All About bell hooks: MAI Visions

by: MAI , February 3, 2022

When the sad news about bell hooks’ passing first reached us on 15 December 2021, our hearts sank. Barely anyone amongst the MAI Collective had ever met bell hooks in person, but her absence was suddenly profoundly felt across our feminist community. With her passing, some of us have lost our intellectual model, others have lost an activist leader, or a distant but close emotional friend. No matter the personal relationship we had with bell hooks’ works, we all felt connected in our grief and sorrow. And it was then that we realised that our sadness could only be alleviated by drawing on the inspiration she had offered us all so generously and selflessly in the past decades. To revive the late bell hooks’ philosophy of hope and love, we decided to celebrate her legacy and vision. By the end of December, we asked our readers, authors and editors to share their intimate thoughts on their personal connection to this great writer and compassionate, wise teacher who was so well known as a tireless speaker for equality. This is what came back…

In memory of bell hooks (1952-2021).

Sarah Lahm: ‘Whenever I am invited to any reading group that asks its guests or members to share any book that they think may be of interest to everyone, I never have to think twice. Instead, I immediately reach for my worn-down copy of Feminism is for Everybody by the incomparable bell hooks. Her loss means that we will not get to hear her voice anymore about current issues. Yet, the world is lucky, because she has spoken and written about universal, human issues that continue to remain relevant¾from opening eyes everywhere to the fact that feminism is indeed for everybody by writing in a way that is accessible to everybody, to her thoughtful and revolutionary considerations of love in all of its magnificent iterations. More so than a tribute to the genius of bell hooks, this is a rallying cry for all of us feminists: bell hooks has given us a precious gift with Feminism is for Everybody, a book that is so much more than ‘just another passionate voice speaking out on behalf of feminist politics’. (2000: x).

We have to continue bell hooks’ work with the fervour and determination she deserves and that her voice demands when she calls for ‘billboards; ads in magazines; ads on buses, subways, trains; television commercials spreading the word, letting the world know more about feminism’. (2000: x) Continuing to communicate bell hooks’ messages to all of us is the honour and privilege of any feminist whose goal it is, indeed, to ‘end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression. (2000: 1)’

Sophia Kier-Byfield: ‘In the spring of 2017, I decided to start a feminist reading group. I was still finding my feet in feminism at the time and figuring out my place in its many worlds. Amidst this heady enthusiasm, deciding to read Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks as one of the first texts was simple. Hooks intended it to be a handbook, a straightforward text that could be given to people she met who were being hostile towards what feminism is. She wanted something to explain concepts and struggles in a clear, accessible, and non-judgmental way. But the book is also a means of stepping into feminism for anyone already sympathetic to its movements, yet curious about its multiplicities and in need of clarity in a rough sea of debates and antagonisms. Over the years, everything I have read by hooks has assumed this same quality. If I am confused or questioning, or looking for inspiration on a topic, be that academia, pedagogy, love, responsibility, culture, family, religion, or intersectional politics and identity, I turn to her unique lucidity and laser-sharp perspective, her wonder with and commitment to life, and her spirit.

Feminism is for Everybody was written because hooks had waited for twenty years for something like it to be published. When it did not appear, she wrote it herself. This sentiment, of becoming and creating that which you desire and need but cannot find, is something to be carried forward in the wake of losing such a motivating and stimulating teacher.’

Teresa Forde: ‘The legacy of bell hooks is so vast and significant. I came to her work through a feminist perspective, and distinctly remember being caught by the power of words in her exploration of racism and the reconfiguring of her own name as a political act. Writing ‘bell hooks’ became an engagement in a political statement and called into question so many issues regarding equality and liberation. Her work emerged at a time of poststructuralist and feminist reflection on the notion of the woman as a subject and with critiques regarding feminism and its own discontents. hooks’ celebration of Sojourner Truth’s statement, Ain’t I a Woman, brings to the forefront the importance of fundamental issues about the experiences of Black women and intersectionality, recognising racism, sexism and classism as potent forces affecting the possibility of freedom and equality. The loss of bell hooks took me back to reading Ain’t I a Woman again, reminding me that her work is still revolutionary, liberatory, and critically resonant today.’

