feminist theory from margin to center sparknotes

In “Madonna: Plantation Mistress or Soul Sister?,” included in her 1992 book “Black Looks: Race and Representation,” she unpacked the singer’s groin-grabbing appropriation of “phallic Black masculinity,” which she used to “taunt” white men with what they lack. But she also engaged with popular culture, in essays that could be as rhetorically blunt as they were intellectually serpentine. She saw the university setting, which was dismissed by some as an elitist space, instead as a site of revolutionary possibility. “I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend - to grasp what was happening around and within me.” “I came to theory because I was hurting,” she wrote in her 1991 essay Theory as Liberatory Practice. For her, theory wasn’t an abstract exercise, but a tool for self-understanding and survival. In the late 1980s, hooks came to broader prominence in the heyday of a new generation of university-based Black public intellectuals, and she was the rare woman in a circle seemingly defined by male scholars like Henry Louis Gates Jr., Michael Eric Dyson and Cornel West (with whom she wrote “Breaking Bread” in 1991).īut while hooks spent her entire career in the academy, teaching at Yale, Oberlin, Berea College in Kentucky and other institutions, she was not solely of it.

In her next book, “Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center,” hooks gave a crisp definition of feminism as “the struggle to end sexist oppression.” If she was critical of “white, bourgeois, hegemonic dominance of feminist movements,” she also warned against using such critiques to “trash, reject or dismiss” feminism itself. “She had all the chops to write in this more traditional, drier academic style, but she chose differently because she wanted to connect with everyday people.” “She came from this really sophisticated world of cultural theory, but she connected it to her very particular experience of growing up in Jim Crow Kentucky,” Perry said. “For so many people, bell hooks was their first introduction to social theory, critiques of patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism.”īut even more, she said, hooks’s writing - and her impact - was personal. “I think we can’t overstate her influence,” Imani Perry, a professor of African American studies at Princeton said. If the outpouring felt more intense than the usual tributes to departed scholars, admirers say that merely reflected the extraordinary way she mixed the emotional with the intellectual in her quest to make the experiences of Black women not just visible, but central to a sweeping reimagining of society. The news that bell hooks had died at 69 spread quickly across social media on Wednesday, prompting a flood of posts featuring favorite quotes about love, justice, men, women, community and healing, as well as testimonials about how this pioneering Black feminist writer had changed, or saved, lives.

Feminist theory from margin to center sparknotes