Feminists are made, not born. So how are they made? According to public intellectual bell hooks, it is through choice and action. Feminists are not super-humans that are immune to the influences and attitudes of society; everyone is socialized into a sexist culture, whether or not they are aware of it. Feminists are simply those people who choose to think critically about the way they have been socialized and who choose to work with others to challenge that culture. In her most famous work Feminism is for Everybody, hooks defines feminism as “a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression.” The clarity of this definition has helped serve the feminist community’s attempt to recognize the diversity of the movement while still maintaining unity in purpose. As a public intellectual, bell hooks concentrates on the availability and accessibility of her message, hoping that her message will help dispel commonly held misconceptions about feminism and its implications. Her concern to make the message accessible led hooks to think deeply about education. For hooks, the spread of knowledge is key to creating a society where a true sense of liberty can be maintained.
Though she was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1952 as Gloria Jean Watkins, all of her works have been published under her pseudonym of bell hooks. Often asked about the unique choice, hooks explains that the name honors both her mother as well as her grandmother, two strong women in her life who served as great influences on her life. Perhaps most telling of her character is her rationale behind the choice to use a pen name: she has a prominent desire to separate the substance of her message from who she is as a person, which is also why she has chosen to leave the name in lowercase. Hooks wanted her ideas to take precedence over whatever recognition she got with simply her name. This choice about the spelling of her pen name reflects the unconventionality that has set hooks apart from other feminist thinkers and social activists of her time.
bell hooks often says that being raised in a household full of strong black women was one of the most powerful influences she had while she was growing up. From early in her youth, she recognized that her race affected the way others saw her and constrained the opportunities available to her. Attending a segregated public school, hooks was taught by mostly single black women, who in addition to teaching regular school subjects also emphasized the need for children of color to take pride in themselves. However, in the late 1960s, Kentucky schools became desegregated and hooks was forced to make the transition to being taught by mostly white teachers while being surrounded by white students. Though as a young girl hooks was expected to be “quiet and well-behaved,” she soon learned that only by speaking up could she be taken seriously. So, she began to write. Initially poetry, then essays addressing the problems she faced with being both black and a woman. As she grew up, hooks learned that “talking back” was the only way to begin fighting sexism and racism. Appropriately, she published a volume of her essays entitled “Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black” in 1988. Once she found her voice, it was soon apparent that hooks was not going to allow anyone to silence her.
Moved by the opportunities education brings, after graduating from high school hooks aspired to become an educator herself. She earned her B.A. in English at Stanford University and continued on to obtain her M.A. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the same subject. In 1983, she completed her doctorate in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz after writing her dissertation on author Toni Morrison. In her teaching positions, hooks felt that she was doing her most important work, seeing education as a means to begin to actively change the problems in society. After briefly teaching at Santa Cruz, she was eventually hired by Yale University where she was given the opportunity to teach African American studies. Evident in her classes was her message of community and the sense of love that can develop from communion with others when united against a cause. For hooks, developing these communities began in schools and education. Seeing her students as agents of change, she strove to be the catalyst that would help them participate in solving the problems they discussed in the classroom.
While many public intellectuals and other scholars tend to underestimate the capacity of their audience to understand the depth of their topic, hooks instead seeks to elevate her readers and audiences rather than talk down to them. She shows her commitment to accessibility by giving lectures at different venues across the United States, writing for popular and mainstream magazines and producing documentaries. In a discussion with the Media Education Foundation, hooks stresses the significance of pop culture by saying “popular culture is where the pedagogy is; it is where the learning is.” In her role as an educator, hooks noticed that her students had difficulty making different groups’ experiences relevant to their own. However, when using popular movies, television shows, and other media that the students were familiar with, they were able to better understand the diversity hooks tries to point out to them. hooks’ ability to move within popular culture while still maintaining the integrity of her feminist worldview is impressive, and it allows her to reach audiences outside of academia. hooks’ goal in reaching out is eminently practical: since her solutions to the problems of racism, classism and sexism stress the importance of forming loving communities, hooks actively participates in the effort to create such communities. We see this interest as a thread running through her work, especially in her work on education, to be discussed later.
bell hooks made her debut as a prominent feminist writer with two soon-to-be famous works, Feminist Theory and Ain’t I a Woman, both published in 1984. These books reflect her struggle to find her place as a black woman within the feminist movement. Second wave feminism, which emerged in the 1970s, is notorious in promoting solely the interests of upper-class, white women while consistently ignoring the voices and experiences of black women. In an attempt to unify feminism, second wave feminists often excluded different groups of women, failing to listen to their own experiences. For hooks, this exclusion affected her deeply, leading her to see the feminist movement of her time as a largely white movement that did not work to improve the position of black or poor women. Many women of color chose not to identify with a movement that did not seek to help them, but hooks decided differently and she explains in Ain’t I a Woman: “It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term “feminism,” to focus on the fact that to be “feminist” in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination and oppression.” In this piece, hooks argues that the racism and sexism in society resulted in black women being forced to the lowest level of society. Through these messages, hooks emerged as a strong voice that advocated not for the alteration of existing hierarchies and power structures, but for overturning the hierarchical system as a whole.
