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bell hooks (born September 25, 1952), born Gloria Jean Watkins, is an internationally recognized African American intellectual and social activist. Hooks focuses on the interconnectivity of race, class, and gender and their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and domination. She has published over thirty books and numerous scholarly and mainstream articles, appeared in several documentary films, and participated in various public lectures. Primarily through a black female perspective, hooks addresses race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism.

Early life

bell hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins on September 25 1952 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. She grew up in a working class family with five sisters and one brother. hooks' father, Veodis Watkins, was a custodian, and her mother, Rosa Bell Watkins, was a homemaker.

Evidence of racism, classism, and sexism in hooks' childhood is a recurrent theme in her writing and is the foundation for her current fight against systems of oppression. Despite laws against racial discrimination, hooks was raised in a racially segregated town. The predominantly black Southern community was laden with poverty, racism, and sexism. As well, hooks came from an abusive family where strict gender roles were enforced. hooks experienced the marginalization of her Black community, particularly the black women, and found solace in reading and writing.

In her early years, hooks attended an all-black educational institution where she felt a sense of community and black empowerment. When she moved to an interracial institution later in her youth, racism was very evident. The teachers and students were predominantly white and the curriculum represented white supremacist ideologies. hooks realized that despite the abolishment of racial apartheid, the social mores apartheid represented were sustained by white-centered institutions. hooks’ negative experience with the education system inspired her to promote literacy and a holistic approach to learning.

After graduating from Crispus Attucks High School in Hopkinsville, hooks pursued higher education. She received her B.A. in English from Stanford University in 1973 and her M.A. in the same subject from the University of Wisconsin in 1976. In 1983, after several years teaching and writing, hooks completed her doctorate from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a dissertation on African American author Toni Morrison.

Career

After completing her Ph.D. in 1983, hooks began her teaching career as an English professor and senior lecturer in Ethnic Studies at the University of Southern California. During her three year term, hooks published her first work, a chapbook of poems titled And There We Wept (1978). The publication of this work is the first time she wrote under the her adopted name, bell hooks. The name honors her great grandmother, whose name she took, and is spelled in lower-case letters to demonstrate that the content of hooks' work is more important than her name.

hooks taught at several institutions in the early 80s, including the University of California, Santa Cruz and San Francisco State University, and published her first major work in 1981. Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism is hooks’s first noted contribution to modern feminist thought. The book was named “One of the twenty most influential women’s books in the last 20 years” by Publishers Weekly in 1992 and was said to have “changed the direction of feminist theory forever and helped establish the emerging field of black women's studies” (UCSB).

Ain’t I a Woman? examines several themes that recur in hooks’ later work. Namely, the history and impact of sexism and racism on black women and the consequential devaluation of black womanhood; the role of the media, the education system, and the white supremacist patriarchal capitalist systems in the marginalization of black women; and the displacement of black women and the disregard for issues of race, class, and gender within feminism.

Since the publication of Ain’t I a Woman?, hooks has become a notable Leftist political thinker and cultural critic. Hooks tries to reach a broad audience by presenting her work in a variety of media and using writing and speaking styles that are audience-specific. As well as writing books, hooks publishes numerous articles in scholarly journals and mainstream magazines, lectures at widely accessible venues, and appears in various documentary films.

hooks has published over thirty books, ranging in topics from black men and masculinity to self-help, engaged pedagogy to personal memoir, and sexuality to the politics of visual culture. A theme in hooks’s most recent writing is the ability of community and love to overcome race, class, and gender. In three conventional books and four children's books, she tries to demonstrate that communication and literacy (the ability to read, write, and think critically)is the key to developing healthy communities and relationships that are not marred by race, class, or gender.

While publishing on average a book a year, hooks has continued to teach at the college and university level. She teaches because the type of writing she does, “dissident” writing, is not very profitable and cannot provide her with a sustainable income (South End Press Collective). As well, hooks wants to challenge the traditional education system that she believes reinforces white supremacist capitalist patriarchal values. Hooks has been a Professor of African and Afro-American Studies and English at Yale University, an Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and American Literature at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, and a Distinguished Lecturer of English Literature at the City College of New York.

