Gloria Jean Watkins (born September 25, 1952), better known by her pen name bell hooks (intentionally uncapitalized), is an American author, feminist, and social activist. She took her nom de plume from her maternal great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks.
Her writing has focused on the interconnectivity of race, capitalism, and gender and what she describes as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She has published over thirty books and numerous scholarly and mainstream articles, appeared in several documentary films and participated in various public lectures. Primarily through a postmodern perspective, hooks has addressed race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality, mass media and feminism.
Read more about Bell Hooks: Influences, Teaching To Transgress, Feminist Theory, Criticism, Awards and Nominations, Select Bibliography, Film Appearances, Further Reading
Famous quotes by bell hooks:
“The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom.”
—bell hooks (b. c. 1955)
“What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy.”
—bell hooks (b. c. 1955)
“Assumptions that racism is more oppressive to black men than black women, then and now ... based on acceptance of patriarchal notions of masculinity.”
—bell hooks (b. c. 1955)
“The political core of any movement for freedom in the society has to have the political imperative to protect free speech.”
—bell hooks (b. 1955)