In Celebration of bell hooks

in celebration of bell hooks - “Love empowers us to live fully and die well. Death becomes, then, not an end to life but a part of living.”

bell hooks died this week. She was a noted author, professor, activist, and mind changer.

Born in Kentucky in 1952, Gloria Jean Watkins attended Stanford, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of California-Santa Cruz. She took on her pen name after her grandmother Bell Blair Hooks.

Many people wonder why hooks is always spelled in the lowercase. When asked about this, she said:

“When the feminist movement was at its zenith in the late ‘60s and early ’70s, there was a lot of moving away from the idea of the person. It was: let’s talk about the ideas behind the work, and the people matter less… It was kind of a gimmicky thing, but lots of feminist women were doing it.”

So, if you see people capitalizing her pen name, remind them that isn’t what she wanted.

Who bell Was to Me

I hate to say that I only recently began to dig more into bell’s work. This week, while working, I’ve been listening to conversations and her work, though.

Through listening to bell, I’ve found so many of my own viewpoints validated and affirmed. Before, I often felt like I was alone and without as much community in the way I view love, justice, and how we throw off oppression. One of the videos that I share below is her and Cornel West talking. I wouldn’t have ever said that my politics aligned with hooks and West on my own accord, especially as a white person. That said, I found my people in that video, in their work.

I wish that I had been in a space to dig into this work sooner. That said, I’m so glad that I’m finally here.

Articles About bell

Read bell’s Works

Since so many of these links are PDFs, I’ve marked those that are not with an asterisk (*).

My Favorite bell hooks Quotes

On Love

“A generous heart is always open, always ready to receive our going and coming. In the midst of such love we need never fear abandonment. This is the most precious gift true love offers – the experience of knowing we always belong.”
“Love is an action, never simply a feeling.”
“To think of actions shaping feelings is one way we rid ourselves of conventionally accepted assumptions… If we were constantly remembering that love is as love does, we would not use the word in a manner that devalues and degrades its meaning.”
“But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.”
“Since loving is about knowing, we have more meaningful love relationships when we know each other and it takes time to know each other.”
“Everywhere we learn that love is important, and yet we are bombarded by its failure….We still believe in love’s promise.”
“The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others.”
“To be loving is to be open to grief. to be touched by sorrow, even sorrow that is unending. we need not contain grief when we use it as a means to intensify our love for the dead and dying, for those who remain alive.”
“Love empowers us to live fully and die well. Death becomes, then, not an end to life but a part of living.”
“To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.”
“Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust.”
“The wounded heart learns self-love by first overcoming low self-esteem.”
“Choosing to be honest is the first step in the process of love. There is no practitioner of love who deceives. Once the choice has been made to be honest, then the next step on love’s path is communication.”
“Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know love we have to invest time and commitment…’dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love — which is to transform us.’ Many people want love to function like a drug, giving them an immediate and sustained high. They want to do nothing, just passively receive the good feeling.”
“Schools for love do not exist. Everyone assumes that we will know how to love instinctively. Despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, we still accept that the family is the primary school for love. Those of us who do not learn how to love among family are expected to experience love in romantic relationships. However, this love often eludes us.”
“The practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt, pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside our control.”
“If only one party in the relationship is working to create love, to create the space of emotional connection, the dominator model remains in place and the relationship just becomes a site for continuous power struggle.”
“The practice of love is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination.”
“One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others. There was a time when I felt lousy about my over-forty body, saw myself as too fat, too this, or too that. Yet I fantasized about finding a lover who would give me the gift of being loved as I am. It is silly, isn’t it, that I would dream of someone else offering to me the acceptance and affirmation I was withholding from myself. This was a moment when the maxim ‘You can never love anybody if you are unable to love yourself’ made clear sense. And I add, ‘Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.’ “
“In an ideal world we would all learn in childhood to love ourselves. We would grow, being secure in our worth and value, spreading love wherever we went, letting our light shine. If we did not learn self-love in our youth, there is still hope. The light of love is always in us, no matter how cold the flame. It is always present, waiting for the spark to ignite, waiting for the heart to awaken and call us back to the first memory of being the life force inside a dark place waiting to be born – waiting to see the light.”
“When we face pain in relationships our first response is often to sever bonds rather than to maintain commitment.”
“Fundamentally, to begin the practice of love we must slow down and be still enough to bear witness in the present moment. If we accept that love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust, we can then be guided by this understanding. We can use these skillful means as a map in our daily life to determine right action.”
“When we commit to love in our daily life, habits are shattered. We are necessarily working to end domination. Because we no longer are playing by the safe rules of the status quo, rules that if we obey guarantee us a specific outcome, love moves us to a new ground of being. This movement is what most people fear.”
“Before I die in this world I want to have a sense of what it is to love and be loved… many of us coming out of abusive settings have not had that. We don’t know what that looks like – and that’s the other thing. Sometimes you have to find out what something looks like and then you have to grieve that you don’t have it. And you may be getting old and you don’t have it. So you have to figure out, what is enough within that?”
“What does it mean to value a friend as you would value a partner? And that is again I think totally counter hegemonic because everything in our culture is constantly telling us that the partner is everything – finding the partner. And so not finding love but finding a partner. And, especially Black women, that’s when we get hooked up with so many people who treat us cruelly, abusively – because we’re trying to find a partner. We’re trying to validate that I’m worth something because I have found somebody and not that I am hoping to love. And then having to grieve when that love doesn’t come…”
“To me, all the work I do is built on a foundation of loving-kindness. Love illuminates matters.”
“Queer not as being about who you are having sex with, that can be a dimension of it, but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”