Kelly Parker: ‘Professor, feminist, writer, and activist bell hooks once wrote ‘Feminist politics aims to end domination to free us to be who we are, to live lives where we love justice, where we can live in peace. Feminism is for everybody.’

Today I write proudly as part of the MAI Collective, whose collaborative and non-hierarchical journal empowers and encourages feminist expression, research and critique of visual culture. Our shared sentiment echoes that of bell hooks, that ‘feminism is for everybody.’ The fact that you are reading this journal today suggests that you too share in our collective ideal of feminism for all.

bell hooks inspired motivation and pride in me. As a woman of colour and a feminist, being afforded the privilege of reading her work changed the trajectory of my life significantly. I learned of bell hooks’ work when I sought ratification as a Black woman who had witnessed and experienced numerous incidences of racism, classism, and sexism. On my journey of self-development, I began reading scholarly writings by women of colour and discovered Ain’t I a Woman while trying to validate my own opinions and experience. The relatability of this book was revelatory to me, particularly the line ‘usually when people talk about the strength of Black women, they ignore the reality that to be strong in the face of oppression is not the same as overcoming oppression, that endurance is not to be confused with transformation’. (6)

And so began my journey into academia, inspired by this quote that will always stay close to my heart. Thank you bell hooks, for paving the way¾for me and many others.’

Brandy Monk-Payton: ‘When I heard the news that bell hooks had moved on to the ancestral plane, I felt a deep sense of loss for a beloved teacher who I had never met, but who has guided me in my path as a Black feminist educator, thinker, and writer. I instinctively retrieved her books from my shelf and splayed them out on my floor, caressing their covers as I remembered how each one has touched and even transformed me. I glimpsed Black Looks (1992), which taught me to harness and celebrate the oppositional gaze of Black women. Her ability to allow us to see differently and make alternative worlds possible through her words is unparalleled. Her 1997 memoir Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life is home to one of my favourite lines of her work: ‘I have always had theories in my head. I spent time imagining what it would be like to take the theories out of my head and live them’. (32) In Wounds of Passion, hooks tells the story of her writerly journey as she strives to cultivate an ‘aesthetics of living’ by putting pen to paper.

Being a Black woman in the academy is a constant emotional, mental, and physical struggle. The memoir intimately details hooks’ time in graduate school trying to find her voice. Her fearlessness in developing critique always came from a place of love and an ethics of care, which allowed her to be responsible to the communities that she served. She wanted us to be spiritually well and whole, inside and outside of the ivory tower, in order to imagine otherwise together. She yearns: ‘I am trying to invent a world that can sustain me as a writer, as a woman dedicated to the life of the mind. I want to remain a seeker on the path’. (160) So do I.’

Felicity Gee: ‘Exposing the sham.’ This is the phrase bell hooks uses to refer to Dorian Carey’s testimony in Jennie Livingstone’s Paris is Burning. It is a moving, and true, performance that cuts through the film, and which hooks demonstrates as being ‘overshadowed by spectacle’. This critique of Livingstone’s documentary appears in one of the most essential essay collections on cultural studies, period: Black Looks (1999). It was to this essay that my foggy brain turned for help in 2012, after leaving a screening of Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild at Brixton’s Ritzy Cinema. A beguiling example of magic realism, encompassing post-Katrina, BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill Louisiana, and climate change, the film is set in the ‘Bathtub’¾a mythical community isolated from ‘civilisation’ on the other side of the levee. Zetilin’s story is told from the point of view of six-year-old Hushpuppy (Quvenzhané Wallis). As I left the cinema, the film’s twinkling lights, anti-capitalist, and otherworldly setting faded, leaving a bad taste in my mouth that I couldn’t quite pinpoint. The treatment of the black community filmed by a white director and crew, and the exploitative voyeurism the film relies upon, deeply troubled me.

