bell hooks

Lino portrait by Carine

But love is really more of an interactive process. It’s about what we do not just what we feel. It’s a verb, not a noun.

bell hooks

Late 2021 we lost a great thinker: bell hooks. She was a writer, teacher, intellectual and prolific reader (one book a day!). In her work, she wrote about love, education and the importance of nuance. I first read her work about intersectionality, the crossovers of identities and issues like feminism and racism, but her works also include discussions on otherness, democracy, religion, celebrity, love, gangster rap, representation and civil rights.

There are some great talks with bell hooks on YouTube that are well worth a watch. Critical thinking was central to her approach. She wasn’t afraid to push boundaries and go against current opinions (the words she used were dissonance and transgression) and brought nuance and depth to well-known arguments. In an interview on ‘speaking freely’, for example, she brought love into the argument of free speech. If expect friction as part of our closest loving relationships, how come we don’t elsewhere in society? She recognised polarisation and the dangers of ‘cancel culture’ in the 90s, well before it had a name.

Although she disliked the term ‘public intellectual’, it was often used to describe her. It fit her so well: she advanced ideas within the public realm and engaged with those who responded to them. Her writing was less academic and more personal because she didn’t use footnotes and used “I” and “you”. She taught everyone to listen, consider and think for themselves.

To create loving men, we must love males. Loving maleness is different from praising and rewarding males for living up to sexist-defined notions of male identity. Caring about men because of what they do for us is not the same as loving males for simply being. When we love maleness, we extend our love whether males are performing or not. Performance is different from simply being. In patriarchal culture males are not allowed simply to be who they are and to glory in their unique identity. Their value is always determined by what they do. In an anti-patriarchal culture males do not have to prove their value and worth. They know from birth that simply being gives them value, the right to be cherished and loved.

bell hooks

Also look up

The term intersectionality was not coined by bell hooks, but by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw in 1989, a leading scholar of critical race theory.

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