best bell hooks essays

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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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The Best of bell hooks: Life, Writings, Quotes, and Books

Renowned author, feminist theorist, and cultural critic bell hooks passed away on Dec. 15 at the age of 69. Read about her remarkable life and and work, alongside a selection of pieces by and conversations with hooks published in the pages of Lion’s Roar.

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When we drop fear, we can draw nearer to people, we can draw nearer to the earth, we can draw nearer to all the heavenly creatures that surround us. —bell hooks

Writer, feminist theorist, and cultural critic bell hooks has played a vital role in twenty-first-century activism. Her expansive life’s work of writing and lecturing has explored the historical function of race and gender in America.

hooks’ writing is deeply personal and educational, drawing on her own painful experiences of racism and sexism in an effort to educate us on how to combat them. hooks also plays a part in the Buddhist community, drawing inspiration from Buddhist practice in her life and her work. Her conversations with a number of important Buddhist leaders have been published on Lion’s Roar , along with her reflections on spirituality, race, feminism, and life.

Read on to learn more about bell hooks’ life and work, and to read some favorite pieces by and conversations with her.

The life of bell hooks

Early life and education.

bell hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins in the fall of 1952 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky to a family of seven children. As a child, she enjoyed writing poetry, and developed a reverence for nature in the Kentucky hills, a landscape she has called a place of “magic and possibility.” Growing up in the south during the 1950s, hooks began her education in racially segregated schools. When schools in the south became desegregated in the 1960s, hooks faced painful challenges among a predominantly white staff and student population. These would inspire and shape her life’s work fighting sexism and racism to come.

After graduating high school, hooks studied at Stanford University, receiving a B.A. in English in 1973. It was at Stanford, in her Women’s Studies classes, that hooks began to notice a significant absence of black women from feminist literature. She began the writing of her book Ain’t I A Woman during her English studies, and also worked as a telephone operator. In 1976, she earned her M.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and later received her doctorate in literature from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1983.

Writing and Career

In 1976, hooks began teaching as an English professor and lecturer in Ethnic Studies at the University of Southern California. During this time, she published a book of poems,  And There We Wept , under the pen name “bell hooks” — her great-grandmother’s name, and a woman who, hooks has said, was known for speaking her mind. hooks chose not to capitalize any letters in her first and last name to emphasize focus on her message, and not herself or her identity.

hooks went on to teach at several post-secondary institutions, and in 1981, published Ain’t I A Woman , which examined the history of black women’s involvement in feminism, focusing on the nature of black womanhood, the civil rights movement, and the historical impact of sexism towards Black women during slavery. Ain’t I A Woman went on to gain worldwide recognition as an important contribution to the feminist movement, and is still a popular work studied in many academic courses.

To date, hooks has published more than thirty books, including four children’s books, exploring topics of gender, race, class, spirituality, and their various intersections. In 2014, she founded the bell hooks Institute , in Berea, Kentucky, which celebrates and documents her life and work, and aims to “bring together academics with local community members to study, learn, and engage in critical dialogue.” Visitors to the Institute are able to explore artifacts, images, and manuscripts written and talked about in her work.

Today, hooks continues to write and lecture to an ever-growing audience. In recent years, she has undertaken three scholar-in-residences at The New School in New York City, where she has engaged in pubic dialogues with other influential figures such as Gloria Steinem and Laurie Anderson. Last year, hooks sat down with actress Emma Watson for an inspiring conversation on feminism for Paper Magazine .

bell hooks and Buddhism

bell hooks was exposed to Buddhism due to her love and exploration of Beat poetry — most notably Beat poets Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder. At the age of 18, she met Snyder, a Zen practitioner, who invited her to the Ring of Bone Zendo in Nevada City, California, for a May Day celebration. She has engaged in various forms of what she calls a “Buddhist Christian practice” ever since.

hooks speaks and writes of her spirituality often, and has met in conversation with many influential Buddhist teachers, including Thich Nhat Hanh , Pema Chödrön , and Sharon Salzberg . In a 2015 interview with The New York Times , philosopher George Yancy asked hooks “How are your Buddhist practices and your feminist practices mutually reinforcing?” She responded:

Well, I would have to say my Buddhist Christian practice challenges me, as does feminism. Buddhism continues to inspire me because there is such an emphasis on practice. What are you doing? Right livelihood, right action. We are back to that self-interrogation that is so crucial. It’s funny that you would link Buddhism and feminism, because I think one of the things that I’m grappling with at this stage of my life is how much of the core grounding in ethical-spiritual values has been the solid ground on which I stood. That ground is from both Buddhism and Christianity, and then feminism that helped me as a young woman to find and appreciate that ground…

Feminism does not ground me. It is the discipline that comes from spiritual practice that is the foundation of my life. If we talk about what a disciplined writer I have been and hope to continue to be, that discipline starts with a spiritual practice. It’s just every day, every day, every day.

bell hooks in Conversation

Strike! Rise! Dance! – bell hooks & Eve Ensler

“Where does the trust come between dominator and dominated? Between those who have privilege and those who don’t have privilege? Trust is part of what humanizes the dehumanizing relationship, because trust grows and takes place in the context of mutuality. How do we get that when we have profound differences and separations?”

Eve Ensler and bell hooks discuss fighting domination and finding love.

Building a Community of Love: bell hooks and Thich Nhat Hanh

“In our own Buddhist sangha, community is the core of everything. The sangha is a community where there should be harmony and peace and understanding. That is something created by our daily life together. If love is there in the community, if we’ve been nourished by the harmony in the community, then we will never move away from love.”

bell hooks meets with Thich Nhat Hanh to ask him the question “How do we build a community of love?”

Pema Chödrön & bell hooks on cultivating openness when life falls apart

“The source of all wakefulness, the source of all kindness and compassion, the source of all wisdom, is in each second of time. Anything that has us looking ahead is missing the point.”

