bell hooks 1952 – 2021

bell hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins, was an American Black feminist philosopher, cultural critic, and the most widely read public writer of Black feminist thought in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, written when she was nineteen, mounted an early and enduring critique of the racial and class blind spots of mainstream American feminism, while Teaching to Transgress and All About Love made the practice of education and the work of love into central political categories. She insisted on the lower-case form of her chosen name to keep attention on the work rather than on the writer.

Gloria Jean Watkins, who wrote under the pen name bell hooks after her great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks, was born at Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in September 1952. She took her bachelor's at Stanford in 1973, her master's at the University of Wisconsin in 1976, and her doctorate at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1983 with a dissertation on Toni Morrison. She taught at Yale, Oberlin, and the City College of New York, and from 2004 was Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies at Berea College in her native Kentucky.

Her books include Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism (1981), Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Talking Back (1989), Yearning (1990), Black Looks (1992), Teaching to Transgress (1994), Killing Rage (1995), Bone Black (1996), Feminism Is for Everybody (2000), All About Love (2000), Communion (2002), We Real Cool (2004), and the young adult title Be Boy Buzz (2002).

hooks insisted from the start of her career that any feminism that did not begin with the lives of poor and Black women would reproduce the structures it claimed to oppose. Her critical pedagogy, indebted to Paulo Freire and to her own Baptist Kentucky upbringing, treated the classroom as a practice of freedom, and her late writings on a love ethic, on Black masculinity, and on Appalachian place reached audiences far beyond the academy. She died at Berea, Kentucky, in December 2021.