bell hooks: Feminism as the Transformational Work of Love

“Embedded in the commitment to feminist revolution is the challenge to love.”[i]

-          bell hooks

I’m not sure when I was first “hooked,” but at some point in my feminist life I began reading everything bell hooks wrote.  Over the years I’ve read a little over half of her 30+ books, and I have been grateful for the wisdom and perspective provided by each one.  I had come to count on her providing new sources of inspiration on a regular basis, and it was with great sorrow and sense of loss that I learned of her death on December 15th.  I have valued immensely the ways her work widened my partial perspective, challenged my blind sports, and gave me important viewpoints on everything from sexism, racism, classism, pedagogy, militarism, work, parenting, and more. I cannot begin to encompass all I have learned from her in a single post, so undoubtedly I will be revisiting her work often in the weeks and months to come. I write this first piece in great appreciation of her articulation of the meaning and practice of feminism as the work of love.

I began this blog in part because I wanted to be able to provide a corrective to popular misconceptions of feminism as a hatred of men, a resentful complaint, and/or a desire for equal access to power and position in the patriarchal, capitalist hierarchy. The feminism I know and love works toward the transformation of systems of domination and oppression to a world of justice, solidarity, and love.  This is the feminism bell hooks articulated so well.

hooks defined feminism simply as “a struggle to end sexist oppression” (Feminist, 24), but also recognized the interlocking of all forms of oppression. In the same year that Kimberlé Crenshaw famously coined the term “intersectionality” (1989), hooks also articulated that “feminist thought must continually emphasize the importance of sex, race, and class as factors which together determine the social construction of femaleness” (Talking, 23).  hooks recognized that feminism is not limited to gender oppression, but rather that it is “necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture” (Feminist, 24).  None of us is immune. As Audre Lorde reflected, “What woman here is so enamored of her own oppression that she cannot see her heelprint upon another woman’s face?” (132). Recognizing that we all have the capacity to oppress and dominate, hooks challenged each of us to examine our own participation in systems of domination. This “ongoing, critical self-examination and reflection about feminist practice, about how we live in the world” (Talking, 24) is one of the hallmarks of feminism. While essential, to be of use in the transformation of domination, it must be accompanied by incumbent action. Feminist solidarity requires that we each take responsibility for recognizing and rectifying those instances in which our actions contribute to the oppression and domination of others, as well as of ourselves.  For hooks, this is the very work of love. As she wrote, “When women and men understand that working to eradicate patriarchal domination is a struggle rooted in the longing to make a world where everyone can live fully and freely, then we know our work to be a gesture of love” (Talking, 27). Conversely, as she reiterated so often, “Anytime we do the work of love, we are doing the work of ending domination” (“Lorde,” 248).

When I first read hooks’ evocation of love as a transformative force embedded in a commitment to feminism, I resonated with her words immediately. It was the message that I had found so compelling in other resistance writers – as hooks did in Paulo Freire’s, “’I am more and more convinced that true revolutionaries must perceive the revolution, because of its creative and liberating nature, as an act of love (70); and in Albert Camus’s, “Then we understand that rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love. . . . this insane generosity. . . which unhesitatingly gives the strength of its love and without a moment’s delay refuses injustice” (304).  I recognize this force in my own deep desire for justice in the world.  Like hooks, I know such love to be a “source of empowerment, . . . a powerful force that challenges and resists domination” (Talking, 26) -- the foundation that sustains the work of creating a world without domination. hooks emphasized that every great movement for social justice has been grounded in love as a transformative force. In her years of working in social justice movements, she had found that “it was always love that created the motivation for profound inner and outer transformation. Love was the force that empowered folks to resist domination and create new ways of living and being in the world” (Writing, 194-195).