In this conversation from 1997, bell hooks talks to Pema Chödrön about how to open your heart to life’s most difficult challenges.

“There’s No Place to Go But Up” — bell hooks and Maya Angelou in conversation

“In my work I constantly say, this is how I fell and this is how I was able to rise. It may be important that you fall. Life is not over. Just don’t let defeat defeat you. See where you are, and then forgive yourself, and get up.”

A classic 1998 conversation between Maya Angelou and bell hooks, moderated by Lion’s Roar editor-in-chief Melvin McLeod.

bell hooks on Sex, Love, and Feminism

Toward a worldwide culture of love.

“Imagine all that would change for the better if every community in our nation had a center (a sangha) that would focus on the practice of love, of loving-kindness.”

The practice of love, says bell hooks, is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination. She traces her thirty-year meditation on love, power, and Buddhism, and concludes it is only love that transforms our personal relationships and heals the wounds of oppression.

Ain’t She Still a Woman?

“It is easier for mainstream society to support the idea of benevolent black male domination in family life than to support the cultural revolutions that would ensure an end to race, gender and class exploitation.”

Increasingly, patriarchy is offered as the solution to the crisis black people face. Black women face a culture where practically everyone wants us to stay in our place.

When Men Were Men

“On one hand it’s amazing how much sexist thinking has been challenged and has changed. And it’s equally troubling that with all these revolutions in thought and action, patriarchal thinking remains intact.”

The message is, says bell hooks, that it’s fine for women to stray from sexist roles and play around with life on the other side, as long as we come back to our senses and stay happily-ever-after in our place.

Penis Passion

“When we finally gave ourselves permission to say whatever we wanted to say about the male body—about male sexuality—we were either silent or merely echoed narratives that were already in place.

bell hooks argues that our erotic lives are enhanced when men and women can celebrate the penis in ways that don’t uphold macho stereotypes.

bell hooks on Life and Faith

Voices and visions.

“When the spirit moves into writing, shaping its direction, that is a moment of pure mystery. It is a visitation of the sacred that I cannot call forth at will.”

bell hooks on the mystery of what calls her to write.

A Beacon of Light: bell hooks on Thich Nhat Hanh

“When I think of Thay now, I am amazed by his awesome gentleness of spirit. Through the years, it’s always been clear that he’s a teacher of tremendous integrity; there has been constant congruence between what he thinks, says, and does.”

The leading cultural critic and thinker bell hooks shares what Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh means to people of color.

When the Spirit Moves You

““Everywhere I turned in nature I could see and feel the mystery — the wonder of that which could not be accounted for by human reason.”

bell hooks shares her experiences of encountering the divine in nature and the written word.

Design: A Happening Life

“When life is happening, design has meaning, and every design we encounter strengthens our recognition of the value of being alive, of being able to experience joy and peace.”

bell hooks Quotes

Living simply makes loving simple..

There is no change without contemplation. The whole image of Buddha under the Bodhi tree says here is an action taking place that may not appear to be a meaningful action.

A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. in the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. this is the most precious gift true love offers – the experience of knowing we always belong., it’s in the act of having to do things that you don’t want to that you learn something about moving past the self. past the ego., books by bell hooks, in the temple of love: the female buddha.

bad baby bell books In the Temple of Love is a collection of poetry by bell hooks. hooks draws on Buddhist themes of compassion, and puts a particular focus on the female bodhisttva, Tara on the 30 poems in this collection.

Belonging: A Culture of Place

“What does it mean to call a place home? How do we create community? When can we say that we truly belong?” asks bell hooks in Belonging . This book follows hooks’ life journey, and what she learned moving from place to place, from country to city, and finally landing back home in Kentucky. hooks explores the “geography of the heart,” touching on issues of race, gender, class, and the roles they play in our sense of community and belonging. hooks takes the reader back to her childhood in the Kentucky hills, where she first developed a deep love of nature, and shows the important role geography can play in developing our spiritual connections and worldviews.

All About Love: New Visions

Harper Perennial

In All About Love , hooks draws from personal experience, and explores the concept and meaning of love through a psychological and philosophical view. She looks closely at the difference between love as a noun, and a verb, examining the flawed idea of love society has created. Drawing on her own childhood and life’s experience, as well as words from influential figures throughout history, hooks investigates the question “What is love?” She unpacks the meaning of love in modern American life, urging us to let go of our obsessions with power and domination in order to truly awaken to love.

Salvation: Black People and Love

Here, hooks looks at love in African American communities, urging that we see love as a force for change. She looks at love through both a religious and social lens, again drawing on personal experience, and reflecting on the messages on love displayed in literature, film, and music. hooks also explores cultivating self-love as an African American woman as well as learning to love black masculinity, and embracing heterosexual love. When it comes to seeking justice, and healing historical and modern wounds in the world, and African American communities, “Love,” hooks concludes, “is our hope and salvation.”

The Will to Change: Men, masculinity, and love

In The Will to Change , bell hooks explores men’s most intimate questions about love, exploring the skewed way patriarchal society has taught men to know love, and know themselves. Though well-known for her feminist thinking, hooks works to include men in the discussion, as she believes men must be involved in feminist resistance. The Will to Change offers a feminist focus on men, doing away with radical feminist labeling of “all men as oppressors and all women as victims.” Many men, says hooks, are afraid to change, and have not been taught how to be in touch with their own feelings — The Will to Change offers a deeply intelligent roadmap to doing just that.

Lion’ s Roar

10 Powerful bell hooks Works on the Intersectionality of Race and Feminism

The iconic writer passed away on December 15, 2021 at age 69.

