“That position is primarily one of her being a black feminist writer, this is what distinguishes her.” As our discussions evolve, so too do hook’s ideas. “She’s trying to figure out how the feminist movement, feminist politics, can be articulated from her perspective as a black woman, and that informs the way that her work is organized, the questions that she’s asking, the debates that she’s engaged with,” Dr. hooks, by contrast, has always been a feminist first. Contemporaries like Angela Davis and Audre Lorde came to feminism from the black liberation movement and Marxism (Davis) and queer theory (Lorde), Dr.

Hooks is historically noteworthy not just as a trailblazer within intersectional feminism, but because she sought to understand what it meant to be a black feminist from the beginning of her career. In 2014, she established the bell hooks Institute at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, where she is currently a Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies, to “promote the cause of ending domination through understanding the ways systems of exploitation and oppression intersect through critical thinking, teaching, events, and conversation.” She has had a storied, controversial, and prolific career as a writer and theorist since, authoring over 30 books and five children’s books, all analyzing facets of culture, feminism, race, masculinity, education, class, and more. Unsurprisingly, after the publication of Ain’t I A Woman, feminists up and down the West Coast began discovering and employing her work in their teachings. at University of California-Santa Cruz in 1983. “Part of what feminism is trying to do is to engage in consciousness-raising in a social movement, so if people understand what the theory you’re creating is, it’s then very helpful with engagement.” The populist nature of hooks’s writing means she has appeared as much on college syllabi as in independent bookstores over the last four decades.Īfter Stanford, hooks got a Master’s degree in English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1976, and a Ph.D. “She’s creating theory, and most of the time when we think about people who are writing theory, it’s usually in a way that’s very dense and hard to decipher and that is not normally engaged by the general public,” Dr. While certainly an academic and a theorist, she chose to use clear, accessible prose to discuss her ideas so as not to limit discussion to the academy. It was with Ain’t I A Woman that hooks also established her signature writing style. “As our world shifts, also shifting with it, and that gives us a road map to see how black feminism is changing and how questions around gender, sexuality, and race transition as well,” Dr.

Feminist theory by bell hooks