Remembering bell hooks: A Legacy of Love and Intersectional Understanding

By: Ali Roberts

On December 15, 2021, the world lost a beloved poet, author, professor, and trailblazer in Black feminist and queer thought; bell hooks. bell hooks, who used lower-case letters for her name to center her work rather than herself, grounded her theory and activism in a radical love while demanding a feminist movement that recognizes the overlapping intersections of race, class, sexuality, and gender within systems of power. Her ideas were revolutionary and are now understood as intersectional feminism, which was originally articulated as intersectionality by law scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw within the context of the law and the erasure of Black women’s lives within the justice system.

bell hooks wrote to and for Black women and girls while ensuring her work was accessible and deeply personal, referencing and citing and lifting up as many women of color as she could. She focused on rooting social justice movements in love and care while giving so many marginalized individuals the language to express their experiences, thoughts, and feelings while navigating a hegemonic society. One of my first exposures to feminist writing and Black feminist theory was hooks’ 1991 essay “Theory as Liberatory Practice.” In the essay, hooks explains what brought her to theory, beginning in her childhood with the pain she experienced in feeling alienated from her family and her desperation to find belonging:

“Let me begin by saying that I came to theory because I was hurting—the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.” (hooks, 1991, p. 1)

Through her offerings, hooks opened up the definition of theory, asserting the fact that one doesn’t have to know they are practicing theory to be doing so. In “Theory as Liberatory Practice", she calls out the academic privileging of white feminist scholars, who often appropriate thought from Black feminists, Chicana theorists, and feminists of color, and the institutional gatekeeping of what counts as theory. Expanding our definition of theory opens up the possibilities of who can see themselves contributing to a liberatory future and makes theory accessible to more people, not just highly educated scholars.

The paradigmatic shift that occurred with the help of bell hooks’ work was and is vital to continue exposing the structural systems of power that provide more privilege and opportunity to particular members of society and the intersections of subjugation that occur in the lives of others. Alongside other Black feminists, such as Patricia Hill Collins and Audre Lorde, hooks urged feminists to de-center the experiences and perspectives of white feminists while moving the experiences of women enduring multiple intersecting oppressions “from margin to center,” as she discussed in her book by that name. bell hooks was pivotal in providing language and methods for understanding how the under-anticipation of women and girls of color in the world of science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics (STEAM) and knowledge production creates a lack of opportunity and can affect their self-perception. We can continue her legacy by engaging with her work and ideas while upholding the importance of accessibility and an ethic of love. Carrying her spirit forward means practicing love and fearlessness on the journey towards an equitable and liberatory future.

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/bell-hooks-death-call-action-ncna1286180 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/17/bell-hooks-obituary https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/books/bell-hooks-dead.html

Written by:

Ali Roberts

Graduate Research Assistant

Ali Roberts is a graduate student in Women and Gender Studies at Arizona State University. She is interested in exploring and describing visual and narrative culture, the impacts of narrative voice, and the ways narrative culture produces biases. Ali graduated from ASU in 2020 with a B.A. in Global Health and minored in Women and Gender Studies. Ali was an undergraduate research apprentice on the ASU ADVANCE Social Science Research team, which explored the life course experiences of women and faculty of color in STEM fields to identify gaps and discover opportunities to support professors throughout their careers. Ali is a self-identified artist, which provides an understanding of the influence of art on our lives and worldview, particularly in the realm of popular culture and media texts. Ali is interested in exploring feminist critique of these media texts and the implications of representations of historically marginalized communities, particularly in the realm of science fiction. In her free time, Ali loves painting, hiking, and rollerskating, as well as spending time with her partner and pets.