Voices from the Gaps: Women Writers of Color

A good, concise biography and some useful links and reference material.

An intellectual and a scholar, bell hooks is devoted to critical consciousness and awareness of oneself and society. Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky on September 25, 1952, bell hooks, nee Gloria Watkins, has been critically conscious since childhood. She made her "commitment to intellectual life in the segregated black world of [her] childhood,"

South End Press: bell hooks speaking engagements

A frequent hooks publisher, South End Press, lists her speaking engagements. You'll also find Praise for bell and the all important contact email address.

To schedule an event or interview with bell, please email events@southendpress.org.

On Death and Patriarchy in Crooklyn

hooks writes insightful commentary on popular culture, and her critique of Spike Lee's Crooklyn is an excellent example of it.

Death and dying are merely a sub-text in Crooklyn, a diversionary ploy that creates a passive emotional backdrop onto which Lee imposes a vision of black family that is fundamentally conservative and in no way in opposition to the beliefs and values of white mainstream culture. Lee's own life story is most interesting, but when he exploits those memories to advance patriarchal thinking, the narrative loses its appeal.

 

Sexism and Misogyny: Who Takes the Rap? :: Misogyny, gangsta rap, and The Piano

An interesting read, even if you're only interested in seeing how hooks weaves The Piano into the critique.

For the past several months white mainstream media has been calling me to hear my views on gangsta rap. Whether major television networks, or small independent radio shows, they seek me out for the black and feminist "take" on the issue. After I have my say, I am never called back, never invited to do the television shows or the radio spots. I suspect they call, confident that when we talk they will hear the hardcore "feminist" trash of gangsta rap. When they encounter instead the hardcore feminist critique of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, they lose interest.

Killing Rage: Ending Racism

This page excerpts Chapter 1 from hooks' passionate look inward at the effects of and antidote to racism.

I am writing this essay sitting beside an anonymous white male that I long to murder. We have just been involved in an incident on an airplane where K, my friend and traveling companion, has been called to the front of the plane and publicly attacked by white female stewardesses who accuse her of trying to occupy a seat in first class that is not assigned to her. Although she had been assigned the seat, she was not given the appropriate boarding pass. When she tries to explain they ignore her. They keep explaining to her in loud voices as though she is a child, as though she is a foreigner who does not speak airline English, that she must take another seat.

White Male Ways of Knowing

Clifford Staples, a University of North Dakota sociologist, reviews Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics

About two years ago my friend Mike sent me bell hooks' review of Spike Lee's "Do The Right Thing," which was published in Zeta Magazine. Mike's photocopy budget is even worse than mine, so I figured if he went to the trouble of smuggling these pages out to me then he really wanted me to read them. So I did. I had seen the film prior to reading the review, and, just like hooks's white male colleagues, I too had "loved it". Her critical review challenged me to rethink my initial response to the film, and got me interested in reading more of her work.

Shambhala Sun Online: bell articles and conversations

hooks' critics might see her frequent contributions to The magazine about waking up, bringing a Buddhist view to all the important issues in modern life as somewhat anachronistic. Good enough reason for them to take a second look. From her conversation with Thich Nhat Hanh:

As teacher and guide Thich Nhat Hanh has been a presence in my life for more than twenty years. In the last few years I began to doubt the heart connection I felt with him because we had never met or spoken to one another, yet his work was ever-present in my work. I began to feel the need to meet him face to face, even as my intuitive self kept saying that it would happen when the time was right. My work in love has been to trust that intuitive self that kept saying that it would happen when the time was right.

bell on Video: Cultural Criticism & Transformation

A, ahem, less than glowing review of hooks' video. By no means representative (see the next entry for a counter-example.)

If when I die, I'm shoved tumbling into hell for my various breaches of political correctness and my seamy career as a closet cultural critic, this is the video I'll be forced to watch for a terrible flaming eternity....

A Small Sampling of Publications Seized or Detained by Canada Customs

bell is in pretty distinguished company here, and, well, some not so distinguished. A partial list.

* Adams, Carol: The Sexual Politics of Meat: a feminist-vegetarian critical theory
* Altman, Dennis: Homosexual Oppression and Liberation
* Bierce, Ambrose: The Devil's Advocate: An Ambrose Bierce Reader
* Burroughs, William: The Naked Lunch
* Dworkin, Andrea: Woman Hating and Pornography: Men Possessing Women
* Hedgepeth, Evonne and Helmich, Joan: Teaching about Sexuality and HIV
* hooks, bell: Black Looks: race and representation
* Irving, John: The Hotel New Hampshire
* Linden, Ruth: Against Sadomasochism
* Mitchell, Mark, ed.:The Penguin Book of International Gay Writing
* Reage, Pauline: The Story of O
* Sade, the Marquis de: The 120 Days of Sodom
* Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky: Tendencies; Fat Art, Thin Art (Duke University Press) and other titles
* Steinbeck, John: The Way
* Oscar Wilde: Teleny
* Willis, Danielle: Dogs in Lingerie
* Caught Looking: Feminism, Pornography and Censorship
* Nudist Magazines of the '50s and '60s
* The Kama Sutra
* Betty Page Reading Cards
* Tin Tin
* Piercing Fans International Quarterly

Postmodern Blackness

According to hooks:

Very few African-American intellectuals have talked or written about postmodernism.

Fueling the Bonfire.

It's Naomi Wolf vs. bell hooks: Chomsky & Foucault referee

Additional feminism resources and bibliographies to be found in the Nomadic Spirit's Naomi Wolf Resources and Susan Faludi Resources pages.