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After receiving her bachelor’s at Stanford and going on to earn a doctorate at the University of California, hooks brought her unyielding and honest perspective to the world of feminist literature. From her debut, Ain't I a Woman , to the celebrated All About Love , hooks’s goal was always to enlighten. Perhaps one of her most apt quotes was this one, from 1999’s Remembered Rapture : “No Black woman writer in this culture can write ‘too much.’ Indeed, no woman writer can write ‘too much’... No woman has ever written enough.”

A native of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, hooks taught at Berea College for over 15 years. She was also the founder of the bell hooks Institute , which “celebrates, honors, and documents the life and work” of its namesake. Check out these ten books by the legendary author.

The Will to Change (2004)

In this acclaimed work, hooks speaks to men of all ages, ethnicities, and sexual identities to address their pressing questions about love and masculinity.

Where We Stand (2000)

In this unflinching meditation, hooks returns to her roots to analyze the intersectionality of class and race and how society can break free of systemic boundaries. 

Communion (2002)

Communion  serves as a heartfelt address to women, guiding them to search for and choose love as a way to set out on the path to ultimate freedom.

All About Love (2000)

In what is arguably hooks's most popular work, the scholar seeks to clarify the true definition of love in our society. Here she makes the argument that only love can heal social divisions and enable us to come together as a true community. 

Feminism Is for Everybody (2000)

In this brief but compelling work, hooks makes the case that feminism is a value all should embrace. She acknowledges that initially the movement was insular, and critiques the forces that made it so, while introducing how communities can utilize feminism's precepts to move forward. 

Bone Black (1996)

As a memoir,  Bone Black  is a revealing look into hooks's life, exploring her journey to womanhood and through her career as a writer in an unequal society.

Killing Rage (1995)

Written from the perspective of feminists and Black Americans,  Killing Rage  is a book of 23 essays that address the reality of systemic racism in the United States. 

Teaching to Transgress (1994)

Here, Hooks proposes that all teachers should strive to encourage their students to reject gender, race, and class divides.

Feminist Theory (1984)

Considered radical when it was first published in 1984, hooks's  Feminist Theory  boldly critiqued the lack of intersectionality in the feminist movement, providing a blueprint for unity in the fight for gender equality.  

Ain't I a Woman (1981)

This classic 1981 work of feminist scholarship remains essential for an understanding of what it is to be a Black woman in America. 

McKenzie Jean-Philippe is the editorial assistant at OprahMag.com covering pop culture, TV, movies, celebrity, and lifestyle. She loves a great Oprah viral moment and all things Netflix—but come summertime, Big Brother has her heart. On a day off you'll find her curled up with a new juicy romance novel.

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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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Where to Start with bell hooks

"bell hooks"  by  Kevin Andre Elliott  is licensed under 

For nearly 50 years, bell hooks was an influential thinker, theorist, and cultural critic. Her first major work,  Ain't I A Woman? Black Women and Feminism , was written while she was still an undergraduate student at Stanford University. Her work addresses diverse issues: race, class, gender, and the intersections thereof; systemic oppression and subjugation and the ways in which education can both perpetuate and defy them. It is both impassioned and scholarly. hooks embraces a colloquial style of writing which draws from various oral traditions. She prefered that her name be in all lowercase letters because what is most important is the "substance of books, not who I am” ( The Sandspur  paper, Rollins College).

Her work has embodied intersectionality for much longer than it has been a buzzword, and in fact, her works have helped folks understand what it means. 

Here are a few books that offer a snapshot of hooks as a lover, a writer, a teacher, a thinker, a gender theorist, and a critic.

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Presenting radical new ways to think about love, the acclaimed cultural critic, feminist, and author examines the role of love in our personal and professional lives and how it can be used to end struggles between individuals, communities, and societies.

A favorite personal moment was when I was reading this book in an airport, and I looked across the aisle at the gate, only to see someone else reading the same red copy of the book. This one has hit the mainstream, without a doubt.

Wounds of Passion

An intelligent, emotional glimpse into the author's transition into womanhood describes leaving Kentucky to pursue her dreams at Stanford and becoming a successful writer, and details her involvement with feminism, the publication of her first book, and other personal events.

Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom

This book shaped a new generation of educators. Hooks teaches students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom, which is, for hooks, the teacher's most important goal. She speaks to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? What do we do about teachers who do not want to teach, and students who do not want to learn? How should we deal with racism and sexism in the classroom? Full of passion and politics, Teaching to Transgress combines a practical knowledge of the classroom with a deeply felt connection to the world of emotions and feelings.

Feminism Is For Everybody

A short, accessible primer. What is feminism? hooks explores the nature of feminism and its positive promise to eliminate sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. With her characteristic clarity and directness, hooks encourages readers to see how feminism can touch and change their lives—to see that feminism is for everybody.

Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery

In this book, bell hooks reflects on the ways in which the emotional health of black women has been and continues to be impacted by sexism and racism. Desiring to create a context where black females could both work on their individual efforts for self-actualization while remaining connected to a larger world of collective struggle, hooks articulates the link between self-recovery and political resistance. Both an expression of the joy of self-healing and the need to be ever vigilant in the struggle for equality, Sisters of the Yam continues to speak to the experience of black womanhood.

The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

In a thought-provoking social and cultural analysis, hooks explores the world of masculinity and maleness to address some of men's most common concerns, including a fear of intimacy and the loss of their patriarchal place in society. She argues that an emotionally rewarding inner life holds the key to successful intimate relationships.

Art on My Mind: Visual Politics

In this book, hooks responds to the ongoing dialogues about producing, exhibiting, and criticizing art and aesthetics in an art world increasingly concerned with identity politics. Always concerned with the liberatory black struggle, hooks positions her writings on visual politics within the ever-present question of how art can be an empowering and revolutionary force within the black community.

