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Bell Hooks Quotes
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Gloria Jean Watkins , better known by her pen name bell hooks, is an American author, professor, feminist, and social activist. The name "bell hooks" is borrowed from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks.The focus of hooks' writing has been the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she describes as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She has published more than 30 books and numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. She has addressed race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism. In 2014, she founded the bell hooks Institute at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky. Wikipedia  

✵ 25. September 1952   •   Other names 貝爾‧胡克斯, 벨 훅스, بيل هوكس
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Bell Hooks: 112   quotes 11   likes

Bell Hooks Quotes

“The fear of being alone, or of being unloved, had caused women of all races to passively accept sexism and sexist oppression.”

Bell Hooks

(1981)

Women , Fear

“When television screens had only rare images of black folks, black people were more critically vigilant about these representations. Even when blackness was represented 'positiviely,' as it was in early black television shows like Julia, which focused on the life of a black nurse, the beauty standard was a reflection of white supremacist aesthetics.”

Bell Hooks

Rock My Soul (2003)

Life , People , Beauty

“The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist,.”

Bell Hooks

Ain't I a Woman (1981)

Women

“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.”

Bell Hooks

The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (2004), p. 66

Men , Success , Parting

“The significance of feminist movement (when it is not co-opted by opportunistic, reactionary forces) is that it offers a new ideological meeting ground for the sexes, a space for criticism, struggle, and transformation.”

Bell Hooks

(1984)

Sex

“. The struggle to end sexist oppression that focuses on destroying the cultural basis for such domination strengthens other liberation struggles. Individuals who fight for the eradication of sexism without struggles to end racism or classism undermine their own efforts. Individuals who fight for the eradication of racism or classism while supporting sexist oppression are helping to maintain the cultural basis of all forms of group oppression.”

Bell Hooks book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984)

Support , Effort , Help , Fight

“Open, honest, truth-telling individuals value privacy. We all need spaces where we can be alone with thoughts and feelings - where we can experience healthy psychological autonomy and can choose to share when we want to.”

Bell Hooks

All About Love: New Visions (2000)

Truth , Feeling

“The crisis facing men is not the crisis of masculinity, it is the crisis of patriarchal masculinity. Until we make this distinction clear, men will continue to fear that any critique of patriarchy represents a threat.”

Bell Hooks

The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (2004)

Men , Fear

“Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique is still heralded as having paved the way for contemporary feminist movement-it was written as if these women did not exist. Friedan's famous phrase, "the problem that has no name," often quoted to describe the condition of women in this society, actually referred to the plight of a select group of college-educated, middle and upper class, married white women-housewives bored with leisure, with the home, with children, with buying products, who wanted more out of life. Friedan concludes her first chapter by stating: "We can no longer ignore that voice within women that says: 'I want something more than my husband and my children and my house.'" That "more" she defined as careers. She did not discuss who would be called in to take care of the children and maintain the home if more women like herself were freed from their house labor and given equal access with white men to the professions. She did not speak of the needs of women without men, without children, without homes. She ignored the existence of all non-white women and poor white women. She did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute, than to be a leisure class housewife. She made her plight and the plight of white women like herself synonymous with a condition affecting all American women. In so doing, she deflected attention away from her classism, her racism, her sexist attitudes towards the masses of American women. In the context of her book, Friedan makes clear that the women she saw as victimized by sexism were college-educated, white women who were compelled by sexist conditioning to remain in the home. … Specific problems and dilemmas of leisure class white housewives were real concerns that merited consideration and change but they were not the pressing political concerns of masses of women. Masses of women were concerned about economic survival, ethnic and racial discrimination, etc. When Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, more than one third of all women were in the work force. Although many women longed to be housewives, only women with leisure time and money could actually shape their identities on the model of the feminine mystique.”

Bell Hooks book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

p. 1-2 https://books.google.com/books?id=uvIQbop4cdsC&pg=PA1.
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory

Life , Women , Men , Money

“Black women control the world. We are through being discriminated against.”

Bell Hooks

Communion: The Female Search for Love (2002) ISBN 0-06-093829-3

Women , World

“In classroom settings I have often listened to groups of students tell me that, a black female, or a black male, which identity would they choose. Each time I do this exercise, most individuals, irrespective of gender or race invariably choose whiteness, and most often male whiteness. Black females are the least chosen. When I ask students to explain their choice they proceed to do a sophisticated analysis of privilege based on race (with perspectives that take gender and class into consideration).”

Bell Hooks

Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003)

Exercises , Time

“Feminist thought and practice were fundamentally altered when radical class I attended—a class where everyone except me was white and female and mostly from privileged backgrounds—when I interrupted a discussion about the origins of domination in which it was argued that when a child is coming out of the womb the factor deemed most important is gender. I stated that when the child of two black parents is coming out of the womb the factor that is considered first is skin color, then gender, because race and gender will determine that child's fate. Looking at the interlocking nature of gender, race, and class was the perspective that changed the direction of feminist thought.”

