How Black Scholar bell hooks Touched Feminists Everywhere


In her next book, “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center,” Hooks gave a clear definition of feminism as “the struggle to end sexist oppression.” While she criticized the “white, bourgeois, hegemonic dominance” of feminist movements, she also warned against using such criticisms to “trash, reject, or reject” feminism itself.

In the late 1980s, hooks came to wider prominence during the heyday of the next generation of college-based Black public intellectuals, and Henry Louis Gates Jr., Michael Eric Dyson, and Cornel West (who co-wrote “Breaking Bread” in 1991).

But while Hooks spent his entire career teaching in academia, teaching at Yale, Oberlin, Berea College in Kentucky, and other institutions, he wasn’t just that. For him, theory was not an abstract exercise, but a tool for self-understanding and survival.

“I came to theory because I suffered,” he wrote in his 1991 article. Theory as Liberating Practice. “I came desperately to theory, wanting to understand, to grasp what was going on around me and inside me.”

Denied by some as an elitist field, he saw the university environment instead as a field of revolutionary possibility. But he also engaged in popular culture in essays that could be as rhetorically blind as they were intellectually serpentine.

In “Madonna: Plantation Mistress or Soul Sister?” Incorporating it in her 1992 book “Black Looks: Race and Representation” she revealed the groin-grabbing allowance of “phallic Black masculinity”, which the singer uses to “taunt” white men for their shortcomings. (“Madonna may hate the phallus, but she longs to have its power,” hooks wrote.)



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