Reading Pathways: Where to Begin With bell hooks Books

Brandie DeRusha

With her MA in English from Rutgers University-Camden, Brandie spends her days chasing around her toddlers and writing. She loves to pair wine with her reading; preferably a Brontë, or an Elliot, or a Woolf novel. Depending on the mood. She currently lives in Florida with her husband, two kids and furry beast.

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I was introduced to the work of bell hooks like most of us, in college; and like some of us, I instantly fell in love with her writing. Of course, it took me a while to actually read one of bell hooks’s books for class. But her whisperings were there. As an English major, her work on race, gender, and class was critical in my education—especially as we discussed the difficult topics of Civil War–era (and beyond) Black writers. Reading hooks’s writing has become essential in my anti-racist learning. She writes with passion, ferocity, pain at the injustices, but mostly love. Love for her family, for herself; love for her culture, for her color, love for all of the people who don’t deserve her writing, but read anyway so we can see a glimpse of what could be. Her writing is downright brave.

“I will not have my life narrowed down. I will not bow down to somebody else’s whim or to someone else’s ignorance.” —bell hooks 

Who is bell hooks?

bell hooks was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky as Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952. She adopted her pen name from her great grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. hooks chooses not to capitalize her name in part to honor her grandmother, and so that her words speak for themselves and not for her name. bell hooks received her BA in English from Stanford University, MA from University of Wisconsin Madison, and finally her PhD from the University of California Santa Cruz; she even wrote her dissertation on Toni Morrison. I mean come on. (heart eyes all around). Her first major book, “Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism” was completed during her undergrad studies and propelled her into the critical spotlight as a voice for marginalized women within feminism.

Since then, she has also spoken out about how race and class play a role in our lives in a white capitalist patriarchal society. Her book topics range from Black Masculinity, the importance of community, teaching diverse children, intersectional feminism . hooks also writes about the importance of literacy in children, believing that the ability to read, write, and think critically are the key to building communities where people can happily coexist without the structural race, gender, and class barrier. In 2014 she founded the bell hooks Institute in Berea Kentucky, to bring cultural critics together and dialogue about how we might achieve these goals. You can learn more at www.bellhooksinstitute.com

Now let’s start reading:

Where to Begin with bell hooks Books

Ain’t i a woman black women and feminism.

Alright, if you haven’t had the honor of reading Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” speech , I suggest you stop everything right now and go read it. Truth is addressing a room of suffragettes and activists asking black women to step aside and let their cause be first (before ending slavery—you know). Enter bell hooks, a young college student 100 years later. Much has changed, yet SO much is still the same. Jeez, even 40 years later we still have to argue that Black and marginalized people are human beings and deserve human treatment. This is essential for hooks readers because it’s her foundation stone. This is the work that she has built her life on.

Feminism is for Everybody

This short and sweet book is often required reading in feminist classes. It’s a primer—in hooks’s classic style, in how feminism can change the lives of all of us for the better. She examines the core issues of feminism and its positive promise to eliminate sexism, sexual exploitation, and oppression.

Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood

Here is where we start to deeply understand bell hooks. How she learned how to understand the social structures in her family as a vulnerable little girl who chose to read alone in the corner. She shows us a society that punishes women for anything more than silence—where fathers are estranged from their daughters—where writing becomes air. This book is the foundation of hooks’s creativity. It’s painful, but deeply beautiful.

Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work

This is a collection of essays about her feelings on writing through her years of teaching English in universities. She discusses how writing can offer healing, why it’s difficult for Black writers to write memoirs, and her personal experiences with publishing. I am putting this under “memoir” for this reason. Of course there’s the beautiful talk about writing being a political act. How women’s writing must take the form of confession to make it readable. But there’s also essays about how the impact of the success of her writing has had in her life. It’s beautiful and inspiring.

On Healing Communities

The will to change: men, masculinity, and love.

I am the mother of two sons whom I don’t want living a life emotionally stunted by toxic masculinity. hooks talks about the impacts of a patriarchal culture that keeps men from knowing themselves. She talks about how rich emotional lives don’t just have to be for women. How spiritually rewarding it is to be fully in tune with yourself. hooks also addresses the common fears men have when treading into this world, losing their patriarchal power. She shows men that life can be so much more rewarding and beautiful once they embrace themselves.

Communion: The Female Search for Love

If “ The Will to Change” was a call to men to embrace themselves, this is the call to women to claim own their own heroic journey into love. It is the third in a series starting with “All About Love” and “Salvation: Black People and Love.” Both are highly recommended. However, this book can stand on its own. A lot of people have said that this book has changed their lives. hooks writes with clear and loving language about the role of love for women in a changing society. What that role can look like if we let go of our obstacles and embraced our humanity as women.

Final Thoughts on bell hooks Books

Obviously, I want you to read all of bell hooks books. I mean, I want to read all of her writing. She does it with passion and grace that leaves me in an awe that is difficult to describe. Recently, she has released a string of children’s books that I hope you’ll also read. I hope that this will give you a little teaser into what she is capable of.  Her writing is so important right now. She writes with a grace and love that is difficult to come by. Whew, are we really hurting for some real love right now.

You can follow bell hooks on Twitter @bellhooks and you can also learn more about her institute at www.bellhooksinstitute.com.

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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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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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Women, Gender, and Families of Color

This essay is part of our online special issue honoring bell hooks

Trusting in the Power of Compassion

By Leah Milne

“For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?” (Angelou, hooks, and McLeod 1998). Spoken in an interview, these words highlight bell hooks’s broadest legacy, one increasingly relevant to us today, namely, her work on compassion. While I’m struck with the hope of these words, I’m more awed by the trust underlying them.

