JOURNEY OF A GROUNDBREAKING FEMINIST: bell hooks
DENIZ AKKAYA
Today, is a truly sad day. We’ve lost a pioneering poet, influential critic and a feminist scholar Gloria Jean Watkins – known as bell hooks.
The prolific and trailblazing author, poet, feminist, cultural critic and professor bell hooks died Wednesday at age 69. Her death was first announced by her niece, Ebony Motley, who said that she had died at home surrounded by family and friends. No cause of death was reported, but Berea College in Kentucky, where hooks had taught since 2004, said in a news release that she had died after an extended illness.
Gloria grew up in segregated Kentucky in the 1950s and ‘60s. The daughter of a janitor and a maid, Gloria left home to attend Stanford University, where she got herself an English degree. Then she moved on to get her Ph.D. and then authored more than 30 works under her pen name, bell hooks, which is taken from her great-grandmother. hooks deliberately styled her own name with lower case letters to focus attention on her message rather than herself. She said she wanted readers to focus on the “substance of books, not who I am”.
Starting in the 1970s, hooks published more than 40 books that helped shape popular and academic discourse. Her notable works included Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center and All About Love: New Visions. Rejecting the isolation of feminism, civil rights and economics into separate fields, she was a believer in community and connectivity and how racism, sexism and economic disparity reinforced each other. Among her most famous expressions was her definition of feminism, which she called “a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression.” Her eclectic work spans on such a broad spectrum, ranging from essays and poetry to children’s books. She wrote regularly about feminism, racism, culture, capitalism, politics, gender roles, love, and spirituality.
hooks studied how stereotypes influence everything from movies which she calls “the oppositional gaze” to love, to everyday life. She also documented at length the collective identity and past of Black people in rural Kentucky, a part of the state often depicted as largely white and homogeneous. hooks was considered a trailblazer within the intersectional feminism movement, in particular, she wrote about how a person’s race, gender and social class were interconnected. “We [cannot] see gains for feminism distinct and separate from other struggles,” she once said.
In a 2000 interview with All Things Considered, hooks spoke about the life-changing power of love — that is, the act of loving and how love is far broader than romantic sentiment. “I’m talking about a love that is transformative, that challenges us in both our private and our civic lives,” she said. “I’m so moved often when I think of the civil rights movement, because I see it as a great movement for social justice that was rooted in love and that politicized the notion of love, that said: Real love will change you.”
She went on: “Everywhere I go, people want to feel more connected. They want to feel more connected to their neighbors. They want to feel more connected to the world. And when we learn that through love we can have that connection, we can see the stranger as ourselves. And I think that it would be absolutely fantastic to have that sense of ‘Let’s return to kind of a utopian focus on love, not unlike the sort of hippie focus on love.’ Because I always say to people, you know, the ’60s’ focus on love had its stupid sentimental dimensions, but then it had these life-transforming dimensions. When I think of the love of justice that led three young people, two Jews and one African American Christian, to go to the South and fight for justice and give their lives — Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner — I think that’s a quality of love that’s awesome. … I tell this to young people, you know, that we can love in a deep and profound way that transforms the political world in which we live in.”
There will not be another bell hooks, an incredible life and and an enormous loss… she has shaped several generations of thinkers and of people who are members of communities. And so let’s hope that, at this moment, it becomes a time for us to reflect on how much she helped us think, how much she helped us grow, right, and how she pushed the world closer to justice. Let’s remember we are all daughters of her thought.
Source: https://www.npr.org.
