bell hooks

Question 1

Historical context affecting their writing:

Answer 1

• Segregated America in the era of Jim Crow laws - legalised racial segregation and systemic discrimination - oppression is structural and learned not innate
• While integration resolved these, black students still were marginalised and underprioritised compared to their white counterparts
• Media and culture in the 1950s-70s reinforced patriarchy and black stereotypes

Question 2

Key work

Answer 2

Feminism is for Everyone (2000)
Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981)
Displays her work on intersectionality

Question 3

Quotations

Answer 3

“As long as women are using class or race power to dominate other women, feminist sisterhood cannot be fully realised.”
“A movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression.”
“Sexist thinking made us judge each other without compassion and punish one another harshly. Feminist thinking helped us unlearn female self- hatred.”
“Black women have been asked to bear the burden of sexist, racist, and classist oppression simultaneously”
“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”

Question 4

Personal life:

Answer 4

• Born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952 in Deep South America (Kentucky)
• She experienced segregation due to her race
• Renamed herself after her great grandmother who was sharp tongued and used lowercase to decentre herself from her works - so people would pay more attention to her ideas than her name and to reclaim herself from stereotypes
• her mother was physically abused by her father
• working class background

Question 5

Philosophical developments:

Answer 5

Buddhism and Christian influences
Sojourner Truth
Marxism/Socialism
Gramsci
Radical feminists
Civil rights movement

Question 6

What were her beliefs on human nature?

Answer 6

• Love is fundamental and is her basis for ethics - it is a practice or an action, not a feeling
• Racism and the patriarchy distort people’s ability to love one another by ‘othering’ people of different groups
• People are therefore socialised into domination not born that way

Question 7

What were her beliefs on society?

Answer 7

Society is formed by multiple systems of oppression (sexism, racism, and classism) not one
- These teach hierarchies of power
- Therefore she believes in intersectionality (a term coined by Kimberle Crenshaw) which is something most of her works centre around
- e.g. Ain’t I A Woman pays homage to Sojourner Truth, a black rights and feminist activist rather than somebody who only works for one cause

Question 8

What were her beliefs on the state?

Answer 8

The state helps to reinforce systems of domination, especially through education, the media and law enforcement
- Critical of top-down power structures which she believed maintained inequality e.g. Jim Crow laws
- Supported grassroots movements and cultural change
- Not strictly anarchist or Marxist but borrowed ideas from them

Question 9

What were her beliefs on the economy?

Answer 9

Strongly critical of capitalism - promoted greed and exploitations, worsens inequality and turns people into consumers rather than caring individuals
- Reinforces race, gender and class oppression
- She described modern society as an “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy”
- believed in economic justice, distributing resources fairly and prioritising people over profit

Question 10

Summary

Answer 10

• Love as a political force
• Prioritisation of education and consciousness-raising
• Cultural as well as structual change