The pandemic continues to challenge the trust in compassion for which hooks advocated. It has brought us stories of devastation wrought not just by illness, but also by dispassionate responses to that illness—whether it is workers in toxic environments or people refusing to wear masks to protect others. Often in direct connection are stories of brutality against Black people, disabled people, and other marginalized groups perpetrated by institutions such as the police, governments, and schools. In so many ways, we have before us an ever-increasing need but also the biggest challenge: to trust in the power of empathy and compassion. While the loss of bell hooks would have been devastating at any historic moment, the timing of this loss of one of our nation’s leading authorities on compassion and empathy seems incalculable. Whether talking about feminism, the media, or issues related to sexuality or race, hooks’s underlying message always focused on collaboration and understanding, even with whom one might disagree.

I want to believe that the balance hooks strove for in bridging the gaps between accountability, forgiveness, and compassion would serve us well as we consider our next personal and political steps in this tumultuous era. Of course, hooks was no pushover. She believed in justice and responsibility, but she also made certain to couch her dissent with growth and community in mind. Maybe what is most important for us to take away from her work is that she also constantly reflected on whether she was striving for compassion in her actions by holding herself accountable, even as she admitted that doing so sometimes led to fear and failure. For her, instilling the habits of compassion—whether in the workplace, the classroom, or the community at large—was about incremental and persistent practice, self-assessment, and self-trust.

In reflecting on her loss, I’m struck by another recent loss of a thinker who similarly endeavored for and reflected upon the nature of compassion: cultural theorist Lauren Berlant, who died several months before hooks. In the introduction to Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion , Berlant seemingly echoes hooks when she talks about compassion as complicated; it requires a sense of moral obligation and community that some people may not have the bandwidth or even the privilege to feel. However, compassion also requires a great deal of unearned trust in certain people or institutions. It requires trusting, for example, that change is possible and that hope is not solely for the naïve. Compassion requires trusting that systemic injustices exist even if one doesn’t experience or witness their effects or consequences directly. It requires thinking about not just an individual’s suffering but the potential suffering of a larger group or collective.

Recent years have taught us that it is not enough to simply hope for mutual kindness in the face of distress or conflict. Even as she asks us to trust, hooks does not advocate a passive approach to compassion. As she stated in All About Love: New Visions , we should consider “love as an action rather than a feeling” (hooks 2001, 13). That action includes the willingness to listen even when one experiences or speaks of pain or fear, even when in situations where inequality persists. Compassion constantly requires us to ask ourselves—with honesty and humility—whether we are moving forward with empathy for others.

Paired with the murder of George Floyd and a spate of anti-Asian hate crimes that continue to this day, the pandemic has challenged my fidelity to compassion and forgiveness more than any other moment in my life. Even though my personal experiences didn’t necessarily justify it, when I was younger, I nevertheless believed in the intrinsic and uncomplicated nature of compassion. Compassion was more of an abstraction rather than the deeply contextualized and challenging definition that hooks offered. But I find comfort in the fact that hooks struggled with this as well. When she said the above words about compassion and forgiveness in an interview with Maya Angelou, she grappled with the all-too-human urge to place people in categories of oppressor or oppressed. She realized that the “larger meaning of compassion” demanded that we “believe in the capacity of someone else to change towards that which is enhancing of our collective well-being. Or we just condemn people to stay in place” (Angelou, hooks, and McLeod 1998).

The struggle hooks had in this interview—the questions behind the questions she asked Angelou as she tried to understand the latter’s refusal to view the world’s seeming villains in binary terms—has become magnified and even hardened today. I admit that I have adopted the mode of so many others I know to not engage those who do not share a baseline belief in my humanity. But hooks ostensibly asks us to consider, at least momentarily, the humanity of others even when they do not return that consideration—even if the only end goal is to bring oneself joy.

And joy, which hooks often pairs with self-love, is her answer to the question of the struggle for balance between forgiveness, accountability, and compassion. She ultimately places the basis for compassion in love for one’s whole self, both one’s successes and failures. She insists that choosing joy and self-forgiveness can elicit compassion for others. And I try to believe her, I really do. I know it is part of my own journey of action and self-accountability to see whether I feel hooks’s words on compassion can withstand this challenging time. I do trust her, and I hope for the best.

Angelou, Maya, bell hooks, and Melvin McLeod. 1998. “‘There’s No Place to Go But Up’ — Bell Hooks and Maya Angelou in Conversation.” Lion’s Roar , January. https://www.lionsroar.com/theres-no-place-to-go-but-up/ .

Berlant, Lauren, ed. 2004. Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion . New York: Routledge.

hooks, bell. 2001. All About Love: New Visions . New York: William Morrow Paperbacks.

Leah Milne is Associate Professor of English at the University of Indianapolis, where she teaches multicultural American literature. She is the author of  Novel Subjects: Authorship as Radical Self-Care in Multiethnic American Narratives,  which won the 2021 Midwest Modern Language Association Book Award. Her work has appeared in journals such as  MELUS ,  African American Review , and  The Journal of American Culture.

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16.2 Textual Analysis Trailblazer: bell hooks

Textual analysis trailblazer: bell hooks, learning outcomes.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Demonstrate critical thinking and communicating in varying rhetorical and cultural contexts.
• Integrate the writer’s ideas with ideas of others.

“Writing and performing should deepen the meaning of words, should illuminate, transfix, and transform.”

Talking Back

Born Gloria Jean Watkins , bell hooks adopted the name of her great-grandmother, a woman known for speaking her mind. In choosing this pen name, hooks decided not to capitalize the first letters so that audiences would focus on her work rather than her name. However, this stylistic choice has become as memorable as her work.