In 2004 hooks joined the faculty of Berea College in Berea, Kentucky as Distinguished Professor in Residence*. Here she participates in a weekly feminist discussion group, “Monday Night Feminism,” a luncheon lecture series, “Peanut Butter and Gender” and a seminar, “Building Beloved Community: The Practice of Impartial Love.” While teaching, hooks continues to lecture at several special events and is expected to publish three books in 2006 and 2007.

Influences

hooks' work is influenced by a variety of people, from abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth, whose speech Ain't I a Woman? inspired hooks's first major work, to Brazillian educator Paulo Freire, whose persectives on education hooks embraces in her theory of engaged pedagogy. Other notable influences on hooks are theologian Gustavo Gutierrez, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, writer James Baldwin, Black Nationalist leader Malcolm X, and leader of the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Awards and nominations

  • Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics: The American Book Awards/ Before Columbus Foundation Award (1991)
  • Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism: “One of the twenty most influential women’s books in the last 20 years” by Publishers Weekly (1992)
  • bell hooks: the Writer’s Award from the Lila Wallace- Reader’s Digest Fund (1994)
  • Happy to Be Nappy: NAACP Image Award nominee (2001)
  • Homemade Love: The Bank Street College Children's Book of the Year (2002)
  • Salvation: Black People and Love: Hurston Wright Legacy Award nominee (2002)
  • bell hooks: Utne Reader’s “100 Visionaries Who Could Change Your Life”
  • bell hooks: The Atlantic Monthly's “One of our nation’s leading public intellectuals”

Selected bibliography

  • Ain't I a Woman?: Black women and feminism (1981) ISBN 089608129X
  • Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984) ISBN 0896086143
  • Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989) ISBN 0921284098
  • Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990) ISBN 0921284349
  • Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (1991) (with Cornel West) ISBN 0896084140
  • Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992) ISBN 0896084337
  • Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-recovery (1993) ISBN 1896357997
  • Teaching to Transgress: Education As the Practice of Freedom (1994)ISBN 0415908086
  • Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (1994) ISBN 0415908116
  • Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (1995) ISBN 1565842634
  • Killing Rage: Ending Racism (1995) ISBN 0805050272
  • Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (1996) ISBN 0805055126
  • Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies (1996)
  • Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life (1997) ISBN 0805057226
  • Happy to be Nappy (1999) ISBN 0786804270
  • Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work (1999) ISBN 0805059105
  • All About Love: New Visions(2000) ISBN 0060959479
  • Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2000) ISBN 0896086291
  • Where We Stand: Class Matters (2000)
  • Salvation: Black People and Love (2001) ISBN 0060959495
  • Communion: The Female Search for Love (2002) ISBN 0060938293
  • Homemade Love (2002) ISBN 0786806435
  • Be Boy Buzz (2002) ISBN 0786808144
  • Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-esteem (2003) ISBN 074345605X
  • The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (2003) ISBN 0743456076
  • Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003) ISBN 0415968178
  • We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (2004) ISBN 0415969263
  • Skin Again (2004) ISBN 078680825X
  • Space (2004) ISBN 041596816X
  • Soul Sister: Women, Friendship, and Fulfillment (2005) ISBN 0896087352
  • Witness (2006) ISBN 089608759X

Film appearances

  • Black Is, Black Ain't (1994)
  • Give a Damn Again (1995)
  • Cultural Criticism and Transformation (1997)
  • My Feminism (1997)
  • I am a Man: Black masculinity in America (2004)
  • Voices of Power (1999)
  • Baadasssss Cinema (2002)
  • Writing About a Revolution: A talk (2004)
  • Happy to Be Nappy and other stories of me (2004)
  • Is Feminism Dead? (2004)

References

  • Florence, Namulundah. bell hooks' Engaged Pedagogy. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1998. ISBN 0897895649
  • Leitch et al, eds. “bell hooks.” ''The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. 2475-2484. ISBN 0393974294
  • South End Press Collective, eds. “Critical Consciousness for Political Resistance”Talking About a Revolution.Cambridge: South End Press, 1998. 39-52. ISBN 0896085872
  • Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto, ed. Other Sisterhoods: Literary Theory and U.S. Women of Color. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998. ISBN 0252023617
  • Wallace, Michelle. Black Popular Culture. New York: The New Press, 1998. ISBN 1565844599

External links

1952 births | African American philosophers | African American writers | Feminist scholars | Living people | University of California, Santa Cruz alumni

Bell hooks | Μπελλ χουκς | Bell hooks

 

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