It wasn’t until several months later that hooks’ article on Beasts found its way to me, giving substance and depth to my own insubstantial ideas about the film. She uncovers the ‘crude pornography of violence’ below the ‘mythic innocence’ of Hushpuppy’s relationship with her father (Dwight Henry). She fights for Hushpuppy, and against the spectacle of the black body in mainstream American culture¾the black female child’s body, and the stereotypical representation of the black father. Unfaltering in its laser gaze, the essay ends with hooks turning to the viewers who ‘fail to choose a standpoint where they might witness her [Hushpuppy’s] suffering or hear her ongoing anguished lament.’ hooks’ writing demands that we shift our standpoint, that we stand alongside her and really see. For my students, her writing opens new possibilities and critical faculties that are essential to understanding the representation of race, ethnicity, and gender on screen. Rarely have I seen so many change their own stance and check their privilege than after reading hooks (myself included). Rest in power bell hooks. May generations to come see and hear what was before invisible or occluded thanks to your light.

Fernanda Ortega: ‘I first read bell hooks in 2020. My best friend Gonzalo told me about an amazing book that he felt had changed his life. ‘I want a book that will change my life!’ I told him, and that is how I came across All About Love which, indeed, changed the way I think and live love. Later, I started a master’s program in Education at Durham University and was excited when I saw bell hooks name on my module handbook for Critical Perspectives in Education (shoutout to Dr Cristina Costa for including her). I was not yet familiar with hooks’ work on education, and as soon as I read Teaching to Transgress, I was hooked. For the first time in my life, I felt like someone was talking about my profession in an approachable and respectful way. Throughout that trilogy, I felt seen and acknowledged. hooks came to remind me that there is a different, better way to think about teaching and education, that teaching critical thinking will always be worthwhile, and that my struggles and efforts in the classroom can and will change the world we live in. I just have to believe it and lead by example, always.’

Rebecca Sahr: ‘A soul sister introduced me to the courageous writing of bell hooks. Naomi Godden spoke passionately about bell’s work as we sat outside The Soupie, in Margaret River, eating vegan curries prepared by volunteers. Naomi used hooks’ (2000) treatise All About Love as the impetus for her paper on the love ethic in social work:

Posed as an alternative to patriarchy, racism, and capitalism, the love ethic is the enactment of justice when one actively challenges hegemonic power and builds connected communities. (Godden 2017: 407)

I was also inspired by bell’s work. Here was an academic who was brave enough to go beyond the neo-liberal and patriarchal constraints of the academy. A woman who unapologetically bared her soul, showing us that such vulnerability imbues strength. Radical wholeheartedness: I was hooked!

In my thesis Being-with-uncertainty (Sahr 2019) I explored how teachers relate to un/certainty, and how edu-policies position un/certainty. One of my research questions asked: ‘what happens when the fear that comes of uncertainty is responded to with love, rather than more fear? What troubles these actions?’ I conceptualised love as presence (to uncertainty), drawing on Buddhist philosophy, the work of hooks, and others:

To begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility. (hooks 2001: 13)

Vale bell. I am grateful for the wisdom you shared. Your brave perspectives will continue to shine a light towards valiant and egalitarian paths for your readers.’

Katherine Prentice: ‘In my first year of studying film, I read a book called Reel to Real: Race, Class and Sex at the Movies by bell hooks. I didn’t yet know anything more about the amazing woman behind the book, or of the countless other works that would underpin my learning and understanding for years to come. Reel to Real introduced me to so many key ideas and is the basis of just about everything I write; it has given me an understanding of the importance of film and media and the role they play in perpetuating oppressive ideologies. Before bell hooks, I just liked films: now, I value them and their ideology. But bell hooks taught me and countless others valuable lessons outside of our studies, about gender, sex and sexuality, race, class, and the important intersections between each, as well as about self-love, ideology, and humour. bell hooks has shown so many the importance of their actions, ideas, and their love for themselves and others, and this has undoubtedly changed lives, just as Reel to Real changed mine.”

Carla Macal: ‘To speak of love, affection, and engaged pedagogies is to call upon the incredible and brilliant life’s work of bell hooks. Her words have become my companions, especially during times and reflections of self-care and worth. I identify as a Guatemalan woman, working-class, raised by a single mother in East Los Angeles. My first encounter with class-consciousness came by reading bell hooks’ book, Class Matters. It really defined class and social status and challenged capitalist values of individualism, competition, and exploitation. It was the year 2006, I was 20, and even though I took part in Marxist groups, bell hooks taught me about love, loving my comrades, and to be proud of calling myself a feminist and a woman of colour.