She is well known for her approach to social critique through textual analysis. The writing interests and research methods hooks uses are wide ranging. They began in poetry and fiction writing and eventually developed into critical analysis. She started writing at an early age, as her teachers (in the church) impressed on hooks the power in language. With this exposure to language, hooks began to understand the “sacredness of words” and began to write poetry and fiction. Over time, hooks’s writing became more focused on advancing and reviving the texts of Black women and women of color, for even though “black women and women of color are publishing more… there is still not enough” writing by and about them. Texts live on through others’ analyses, hooks argues. Therefore, she believes the critical essay “is the most useful form for the expression” between her thoughts and the books she is reading. The critical essay allows hooks to create a dialogue, or “talk back” to the text. The critical essay also extends “the conversations I have with other critical thinkers.” It is this “talking back” that has advanced hooks’s approach to literary criticism. This action, for which hooks eventually named a volume of essays, refers to the development of a strong sense of self that allows Black women to speak out against racism and sexism.

Although young hooks continued to write poetry—some of which was published—she gained a reputation as a writer of critical essays about systems of domination. She began writing her first book, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism , when she was 19 and an undergraduate student at Stanford University . The book is titled after Sojourner Truth’s (1797–1883) “ Ain’t I a Woman ” speech given at the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851. In this work, hooks examines the effects of racism and sexism on Black women, the civil rights movement, and feminist movements from suffrage to the 1970s. By “talking back” to formerly enslaved abolitionist Sojourner Truth throughout, hooks identifies ways in which feminist movements have failed to focus on Black women and women of color. This work is one of many in which thorough analysis “uncovered” the lived experiences of Black women and women of color.

Discussion Questions

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20 of The Best  bell hooks Books

By Med Kharbach, PhD | Published: June 17, 2023 | Updated: March 11, 2024

bell hooks – with her name intentionally presented in lower case to shift the focus from her identity to her ideas – is an author whose works I hold dear to my heart. An acclaimed intellectual, feminist theorist, cultural critic, artist, and writer, hooks has been an instrumental figure in shaping discussions on race, gender, and social justice.

Her unflinching honesty, fearlessness in the face of controversy, and unwavering commitment to activism reflect a philosophy that seeks to dismantle systems of oppression and pave the way towards a more equitable world.

I have been deeply moved by hooks’ perspective on love, community, education, and the inherent interconnectedness of these elements in societal progress. Her insistent advocacy for feminist thinking and racial equality speak volumes of dedication to these causes. It is this relentless pursuit of truth, justice, and understanding that fuels my admiration for her. In this post, I share with you some of her amazing works.

Here is a collection of some bell hook’s best books:

1.  All About Love: New Visions , by bell hooks

In “All About Love: New Visions,” bell hooks explores the concept of love, not as a noun but as a verb. This provocative and deeply personal work confronts society’s shortcomings in teaching us how to love and proposes a new, proactive approach to rectifying this lack. Stripping love from its conventional associations with sex and desire, hooks points us towards a path of love that is sacred, redemptive, and healing for both individuals and nations.

2. Feminism is for Everybody , by bell hooks 

“Feminism is for Everybody” serves as an accessible introduction to the concept of feminism and its potential to eradicate sexism and oppression. Through her clear and direct style, bell hooks urges readers to recognize the transformative power of feminism in their lives, emphasizing its relevance and accessibility to all.

3. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom , by bell hooks

bell hooks, in “Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom,” writes about the critical role of education in promoting freedom. She believes that teaching students to break barriers related to race, sex, and class is the key to achieving this freedom. Addressing current education challenges, hooks advocates for reimagining teaching practices to accommodate the modern, multicultural world.

4.  Communion: The Female Search for Love , by bell hooks

In “Communion: The Female Search for Love,” hooks champions the female quest for love as a heroic journey towards freedom. She investigates the impact of the feminist movement, women’s participation in the workforce, and self-help culture on women’s perception of love. She encourages women of all ages to incorporate love into every aspect of their lives.

5. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center , by bell hooks

“Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center” provides a groundbreaking blueprint for a unified, global feminist movement. Published in 1984 and still as relevant today, bell hooks’ seminal work challenges readers with its bold vision for feminism, which includes developing a common language to promote the cause.

6. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love , by bell hooks

“The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love” finds bell hooks exploring how patriarchal culture deprives men of emotional awareness and love. hooks illuminates how men can learn to express their emotions freely, encouraging them to challenge societal norms of masculinity and reclaim their rich emotional lives.

7. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism , by bell hooks

“Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism” stands as a seminal piece of feminist scholarship that interrogates the intersection of racism and sexism. bell hooks scrutinizes the devaluation of black womanhood, racism among feminists, and black women’s engagement with feminism, seeking to move beyond racist and sexist preconceptions. This work occupies a vital place in feminist discourse, emphasizing the unique experiences and contributions of black women.

8. Salvation: Black People and Love , by bell hooks

“Salvation: Black People and Love,” by bell hooks explores the significant role of love in the lives of African Americans, by considering aspects of history, culture, liberation movements, and popular literature. Through the prism of love, hooks examines race, class, and history, aiming to foster healing and community within a society scarred by lovelessness.

9. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope , by bell hooks 

In “Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope,” bell hooks advocates for a new vision of education that extends beyond the classroom, promoting a discourse of race, gender, class, and nationality in everyday learning situations. hooks explores the potential for positive societal change through teaching with love, mutual respect, and shared knowledge.

10. Skin Again , by bell hooks 

“Skin Again” is an award-winning book by bell hooks that delivers a timeless message of appreciating diversity and self-love. The book emphasizes the importance of looking beyond superficial differences and cherishing our unique inner treasures.

11. When Angels Speak of Love , by bell hooks 

 “When Angels Speak of Love” is a collection of 50 love poems by bell hooks that challenges conventional views and experiences of love. The poems explore the dynamics of desire, surrender, and the poignant beauty of love towards family, friends, and self.

12. Belonging: A Culture of Place , by bell hooks 

“Belonging: A Culture of Place” sees bell hooks examining the concepts of place, community, and belonging, particularly in relation to race, class, and land ownership. Reflecting on the experiences of Black people and rural-to-urban migration, hooks connects issues of environment, sustainability, and race to offer a vision of belonging for all.