Bell Hooks book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

p. xiii https://books.google.com/books?id=L1WvBAAAQBAJ&pg=PR13.
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Preface

Fate , Color , Nature , Parent

“Indeed much of the literature written about black folks in the post-civil rights era emphasized the need for jobs. Material advancement was deemed the pressing agenda. Mental health concerns were not a high priority.”

Bell Hooks

Rock My Soul (2003)

Health , Literature

“While it is in no way racist for any author to write a book exclusively about white women, it is fundamentally racist for books to be published that focus solely on the American white woman's experience in which that experience is assumed to be the American woman's experience.”

Bell Hooks

(1981)

Women , Books , Way

“Women who are daily beaten down, mentally, physically, and spiritually-women who are powerless to change their condition in life. They are a silent majority. A mark of their victimization is that they accept their lot in life without visible question, without organized protest, without collective anger or rage.”

Bell Hooks

p. 1 https://books.google.com/books?id=uvIQbop4cdsC&pg=PA1.
(1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory

Question , Anger , Women , Life

“The understanding I had by age thirteen of patriarchal politics created in me expectations of the feminist movement that were quite different from those of young, middle class, white women. When I entered my first women's studies class at Stanford University in the early 1970s, white women were revelling in the joy of being together-to them it was an important, momentous occasion. I had not known a life where women had not been together, where women had not helped, protected, and loved one another deeply. I had not known white women who were ignorant of the impact of race and class on their social status and consciousness (Southern white women often have a more realistic perspective on racism and classism than white women in other areas of the United States.) I did not feel sympathetic to white peers who maintained that I could not expect them to have knowledge of or understand the life experiences of black women. Despite my background (living in racially segregated communities) I knew about the lives of white women, and certainly no white women lived in our neighborhood, attended our schools, or worked in our homes When I participated in feminist groups, I found that white women adopted a condescending attitude towards me and other non-white participants. The condescension they directed at black women was one of the means they employed to remind us that the women's movement was "theirs"-that we were able to participate because they allowed it, even encouraged it; after all, we were needed to legitimate the process. They did not see us as equals. And though they expected us to provide first hand accounts of black experience, they felt it was their role to decide if these experiences were authentic. Frequently, college-educated black women (even those from poor and working class backgrounds) were dismissed as mere imitators. Our presence in movement activities did not count, as white women were convinced that "real" blackness meant speaking the patois of poor black people, being uneducated, streetwise, and a variety of other stereotypes. If we dared to criticize the movement or to assume responsibility for reshaping feminist ideas and introducing new ideas, our voices were tuned out, dismissed, silenced. We could be heard only if our statements echoed the sentiments of the dominant discourse.”

Bell Hooks

Source: (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory, pp. 11-12.

Love , Life , Women , People

“Feminism is the struggle to end sexist oppression. Therefore, it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture on various levels, as well as a commitment to reorganizing society so that the self-development of people can take precedence over imperialism, economic expansion, and material desires.”

Bell Hooks

(1984)

People

“My thoughts have been shaped by the conviction that feminism must become a mass based, transformative impact on society.”

Bell Hooks book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

p. xiii https://books.google.com/books?id=L1WvBAAAQBAJ&pg=PR18.
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Preface

“A dangerous form of psychological splitting had to have taken place, and it continues to take place, in the psyches of many African Americans who can on one hand oppose racism, and then on the other hand passively absorb ways of thinking about beauty that are rooted in white supremacist thought.”

Bell Hooks

Rock My Soul (2003)

Beauty , Way , Thinking

“To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body. As black Americans living in a small Kentucky town, the railroad tracks were a daily reminder of our marginality. Across those tracks were paved streets, stores we could not enter, restaurants we could not eat in, and people we could not look directly in the face. Across those tracks was a world we could work in as maids, as janitors, as prostitutes, as long as it was in a service capacity. We could enter that world but we could not live there. We had always to return to the margin, to cross the tracks, to shacks and abandoned houses on the edge of town. There were laws to ensure our return. To not return was to risk being punished. Living as we did-on the edge-we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as on the margin. We understood both. This mode of seeing reminded us of the existence of a whole universe, a main body made up of both margin and center. Our survival depended on an ongoing public awareness of the separation between margin and center and an ongoing private acknowledgment that we were a necessary, vital part of that whole. This sense of wholeness, impressed upon our consciousness by the structure of our daily lives, provided us an oppositional world view-a mode of seeing unknown to most of our oppressors, that sustained us, aided us in our struggle to transcend poverty and despair, strengthened our sense of self and our solidarity. … Much feminist theory emerges from privileged women who live at the center, whose perspectives on reality rarely include knowledge and awareness of the lives of women and men who live in the margin. As a consequence, feminist theory lacks wholeness, lacks the broad analysis that could encompass a variety of human experiences. Although feminist theorists are aware of the need to develop ideas and analysis that encompass a larger number of experiences, that serve to unify rather than to polarize, such theory is complex and slow in formation. At its most visionary, it will emerge from individuals who have knowledge of both margin and center.”

