Hooks, Bell (1952–)

Writer, feminist, and cultural critic who is considered one of the foremost African American intellectuals of her generation. Her numerous writings, including more than twenty books, have often taken the modern feminist movement to task for not paying enough attention to the unique needs of African American women, for whom race and class can be as oppressive as gender. This is true of a few of her early works, which established her career and reputation and changed the direction of feminist scholarship. hooks wrote about art, education, film, language, and literature, as well as a book for children.

Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, bell hooks was the daughter of Veodis Watkins, a postal service custodian, and Rosa Bell Watkins, a homemaker. Although her given name was Gloria Jean Watkins, she began using the lowercase “bell hooks” pseudonym when she started writing professionally as an adult. She borrowed the name from one of her Native American great-grandmothers.

Hooks grew up in a segregated community that was experiencing rapid change during the turbulent civil rights era. After graduating from Stanford University in 1973, she earned a master's degree in English from the University of Wisconsin and began a teaching career at the University of California at Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1983.

In 1981, hooks published her first major work, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, whose title was derived from a famous speech by the early abolitionist Sojourner Truth. The book examined the thinking of important African American women of the nineteenth century and served as an important critique of feminism from an African American perspective. hooks argued that women of color had unique issues that were not being addressed by the feminist movement, which was largely the preserve of white women. In her next book, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), hooks argued that race and class played as important a role as gender in the disenfranchisement of black women.

Hooks carried these themes forward in Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989) and in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990). Talking Back offered some of hooks's personal experiences in overcoming the legacy of living in a racist and sexist society. In Yearning, she critiques the images of black women in advertisements, rap songs, and film, an idea she examines further in Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992), which describes how images of blacks have become commodified as the “other” in a consumer society. In Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (1991), hooks collaborated with Professor Cornel West in a dialogue about the direction that African American society should be taking in the post–civil rights era.

Hooks had long advocated self-help support groups for black women to help them overcome the negative self-images that she felt were hindering their progress. In Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery (1993), she wrote of the experiences of a support group she had founded. She chose the title to symbolize the sisterly solidarity of black women, since the yam is a staple of black diets everywhere in the world. hooks believed that black women could easily fall into abusive relationships or substance abuse unless they made a concerted effort to support one another.

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