13. killing rage: Ending Racism , by bell hooks 

“killing rage: Ending Racism” is a collection of essays by bell hooks that tackles a wide array of topics on race and racism in the U.S. Advocating for the eradication of racism and sexism, hooks presents a vision where rage transformed into love and strength can be a catalyst for positive societal change.

14. Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom , by bell hooks

Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom,” by bell hooks addresses compelling issues facing educators, including questions of race, gender, class, and authority in the classroom. Through a series of enlightening essays, hooks celebrates the transformative power of critical thinking in education, and encourages open dialogue and the democratic dissemination of literacy.

15. Black Looks: Race and Representation , by bell hooks 

Black Looks: Race and Representation” is a collection of critical essays by bell hooks, aimed at interrogating and providing alternative perspectives on blackness, black subjectivity, and whiteness across various mediums of culture such as literature, music, television, and film. These thought-provoking essays are designed to disrupt and subvert traditional narratives around race and representation.

16. Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood , by bell hooks 

“Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood” is a memoir by bell hooks offering an intimate account of her journey towards becoming a writer in the South. The book sheds light on the vulnerability of children, the unique expression of female creativity, and societal imbalances surrounding marriage and gender. It provides a glimpse into the solace found in solitude and the comfort derived from books during her early years.

17. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations , by bell hooks

“Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations” by bell hooks is a collection of bold and electrifying feminist essays that challenge and critique a variety of cultural icons and mediums. From Madonna to Spike Lee, hooks explores popular culture as a site for powerful interventions, challenges, and changes.

18. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black , by bell hooks

“Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black” by bell hooks is a collection of personal and theoretical essays reflecting on issues of racism, feminism, politics, and pedagogy. The book explores the transformation from silence to speech, highlighting how such a shift can be an act of defiance that fosters healing and growth for the oppressed.

19. Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life , by bell hooks

“Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life” by bell hooks is a memoir that traces her journey as a writer, revealing the challenges and victories she has experienced in a life devoted to writing. hooks explores the process of finding one’s own voice, the significance of relationships in her feminist thinking, and the power of words in shaping her life path.

20. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics , by bell hooks 

“Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics” by bell hooks is a collection of her classic and early pieces of cultural criticism from the 80s. The book addresses a variety of topics such as pedagogy, postmodernism, and politics while examining various cultural artifacts. Above all, hooks’ work seeks to transform oppressive structures of domination.

Final thoughts

As we reach the end of this tribute to the formidable bell hooks, it’s clear that her body of work stands as a monumental contribution to our understanding of the complex tapestries of race, gender, and social justice. Her books, each a beacon of knowledge and empowerment, challenge us to confront uncomfortable truths and to engage actively in the creation of a more equitable society.

Through her incisive writings, hooks has left an indelible mark on my own understanding of educational and societal structures. Her thoughts on love and community are especially resonant in a world that often feels fragmented and isolated. Her works serve not just as a mirror to reveal the systemic inequities embedded within our society but also as a map to navigate towards a place of collective healing and growth.

In sharing this curated list of her writings, my hope is that you, too, will find the same profound insights and calls to action that have inspired countless others, including myself. May bell hooks’ legacy continue to provoke, educate, and guide us towards the praxis of freedom she so eloquently advocated for. Let’s honor her memory by engaging with her ideas, challenging ourselves to think deeper, and taking part in the necessary work of reshaping our world.

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Meet Med Kharbach, PhD

Dr. Med Kharbach is an influential voice in the global educational landscape, with an extensive background in educational studies and a decade-long experience as a K-12 teacher. Holding a Ph.D. from Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Canada, he brings a unique perspective to the educational world by integrating his profound academic knowledge with his hands-on teaching experience. Dr. Kharbach's academic pursuits encompass curriculum studies, discourse analysis, language learning/teaching, language and identity, emerging literacies, educational technology, and research methodologies. His work has been presented at numerous national and international conferences and published in various esteemed academic journals.

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education, community-building and change

bell hooks on education

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 .

© Barry Burke 2004

Last Updated on September 12, 2019 by infed.org

The Palgrave Handbook of Educational Thinkers pp 1–12 Cite as

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

• Courtney BrieAnn Morris-Coker 2  
• Living reference work entry
• First Online: 31 March 2023

427 Accesses

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.

• Intersectionality
• Hip-hop feminism
• Black womanhood

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Biana, H. T. (2020). Extending bell hooks’ feminist theory. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 21 (1), 13–29.

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Frye, M. (1998). Oppression. In L. J. Peach (Ed.), Women in culture: A women’s studies anthology . Blackwell Publishers.

Hill, L. (1998). The miseducation of Lauryn Hill [Album]. Columbia Records.

hooks, b. (1981). Ain’t I a woman: Black women and feminism . Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

hooks, b. (1984). Feminist theory: From margin to center . South End Press.

hooks, b. (1989). Talking back: Thinking feminist, thinking black (Vol. 10). South End Press.

hooks, b. (1992). The oppositional gaze: Black female spectators in Black American Cinema . Routledge.

hooks, b. (1993). Sisters of the yam: Black women and self-recovery . South End Press.

hooks, b. (1994a). Teaching to transgress . Routledge.

hooks, b. (1994b). Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural politics . Routledge.

hooks, b. (1996). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Journal of Leisure Research, 28 (4), 316.

hooks, b. (1999). All about love: New visions . William Morrow.

hooks, b. (2000). Where we stand: Class matters . Psychology Press.

hooks, b. (2006). Killing rage: Ending racism . Henry Holt and Company.

Kendall, M. (2020). Hood feminism: Notes from the women that a movement forgot . Viking.