Bell Hooks book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

p. xvii https://books.google.com/books?id=ClWvBAAAQBAJ&pg=PT8.
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Preface

Women , Men , People , World

“As more and more women acquired prestige, fame, or money from by the ruling capitalist patriarchy.”

Bell Hooks book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

Source: Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory, p. 7.

Women , Money

“A central tenet of modern feminist thought has been the assertion that "all women are oppressed." This assertion implies that women share a common lot, that factors like class, race, religion,, and it is both appropriate and necessary that we speak against such oppression.”

Bell Hooks book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

p. 5 https://books.google.com/books?id=L1WvBAAAQBAJ&pg=PA5.
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory

Women , Religion

“Marcus Garvey, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, Amiri Baraka and other black male leaders have righteously supported patriarchy. They have all argued that it is absolutely necessary for black men to relegate black women to a subordinate position both in the political sphere and in home life.”

Bell Hooks

(1981)

Life , Women , Men , Home

“The more Lil' Kim distorted her natural beauty to become a cartoonlike caricature of whiteness, the larger her success.”

Bell Hooks

Rock My Soul (2003)

Beauty , Nature , Success

“Racism has always been a divisive force separating black men and white men, and sexism has been a force that unites the two groups.”

Bell Hooks

(1981)

Men

“As we search as a nation for constructive ways to challenge racism and white supremacy, it is absolutely essential that progressive female voices gain a hearing.”

Bell Hooks

Killing Rage: Ending Racism (1995)

Way , Search

“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.”

Bell Hooks

(1981)

Women , People , Sense

“If one assumes, as I do, that battery is caused by the belief permeating this culture that hierarchical rule and coercive authority are natural, then all our relationships tend to be based on power and domination, and thus all forms of battery are linked.”

Bell Hooks

(1984)

Nature

“To be in touch with senses and emotions beyond conquest is to enter the realm of the mysterious.”

Bell Hooks

Source: Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (2006), Chapter 2, Altars of Sacrifice

Sense

“Revolutionary feminism embraces men who are able to change, who are capable of responding mutually in a subject-to-subject encounter where desire and fulfillment are in no way linked to coercive subjugation. This feminist vision of the sexual imaginary is the space few men seem able to enter.”

Bell Hooks

Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (2006)

Men , Way , Change

“To counter the fixation on a rhetoric of victimhood, black folks must engage in a discourse of self-determination.”

Bell Hooks

Killing Rage: Ending Racism (1995)

“As a black woman interested in feminist movement, I am often asked whether being black is more important than being a woman; whether feminist struggle to end sexist oppression is more important than the struggle to racism or vice versa. All such questions are rooted in competitive either/or thinking, the belief that the self is formed in opposition to an other. … Most people are socialized to think in terms of opposition rather than compatibility. Rather than seeing anti-racist work as totally compatible with working to end sexist oppression, they often see them as two movements competing for first place.”

Bell Hooks book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984)

People , Question , Thinking

“The fierce willingness to repudiate domination in a holistic manner is the starting point for progressive cultural revolution.”

Bell Hooks

Women, Art, and Society: Fourth Edition (2007) by Whitney Chadwick ISBN 0-500-20393-8

“Feminist emphasis on "common oppression" in the United States was less a strategy for politicization than an appropriation by conservative and liberal women of a radical political white women were able to make their interests the primary focus of feminist movement and employ a rhetoric of commonality that made their condition synonymous with "oppression." Who was there to demand a change in vocabulary? What other group of women in the United States had the same access to universities, publishing houses, mass media, money? Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves "oppressed," no one would have taken them seriously. Had they established public forums and given speeches about their "oppression," they would have been criticized and attacked from all sides. This was not the case with white bourgeois feminists for they could appeal to a large audience of women, like themselves, who were eager to change their lot in life. Their isolation from women of other class and race groups provided no immediate comparative base by which to test their assumptions of common oppression.”

Bell Hooks book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

Source: Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory, p. 6.

Life , Women , Money , Universe

“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.”

Bell Hooks

Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (2006)

Love , Way , Freedom

“Feminism in the United States has never emerged from the women who are most victimized by sexist oppression; women who are daily beaten down, mentally, physically, and spiritually-women who are powerless to change their condition in life. They are a silent majority. A mark of their victimization is that they accept their lot in life without visible question, without organized protest, without collective anger or rage.”

Bell Hooks book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

p. 1 https://books.google.com/books?id=uvIQbop4cdsC&pg=PA1.
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory

Anger , Question , Rage , Life

“The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labeling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization.”

Bell Hooks

Ain't I a Woman (1981)

Women , Change

“I have wanted them to have this simple definition to read again and again so they know: Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.”

Bell Hooks

Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2014), p.XII

Reading

“Creation spirituality replaced a patriarchal spirituality rooted in notions of fall and redemption.”

Bell Hooks

Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2014), p.106.

“Today’s fashion magazines may carry an article about the dangers of anorexia while bombarding its readers with images of emaciated young bodies representing the height of beauty and desirability.”

Bell Hooks

As quoted in Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2014), p.34

Beauty , Fashion