“If any female feels she need anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.”- Bell Hooks
The activist and feminist intellectual, whose real name is Gloria Jean Watkins, (September twenty-five, 1952 – December fifteen, 2021) was better known for her pioneering work on racism, feminism, and gender. Gloria Jean Watkins was born on September twenty-five, 1952, in Hopkinsville, a small, separate city in American state, to a working-class African-American family. Watkins was one of six youngsters born to genus Rosa Bell Watkins and Veodis Watkins. Her father worked as a steward and her mother worked as a maid. She attended racially-segregated public institutions in Hopkinsville as a toddler. She performed poetry readings for her church community and was heavily influenced by her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Anthony Charles Lynton Blair Hooks, who was known for her sharp opinions. The neighbourhood where she grew up provided young Gloria resistance to racism; however, it conjointly provided her with the negative and positive experiences that may form her feminism.
Watkins attended Stanford University on scholarship. She graduated in 1973 and visited the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where she earned a master’s degree in English literature in 1976. In 1983, she obtained her PhD at the University of California-Santa Cruz, having completed her dissertation on the work of novelist Toni Morrison. Hooks’ pen name is intentionally stylized in all lower-case not only to differentiate her persona from her grandmother’s but conjointly as a result of which she wished the main focus to air the "substance of books, not who she was. She sets to not capitalize her new name to position specialize in her work instead of her name, on her ideas instead of her temperament. Her initial book, "Ain't I a Woman? Black girls and Feminism" were printed in 1981.
She was thought of as a "crossover" education, as her works weren't solely academic however broad thus a range of individuals might scan and perceive them. Though Hooks was imagined to become known as a well-behaved, young quiet lady, she became instead a lady who “talked back” for which hooks eventually named a volume of essays that allowed black girls to speak against racism and discrimination. Once a number of her works got printed, she gained a name as an author of important essays on systems about domination.
While her work speaks to the pain and suffering of all teams, her work is basically impressed by her love of and for black individuals. She inspired black individuals to seek out the spirit to resist the totalizing forces of gender discrimination, racism, and classism. In her essay ‘Eating the order’, she describes a white yearning to invade and possess non-white people through cultural appropriation. She critiques the ways how white people co-opt Black culture for their own use which erases the voice of black people.
Hooks' defines feminism as "a movement to finish discrimination, sexist exploitation and oppression." Once it came to feminism, Hooks argued that not all men in Western society are treated as equals, so girls can struggle to possess a similar opportunity as men till changes/measures are created. “As long as women are using class or race power to dominate other women, feminist sisterhood cannot be fully realized,” she wrote in “Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics” (2000).
“A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming,” hooks wrote in one famous passage from All About Love. On the inside of such love, we'd like to never concern abandonment. This can be the foremost precious gift true love offers — the expertise of knowing we tend to continually belong. She declared that love cannot exist in an exceeding power struggle and can't exist with abuse and inspired her readers to get the love for themselves before they wanted it from others.
On every one of the central themes of hooks’ work is her use of the term imperialist supremacist capitalist social organisation to explain the four interlocking systems of power that characterize Euro American dominator culture. She taught at varied colleges, together with Yale University, Oberlin school and town school of the recent royal line. Apart from that, she is the winner of many literary awards and is considered one of the foremost potent activists and leaders of Black feminism.
On December fifteen, 2021 bell hooks—an American feminist scholar/ cultural theorist/educationist—died at Berea, Kentucky, United States of America. Her life journey- growing up in an African family, facing the struggle of the standard of living, battling with racism and discrimination within the society and eventually coming up to be a good scholar/activist – has really impressed several.
Books :
· And There We Wept: poems.
· Ain't I a Woman (1981)
· Feminist Theory (1984)
· Teaching to Transgress (1994)
· Killing Rage (1995)
· Bone Black (1996)
· All About Love (2000)
· Feminism is for everybody (2000)
· Where We Stand (2000)
· The Will to Change (2004)
· Communion (2002)
· Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics.
· Sisters of the Yam: Black women and self-recovery.
· Belonging: a culture of place
· Soul Sister: Women, Friendship, and Fulfillment
· Wounds of passion : a writing life
· Where we stand: class matters
· Salvation: Black people and love
· Communion: the female search for love
· Teaching community: a pedagogy of hope
· Appalachian Elegy: poetry and place.
Some of her notable work includes :
· Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981)
· Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984)
· Teaching to Transgress (1994)
· Feminism is Everybody: Passionate Politics (2000)
· All About Love: New Visions (2000)
· We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (2004)
Awards and Nominations
Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics: The American Book Awards/ Before Columbus Foundation Award (1991)
Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism: "One of the twenty most influential women’s books in the last 20 years" by Publishers Weekly (1992)
Bell Hooks: The Writer’s Award from the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fund (1994)
Happy to Be Nappy: NAACP Image Award nominee (2001)
Homemade Love: The Bank Street College Children's Book of the Year (2002)
Salvation: Black People and Love: Hurston Wright Legacy Award nominee (2002)
Bell Hooks: Utne Reader's "100 Visionaries Who Could Change Your Life"
Bell Hooks: The Atlantic Monthly's "One of our nation’s leading public intellectuals"
Sources:
About the Author:
Riddima Singh is currently pursuing Bachelor in Commerce from the University of Delhi. She is a coffee addict and loves to observe people. In her free time, she’s usually found binge-watching her favourite series. You can reach out to her for conversations about music, food and movies.
What a delight to read this piece! ✨