Pioneering author and activist bell hooks has died, aged 69. Born Gloria Jean Watkins, she adopted the pen name as a way to honour her maternal great-grandmother and went on to become a idolised leader in conversations on race, intersectional feminism, class, identity, gender, relationships and power.
Since the 1980s she published important books including Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, All About Love, Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood, Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, and Communion: The Female Search for Love. It’s difficult to appropriately describe hooks’ influence and legacy; author Roxane Gay wrote on Twitter that “Her loss is incalculable”.
The icon was known for her unique ability to get to the heart of complex issues in a way that showed both her empathy and intellectual prowess, with her writing and interviews providing plenty of inspiring, hard-hitting and honest truths. We wouldn’t call these her ‘best quotes’, but they are some that we’ve noted down over the years or are some of her most well-known.
“It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term ‘feminism’, to focus on the fact that to be ‘feminist’ in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.”
– Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, 1981
“No Black woman writer in this culture can write ‘too much’. Indeed, no woman writer can write ‘too much’ … No woman has ever written enough.”
– Remembered Rapture: The Writer At Work, 1999
“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.”
– All About Love: New Visions, 1999
“As long as women are using class or race power to dominate other women, feminist sisterhood cannot be fully realised.”
– Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, 2000
“The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourself. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin.”
– Communion: The Search for Female Love, 2002
“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.”
– The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, 2004
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 fantasised 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.”
– All About Love: New Visions, 1999
“There will be no mass-based feminist movement as long as feminist ideas are understood only by a well-educated few.”
– Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, 1984
“We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalised by mass media and rendered unproblematic.”
– Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism, 2006
"One of the most subversive institutions in the United States is the public library..”
– Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-Esteem, 2002
“Privilege is not in and of itself bad; what matters is what we do with privilege. I want to live in a world where all women have access to education, and all women can earn PhD’s, if they so desire. Privilege does not have to be negative, but we have to share our resources and take direction about how to use our privilege in ways that empower those who lack it.”
– Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism, 2006
“When liberal whites fail to understand how they can and/or do embody white supremacist values and beliefs even though they may not embrace racism as prejudice or domination (especially domination that involves coercive control), they cannot recognise the ways their actions support and affirm the very structure of racist domination and oppression that they wish to see eradicated.”
– Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, 1989
“Women will only be truly sexually liberated when we arrive at a place where we can see ourselves as having sexual value and agency irrespective of whether of not we are the objects of male desire.”
– Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, 2000