Levantovskaya, M. (2019, January 30). Why me?: On Tressie McMillan Cottom’s “Thick and other essays” . Los Angeles review of books. Retrieved January 20, 2022, from https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/why-me-on-tressie-mcmillan-cottoms-thick-and-other-essays/

Love, B. (2012). Hip hop’s li’l sistas speak: Negotiating hip hop identities and politics in the New South . Peter Lang.

Love, B. (2020). We want to do more than survive: Abolitionist teaching and the pursuit of educational freedom . Beacon.

Morgan, J. (1999). When chickenheads come home to roost: A hip-hop feminist breaks it down . Simon & Schuster Paperbacks.

Morgan, J. (2018). She begat this . Atria Books.

Peoples, W. A. (2008). “Under construction”: Identifying foundations of hip-hop feminism and exploring bridges between black second-wave and hip-hop feminisms. Meridians, 8 (1), 19–52.

Taylor, U. Y. (2014). Making waves. The Black Scholar, 44 (3), 32–47.

Townes, S. A. (2000). Black woman warrior: A rhetorical biography of bell hooks . Ohio University.

Yancy, G., Crowley, K., James, J., Love, B. L., Powell, John A., Robbins, S. T., & Steinem, G. (2022). A tribute to bell hooks . Retrieved from https://dev.lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-tribute-to-bell-hooks/

Further Reading

Cottom, T. M. (2019). Thick and other essays . The New Press.

Dillard, C. B. (2021). The spirit of our work: Black women teachers (re)member . Beacon Press.

hooks, b. (2000). All about love: New visions . Harper Collins Publishers.

Kendall, M. (2020). Hood feminism: Notes from the women that a movement forget . Penguin Books.

Love, B. (2020). We want to do more than survive: Abolitionist teaching and the pursuit of educational freedom . Beacon Press.

Morrison, T. (2019). The source of self-regard: Selected essays, speeches, and meditations . Alfred A. Knopf.

hooks, h. (1989). From black is a woman’s color. Callaloo, 39 , 382–388.

hooks, h. (2000). Learning in the shadow of race and class. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 47 (12), B14–16.

hooks, h. (2015). Writing without labels. Appalachian Heritage, 43 (4), 8–21.

Brosi, G., & hooks, b. (2012). The beloved community: A conversation between bell hooks and George Brosi. Appalachian Hertiage, 40 (4), 76–86.

Specia, A., & Osman, A. A.(2015). Education as a practice of freedom: Reflections on bell hooks. Journal of Education and Practice, 6 (17), 195–199.

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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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7 Books You Should Read to Honor bell hooks's Legacy

Published on 12/16/2021 at 7:30 PM

If you've ever taken a women's and gender studies class or looked to expand your knowledge of intersectional feminism, you've most likely heard the name bell hooks. bell hooks was a renowned professor, writer, and social activist, penning more than 34 pieces of literature that explored the intersections of capitalism, race, and gender and challenged the way readers interacted with those systems in society. Before her death , she received a Pulitzer Prize for her poetry, was nominated for an NAACP Image Award, and founded the bell hooks Institute, which "documents the life and work" of its namesake. Ahead, we honor her work that changed the way we think about feminism; here are seven essential books you should read from bell hooks's massive, prolific collection of essays, poems, and literature.

Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism

bell hooks began writing Ain't I a Woman ($42) when she was just 19 years old, and this book, which takes its title from Sojourner Truth's famous speech of the same name, might be hooks's most famous work. This must-read book explores the impact of sexism on Black women and how Black women have historically been oppressed by both Black and white men and white women. Her writing unflinchingly challenges the idea that race and gender are separate issues, insisting that the fight to end sexism and racism are inseparably linked.

Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

Considered a follow-up to Ain't I a Woman , Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center ($38) analyzes the future of the feminist movement while reminding activists of the need for continual reflection. This iconic text took mainstream feminist thinking from the 1980s and elevates it, encouraging readers to consider how both racism and classism intersect with sexism, and her arguments still hold up today.

Feminism Is For Everybody

This short book is an accessible introduction to feminist theory that's designed to be read by all genders. Feminism Is For Everybody ($38) is both an answer to the question "what is feminism?" and an argument for why we should all be involved in the feminist movement. Looking at the successes and failures of the movement, she examines issues like sexual violence, reproductive rights, work, class, and racism and encourages us to demand alternatives to the patriarchal systems that exist and persist in society today.

All About Love: New Visions

Published in 2000, All About Love: New Visions ($15, originally $16) discusses the importance of love both in our private and public lives and how our culture falls short of teaching us how to love. hooks argues that especially in America, women have been taught to give love in most situations — even when their needs aren't being met — while men are socialized to mistrust love and downplay their own emotions, resulting in them being unable to give or receive love in constructive ways.

Outlaw Culture

This collection of essays looks at pop culture icons like Madonna, Spike Lee, and others while examining the intersectionality of sexism and racism that's perpetuated by contemporary media. In Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations ($22), hooks asks us to look at the line between representation and tokenism while reminding us that a system made by a patriarchal society will never show us images or media that isn't beneficial to that same system.

We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity

In We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity ($45), hooks asserts that America is a "culture that does not love Black males . . . especially, Black men do not love themselves . How could they?" A powerful look at how both white society and Black leaders are failing young Black men, this complex, thought-provoking book layers in pop culture references (including a chapter called "gangsta culture: a piece of the action") and weaves in the voices of Black authors and social workers.

Killing Rage: Ending Racism

Killing Rage: Ending Racism ($17, originally $18) is a collection of 23 essays that are still as relevant today as they were when hooks wrote them in 1996. As always, hooks maintains that eradicating racism must go hand in hand with eradicating sexism — and most of the time, women are locked out of public discourse on racism. These essays seek to highlight this imbalance, spotlighting trauma among Black Americans, internalized racism in movies and media, and the titular essay, "killing rage," discusses the anger Black people feel by repeated instances of everyday racism and using the rage to fuel a catalyst for positive change.

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