One of my favourite quotes by hooks is, ‘[t]he moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom.’ When I read this, I was 28, going through my Saturn return, and a spiritual awakening. Reading bell hooks became my therapeutic escape, someone I could talk to while writing in my journal and not feel judged. Her teachings, words, and the embrace of her writing showed me how I can live in this capitalist world and build communities of love with sisters, relationships, and elders. Being aware of this became my medicine: to be in communities of love by remaining critical of systems of oppression, and unapologetically calling out the capitalist, patriarchal, imperialist systems hooks would always remind us about.’

Nyx McLean: ‘bell hooks’ work formed the foundation of my academic life, a map guiding me when I felt (and continue to feel) that resistance to social justice and community work often found within the academy.

I have her words’ without justice there can be no love’ from All About Love tattooed on my ribs. I remember that very humid afternoon well, in a tattoo parlour on Long Street in Cape Town, at the end of my first year of lecturing.

That year the first assignment I set my students was to create a zine that would inspire their future media work. I told them I would join them and create a zine to inform my teaching. It ended up being mostly bell hooks’ words, some Paulo Freire, and a great deal of dreaming.

I hadn’t really thought about that tattoo, or the zine, for a while, until I heard of her passing. In that moment and as others spoke of how she inspired them, I sat with everything she gave me, too much to be written here.

But if pushed to sum it up: bell hooks gave me a sense of direction as a first-gen student from a working-class family, and later a first-gen academic. She showed me that I could write from where I stood, and that theory was to be found in the everyday, if only I paid enough attention; and that there was nothing wrong with letting love and justice inform my work.’

Emily Ryder: ‘Through her writing and in her life, bell hooks was at odds with the world she was born into. She embodied a specific kind of queerness, one that had less to do with who one was sleeping with, and more to do with how one moved through life in contradiction to the white, heteronormative, binary-driven, nuclear systems we have all been expected to exist quietly in.

By contrast, her existence was loud. And she refused to make herself or her words more palatable for anyone.

Her efforts to democratise academia through her use of accessible language were met with backlash from her academic, white, straight, feminist contemporaries, but her iconoclastic modus operandi made her ideas accessible to those who did not have the privilege of sitting in the ivory towers of higher learning institutions.

And because of this, she was able to teach generation after generation of followers the joys of creation, invention, and building our own worlds when the ones we’re born into don’t fit. She taught us that thinking is never in vain, and that writing is a revolutionary act. She fostered in her readers a divine love for learning and instilled in all of us confidence in our ability to define our own liberation.’

Ki Wight: ‘I am finally finding the words to express the stunning loss of bell hooks, and I offer this note:

Thank you, bell hooks, for providing the tools to both think and care with in my work life. From the oppositional gaze in media reception to decolonisation within critical pedagogy, your words will be a lasting guide on the path towards social justice in education and media spheres.

With deep care and gratitude for you as you rest, Ki.’

Neil Fox: ‘bell hooks was a name I was familiar with from reading Sight & Sound since my university days. It was always a thrill and a challenge to my thinking when her work appeared in those pages. It was when I met my wife in 2013 that her work really hit me in a major way. My wife had some of her books, and as I was developing a keen interest in pedagogy through working on my doctorate in film education and starting my first university job, her work resonated with me deeply.

Teaching to Transgress opened me up in terms of how I wanted my classrooms to be, increasingly challenging in a neoliberal UK higher education climate, and affirmed my instincts regarding vulnerability and openness about my class background and the limitations on the knowledge we all possess. That book was also a wonderful lesson in critically engaging with hallowed texts, as she wrestles with the work of Paolo Freire so thoroughly and thoughtfully.

A few years later, when travelling to the US to premiere my feature film I took Outlaw Culture from the shelf and read it on the trip. It kept me rooted in a critical space that didn’t diminish my pride in screening my film but reminded me of the work I wanted (it) to do. It was also just a thrill because she was such a great writer. I wish I’d mustered the courage to send her my film to see what she’d make of it.’

