full article: Ending Global Violence Through Radical Feminist Theory
bell hooks's passing in December 2021 sparked numerous acts of remembrance from writers, activists, students, and academics who had mobilised her work for 40 years. hooks Footnote 1 was an accomplished writer, a mentor to many and a key voice within Black feminism, critical cultural studies and critical race theory across the world, known for her committed writing and teaching.
Honoring bell hooks's Legacy: Humanist, Feminist, Public Intellectual
The essays constituting this online special issue, organized in memoriam, reflect on bell hooks's influence on the contributors' evolving relationships to their writing and work as well as deep connections to feminism, mothers, students, regions, ecologies, cultures, and the academy, among other facets of their lives.
Hook Feminism Essay
The key argument that Hook makes throughout her novel is that feminism is about creating a world free of sexism. The only way to make this possible is by having both males and females fight to end sexist causes. The patriarchal society is based on powers in relationships—whether that power is men over women, bosses over their workers and even ...
Feminist theory : from margin to center : Hooks, Bell, 1952- : Free
xvii, 179 pages ; 22 cm This book established bell hooks as one of feminism's most vital and influential voices. A new preface by the author introduces the second edition of this essential classic to a new generation of feminist readers, while reminding seasoned activists of the need for continual, critical reflection.
bell hooks on education
hooks is a feminist and for her, literacy is essential to the future of the feminist movement because the lack of reading, writing and critical skills serves to exclude many women and men from feminist consciousness. ... Passionate collection of essays arguing that racism and sexism can only be eradicated in they are confronted together. hooks ...
An Analysis of Bell Hooks Concept of Feminist Consciousness: An
This new defini tion of feminism was the core foundation of bell hooks feminist philosophies a s sh e . ... Locke's Essays con cerning hum an understanding (1690). Locke defined consciousness as ...
Essay On Feminism in English for Students
500 Words Essay On Feminism. Feminism is a social and political movement that advocates for the rights of women on the grounds of equality of sexes. It does not deny the biological differences between the sexes but demands equality in opportunities. It covers everything from social and political to economic arenas.
18 Essential Feminist Books, According to 6 Feminist Authors
18 Essential Feminist Reads, According to 6 Feminist Authors. by Salomé Gómez-Upegui. March 30, 2022. Collage by Ashley Peña. As the great bell hooks stated, "feminism is for everybody ...
"Feminist Politics: Where We Stand" (Bell Hooks)
In the text, Hooks describes the early types of feminism: reformist (who chose to emphasize gender equality) and revolutionary (who saw beyond gaining women's rights and instead focused on ending the patriarchy and sexism as well). Nowadays, the majority of us will probably identify more as revolutionary feminists. ... In her essay, Hooks ...
Feminist Theory Essay Topics
Essay Topics. 1. In what ways does bell hooks disagree with the feminist movement at the time of writing Feminist Theory: From Margins to Center? Choose three aspects of the feminist movement that hooks aims to reform and explain the changes she argues for. 2. hooks frequently quotes major feminist texts, post-colonial texts, and social ...
Student Essay Example: Feminist Criticism
The following student essay example of femnist criticism is taken from Beginnings and Endings: A Critical Edition . This is the publication created by students in English 211. This essay discusses Ray Bradbury's short story "There Will Come Soft Rains.".