Back More
Salem Press

Table of Contents

From Suffrage to the Senate America's Political Women: An Encyclopedia of Leaders, Causes & Issues

hooks, bell (née Gloria Watkins) (b. 1952)

African American intellectual bell hooks has criticized the feminist movement for its racism and has argued that it must recognize that women have a variety of backgrounds and experiences and that race and class affect women’s lives as much as gender. She seeks to understand race, gender, and class biases by developing theories, beginning with her own experiences and the experiences of other women. She further seeks to use her theories to alter the ways people live their lives, which she calls the practical phase of her work. To involve a larger audience than academics, hooks uses popular culture to link familiar movies or books to theory, providing a base from which to engage students and readers and then move them towards considering theory.

College professor and mentor, hooks has published several works, including Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981); Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (1984); Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990); Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (1991); Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994); We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (2003); and Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003).

Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, bell hooks was given the name Gloria Jean Watkins. She took her maternal great-grandmother’s name when she began her writing career. She uses lowercase letters instead of capital letters because she believes that a person who has written something is less important than what she or he has written. hooks completed her undergraduate studies at Stanford University in 1973 and earned her master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin in 1976 and her PhD from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1983. She has taught at various California universities, Yale University, Oberlin College, and the City College of New York.

See also: Feminist Movement

References: H. W. Wilson, Current Biography Yearbook, 1995 (1995); hooks, with MacKinnon, Sisterhood: Beyond Public and Private (1996); “bell hooks,” http://www.education.miami.edu/ep/contemporaryed/bell_hooks/bell_hooks.html (accessed July 23, 2012).

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
"Hooks, Bell (née Gloria Watkins) (b. 1952)." From Suffrage to the Senate America's Political Women: An Encyclopedia of Leaders, Causes & Issues, edited by Suzanne O’Dea, Salem Press, 2019. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Suffrage3e_0463.
APA 7th
hooks, bell (née Gloria Watkins) (b. 1952). From Suffrage to the Senate America's Political Women: An Encyclopedia of Leaders, Causes & Issues, In S. O’Dea (Ed.), Salem Press, 2019. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Suffrage3e_0463.
CMOS 17th
"Hooks, Bell (née Gloria Watkins) (b. 1952)." From Suffrage to the Senate America's Political Women: An Encyclopedia of Leaders, Causes & Issues, Edited by Suzanne O’Dea. Salem Press, 2019. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Suffrage3e_0463.