bell hooks, real name, Gloria Jean Watkins (1952–2021), was an American poet, author, feminist, professor, cultural critic, and social activist, who was dedicated to the cause of ending sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.
Her pen name, ‘bell hooks’ (deliberately spelt in lowercase- always- so as to draw people’s attention to the content of her work rather than her identity or personhood), was the name of her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks, whom she was often compared to as a child, with Watkins using it as a pseudonym to honour female legacies.
Best known for her writings on race, feminism, and her commitment to exploring the intersectionality of these things, and what she described as their ‘ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination’, hooks published around 40 books throughout her career, all of which ask readers to question their understanding of how patriarchy, capitalism, and white supremacy intermingle.
hooks wrote her first book, ‘Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism’, when she was just 19 years old, with her first ‘officially’ published work being released in 1978- a chapbook of poems titled, ‘And There We Wept.’
Following the completion of her studies in 1983, (a Ph.D. in English literature), hooks went on to forge a career in academia as an English professor and lecturer, teaching at several institutions before joining Berea College in 2004 as a professor in residence. The bell hooks Institute was later founded there in 2014.
‘My writing is a form of activism.’
Early Years
Though hooks’ childhood in the segregated community of the American South exposed her to vicious examples of white supremacy, where her mother, Rosa Bell, was a maid for white families, and her father, Veodis Watkins, a postal worker, her tight-knit Black community showed her the possibility of resistance from the margins, of finding community among the oppressed, and of drawing power from those connections — a theme to which she would return frequently in her work…
It was her sense of community amongst the oppressed that saw hooks identifying as ‘queer’ (‘queer-pas-gay’), with her famous quote, as below, perfectly encapsulating who bell hooks was- ‘at odds with everything’, but never letting that deter her from doing what she really wanted to do/ never losing sight of hope.
‘Queer’ not as being about who you’re having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but ‘queer’ as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.’
hooks Was Not A ‘Doom’ Writer
Although she wrote about hard-hitting subjects, exposing the unjust, devoting her life to naming the power structures around us, hooks was also full of hope for the future, providing a roadmap to freedom, naming the power inside of us to resist the oppression.
E.g., — while hooks recognised the ‘elitism’ of some universities, she also recognised how they were(/are), a site of revolutionary possibility.
‘There’s nothing but love within me for the world around me.’
Combining her Buddhist outlook on life, hooks provided hope by reminding us all (or at least, those of us who were willing to listen), that true transformation starts internally. That, in order to live in a more loving society, we all must become love*.
*Love, according to hooks, being the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination.
‘It is only love that heals the wounds of oppression.’
Never washing over the important things, however hard-hitting, and never losing sight of the possibility for change, this is why bell hooks is remembered as the trailblazer that she truly is.
Portfolio of Hope 