On Justice

“There are times when we have to stand for justice. And there are times when, in standing for justice, we have to turn away from people that we would ordinarily maybe want to be with. And that is a difficult part of struggle.”
“Rarely, if ever, are any of us healed in isolation. Healing is an act of communion.”
“To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.”
“When we drop fear, we can draw nearer to people, we can draw nearer to the earth, we can draw nearer to all the heavenly creatures that surround us.”
“Sometimes people try to destroy you, precisely because they recognize your power — not because they don’t see it, but because they see it and they don’t want it to exist.”
“Only grown-ups think that the things children say come out of nowhere. We know they come from the deepest parts of ourselves.”
“What we do is more important than what we say or what we say we believe.”
“True resistance begins with people confronting pain…and wanting to do something to change it.”
“For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?”
“Definitions are vital starting points for the imagination. What we cannot imagine cannot come into being. A good definition marks our starting point and lets us know where we want to end up.”
“Dominator culture has tried to keep us all afraid, to make us choose safety instead of risk, sameness instead of diversity. Moving through that fear, finding out what connects us, reveling in our differences; this is the process that brings us closer, that gives us a world of shared values, of meaningful community.”
“All our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of complicity.”
“We can’t combat white supremacy unless we can teach people to love justice. You have to love justice more than your allegiance to your race, sexuality and gender. It is about justice.”
“The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem.”
“If I do not speak in a language that can be understood there is little chance for a dialogue.”
“Most folks don’t seem to want to believe that one can be struggling for justice and into nuanced cultural perspectives, aesthetics, and the vernacular at the same time.”
“It takes courage and critical vigilance not to conform. It takes knowing the rules of the game, how to play and win, as well as finding strategies to win without compromising in ways that violate or destroy the integrity of your being.”

On Writing and Her Work

“When I sit down to write I do not imagine my pen will be guided by anything other than the strength of my will, imagination and intellect. When the spirit moves into that writing, shaping its direction, that is for me a moment of pure mystery. It is a visitation of the sacred that I cannot call forth at will. I can only hope that it will come. This hope is grounded in my own experience that those moments when I feel my imagination and the words I put together to be touched by the presence of divine spirit, my writing is transformed.”
“Words have the power to heal wounds. Out of the mysterious place where words first come to be ‘made flesh’—that place which is all holiness—I am given the grace to work with words in a spirit of right livelihood which calls me to peace, reflection, and connectedness with communities of readers whom I may never know or see. Writing becomes then a way to embrace the mysterious, to walk with spirits, and an entry into the realm of the sacred.”
“Writing has been for me one of the ways to encounter the divine. As a discipline of mind and heart, working with words has become a spiritual practice.”
“I write with intensity, discipline and constancy, because this is the work that calls me—the vocation of my heart. The writing I do is always meant to serve as critical intervention, as resistance. Balancing the desire to have work meaningfully touch relevant issues without, as well as always reflect artistic expression and integrity within, is not an easy task. While much of my cultural criticism challenges representations that reinforce existing structures of domination, it also offers new and different representations. The work then is always part of our struggle for liberation.”

Chronic Sex

because sexuality doesn't depend on ability