Jenny Chamarette: ‘In All About Love, bell hooks writes: ‘[t]o be loving we willingly hear each other’s truth and, most important, we affirm the value of truth-telling. Lies may make people feel better, but they do not help them to know love.’

Knowing love also means knowing fear. Knowing fear means befriending it to speak the truth. Love is learning to embody that quiet truth-telling voice that muddies the waters, trusting that love remains even in fear. When you speak in that voice, remember it was not you who made the mud. You just sifted up the dirt that lay waiting.

bell hooks saw the mud and spoke its truth. Her auto-ethnography-autofiction-memoir-writing-of-the-self, whatever you want to call it writing, comes with and before self-writing was absorbed into self-theorising: a body-philosophy.

Speaking truth, not mealy post-truths from the puckered lips of wounded white men, but real truth with fierce love, earns you few friends. At best, what you mostly feel is others’ disapproval, at worst, their ire. It takes years before somebody says, ‘I hear you’. If I, a white queer woman living with chronic illness, know this, how did hooks live, year on year, as her full dissenting queer Black woman presence? How did she fill her world with love?

The answer lies, not in lies, but in knowing the communal truth of love, in loving difficult truth as a deepest, most intimate vulnerability. Rest in power, bell hooks. Rest in the power of your most intimate love: truth.’

Anna Backman Rogers: ‘For so many of us teaching feminist theory and history at university, hooks’ Teaching to Transgress (1994) is not merely the urtext, it is the most sublime, compassionate reminder of the responsibility we hold as teachers within a space of learning; for hooks, that space was always one of potentiality for compassionate exchange, for the possibility of teaching and learning from a place of shared vulnerability and radical honesty. She taught us never to wield pedagogy as an egotistical tool of power or belittlement. She taught us about the privilege of knowledge as an always provisional, open exchange through which communities can be built. She taught us that the classroom can be the most revolutionary of spaces. We will always be learning from bell hooks. We are all in her debt.’

Kristi McKim: ‘I could not have been a teacher without bell hooks. Twenty years ago, her Teaching to Transgress gave shape and language to the kind of teacher I wanted to become. Generally speaking, feminist theory fired me up and structured my feelings and life experience into shareable forms; yet reading bell hooks transformed this abstract intellectual experience into something actionable: teaching, she taught me, brings theory to practice. Rereading Teaching to Transgress recently, I appreciate all that she knew before I could begin to understand, how a classroom opens up through shared vulnerability and courage, how learning can be at once joyful and revolutionary. This past semester, my students and I (Film Theory, Hendrix College, Fall 2021) spent nearly an entire class session discussing just the opening paragraph of ‘The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators’, which begins as follows: ‘When thinking about black female spectators, I remember…’ She narrows her argument for Black women’s ‘oppositional gaze’ within the personal subject and verb “I remember” as a means toward opening up to the bold and earned pronouncement, with which the introductory paragraph concludes: ‘There is power in looking’. My students and I marvelled together at this paragraph’s perfect concentration of film spectatorship, personal history, education, enslavement, parenting, systems of surveillance and discipline, and contemporary politics, all woven together seamlessly and urgently. Her sentences not only bring theory to practice but are themselves an argument for the necessary interdisciplinarity of rigorous and exhilarating writing, work that bravely calls for and becomes a better world.’

Anna Misiak: ‘Humble and focused on the other, bell hooks’ beautiful yet simple words taught me kindness, sensitivity, and forgiveness. Like many others, I often recommend All About Love to my students and friends. After all, it is an excellent contemporary manual to navigate the emotional crises in today’s capitalist, patriarchal society.

Equally, if not more, I embrace bell hooks’ social and pedagogical thought—so perfectly articulated in her lectures, interviews, books, and articles. I believe in bell hook’s courageous drive to question privilege and post-identity politics, to promote equality by addressing the hierarchy. Her gentle preaching to end feminist conflicts in academia and beyond, her respect for intersectional feminist work to date and, most of all, her emphasis on female solidarity and strategic essentialism to combat oppression, are all part of who I am now.