One of hooks’ primary objectives as she began to write for larger audiences was to create a sort of “primer” for feminism - a straightforward and clear introduction that anyone could pick up in order to understand the basic feminist principles and philosophies. Such a primary was needed because the general public’s conception of feminism is usually based on stereotypes, rather than on the words of legitimate feminist leaders and women at the grassroots. She achieved this goal with one of her most famous publications Feminism is for Everybody in 2000. Hoping to de-stigmatize the term “feminist,” hooks emphasizes that the accomplishments of feminism have been largely positive. Without its efforts in the 1970s, many women would not be where they are today: opportunities in education, the workforce, reproductive rights, divorce laws, rape laws, and discrimination being important accomplishments of the feminist movement. Working with her established definition of feminism, it is clearly intended to be inclusive to many different race, class and gender experiences as well as emphasize the important of political commitment and activism. This can be read not necessarily as a call to vigorous public involvement, but more importantly living according to one’s principles in whatever ways are accessible to us.
It would be difficult to find a public intellectual or other important thinker whose opinions and works were not influenced by someone who came before them. bell hooks is no exception. Her pedagogical philosophy was profoundly influenced by Brazil’s Paulo Freire, a philosopher and educational thinker of the twentieth century. Both Freire and hooks point out the problematic nature of the education system in the United States today, most importantly, the lack of attention to developing students’ critical thinking. While Freire talks about a “banking” concept of education in which memory is rewarded over independent thinking, hooks also talks about how much of education today is simply repeating facts, not encouraging students to think for themselves. In her article “Teaching Critical Thinking”, hooks describes how the education system enforces conformity in its narrow sense of knowledge: “By the time most students enter college classrooms, they have come to dread thinking. Those students who do not dread thinking often come to class assuming thinking will not be necessary, that all they will need to do is consume information and regurgitate it at appropriate moments.” Essentially, students are rewarded for repeating and generally coming to believe the narrow scope of what they are taught in schools, without questioning its credit or its effectiveness. What hooks and Freire agree on is that learning is a critical process, and it necessary that students be able to ask questions, criticize others’ opinions, reflect on their own assumptions, and apply the theories they learn into practice to be active learners. Without active learning, hooks concludes, oppression will remain in place because there will be no knowledge to encourage the necessary change.
Interestingly enough, what makes hooks stand out as a public intellectual is also what her critics deem as weaknesses. In reading any of hooks’ works, it is evident that most of her language could be understood without an Ivy League education or prior knowledge of the subject; this accessibility large part of what attracts her audience. In her writings, hooks doesn’t provide a lot of scholarly references, as she most often cites herself instead of other thinkers. Critics see this as a failed opportunity to incorporate other foundational feminist thinkers or ideas in her introductions to feminism. Essentially, what is being given to the readers is an account heavily influences by hooks’ own opinions and experiences, instead of a more diverse account of feminist ideologies. However, many argue that this straightforward approach is what makes hooks so influential, as she does not overwhelm her readers with so much different information. In addition to popularizing feminist ideas, hooks has been significant to the movement in another important way. She was never afraid to bring black women into discussions and point out how different their experiences are. Black women, hooks points out, face not only issues of inequality but diversity on top of it. Paving the way for third-wave feminism, bell hooks was not deterring from the exclusion in the feminist movement but instead sought to correct it and even encourage diversity.
As a feminist and public intellectual, bell hooks has somewhat faded from her place of prominence as other young feminists have joined and shaped the movement. Nevertheless, hooks’ work on three main areas of concern – race, media, and education – remain important touchstones in feminism today, particularly among black feminists. Fighting for space in a predominantly white movement, bell hooks was revolutionary for her discussion of race and her work to fight the systematic oppression of people of color. Her critical eye toward the media contributed to feminists’ abiding interest in analyzing how popular culture creates and reinforces social norms surrounding race, gender, and class. Inspired by her love of learning, she became a teacher to encourage her students to look critically at the world around them and know they were capable of making a difference. Looking back, we can see that once the young bell hooks realized that, regardless of Jim Crow racism, she had the power to write and speak, she never stopped using her voice. Her refusal to back down, even in the face of criticism or contempt, makes her an important role model in the continuing fight against sexist oppression.
Sources/Links:
bell hooks - Notable Biographies
Rhetoricat: bell hooks and the Challenges of Teaching Higher Education
Infed - bell hooks on education
University of Miami Education: Contemporary Thinkers, bell hooks