Much of hooks’ later work centered around defining and refining the meaning and practice of love in action in the world. This work culminated in her book, All About Love, in which she reflected on the implications of love in work, family, friendship, public policy, spirituality, and more.  Every chapter is worthy of long conversation and contemplation, but the one that has been in the forefront of my mind recently is her chapter on “Living by a Love Ethic.” In it hooks articulates a feminist vision of society shaped by this ethic of love, in which citizens and neighbors value and protect the common good -- a notion that seems to have disappeared from our national consciousness and will as of late, but that we sorely need in this time. How very different our society could be if we as a nation, as a world, lived by this love ethic. As hooks wrote, “If all public policy was created in the spirit of love, we would not have to worry about unemployment, homelessness, schools failing to teach children, or addiction” (All About Love, 98). And, I would add, public health, health care for all, poverty, childcare, structural racism, the school to prison pipeline, gun violence, environmental destruction, climate change. The list could go on and on. Imagine it – public policy created in the spirit of love. hooks challenged us to do more than imagine, inspiring us to do the daily hard and rewarding work of creating this society and these relationships based in love.

The love that hooks invoked is demanding.  As she said, it entails accepting “the fullness of our humanity, which then allows us to recognize the humanity of others” (Writing, 198).  That is not such an easy task.  It requires us to recognize not only the goodness in those we cast as “the enemy,” but our own shortcomings as well.  As one of her inspirations, Sam Keen, wrote, “When I know my shadow, I know that ‘they’ are like me. . . . [Those] I cast into the category of aliens are fellow humans who, like myself, are faulted, filled with contradictory impulses of love and hate, generosity, and the blind will to survive . . . ” (150). It is this recognition that galvanizes our refusal to engage in acts of domination, even against those who have oppressed and dominated us.  It enables us instead, in hooks’ words, to “engage a practice of loving kindness, forgiveness, and compassion” (Writing, 198). 

This is the work of transformational love.  This is the work of feminism.   To that end, as we head into a new year, I conclude with hooks’ charge to us all: “Let us draw upon that love to heighten our awareness, deepen our compassion, intensify our courage, and strengthen our commitment” (Talking, 27).

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Notes

Camus, Albert. The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt. Trans. Anthony Bower. New York: Vintage Books, 1956.

Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  20th Anniversary Edition. Trans. Myra Berman Ramos. New York: Continuum, 1993.

hooks, bell, All About Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow & Co., 2000.

______. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center.  Boston: South End Press, 1984.

______. “Lorde: The Imagination of Justice.” in Byrd, Rudolph et. al. eds. I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde. New York: Oxford U. Press, 2009.

______. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston: South End Press, 1989.

______. Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge, 2013.

Keen, Sam. The Passionate Life: Stages of Loving. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983.

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde.  Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984.

[i] Hooks, bell. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black.  Boston: South End Press, 1989, 26.

Longing for Darkness

Hale Bopp

When I moved to Minnesota from Ohio, everyone back home voiced concern about how cold the winters would be.  Nobody warned me about how dark they would be, nor how long the dark would last.  For years, I complained, but gradually I have come to embrace the dark.  The dark invites us to slow down, to rest, to sleep, to dream.  It is a time to open to our depths, and to others. There is a kind of magic in the dark. Without the harsh light of judgment, in the dark we are more likely to share our secrets and stories, our wounds and our wonderings, our hearts and hopes with each other. As the deciduous trees lose their leaves, the sky opens as well, giving birth to the night sky.  As Sara Thomsen sings in her, “Darkness Cover Me”: “Holy Maker of Moonlight, singing through starlight. . . . womb of the night.”  The dark gives us the gift of stars. In the brief nights of summer, I rarely see the stars, but in winter they blanket the sky, giving me a sense of my place in the universe. They arrive like old friends -- the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades appearing in the evening, and Orion greeting me out my window every morning. When Hale-Bopp was visible from earth, I would look for her on my late-night drives home from teaching night class, and there she would be, my constant companion on those cold winter nights.  The stars remind us that we are not alone, that we are all related, for we are all made of the stuff of stars.

Lately I’ve been longing for darkness. When I first moved to my home in the woods, the night was dark. As the city has grown, and more houses have been built, and streetlights added, the dark is eclipsed by a never-ending twilight.  In my neighborhood, more and more people keep “security” lights on all night long, leaving me feeling invaded by the perpetual light.  In our human efforts to resist the dark, we have forgotten the earthly command to rest, and we are all suffering the consequences. Light pollution affects our health, throwing off our circadian rhythms, diminishing the release of melatonin – paving the way for loss of sleep, increased anxiety, and a host of other ailments.  Other animals’ health is affected as well, as is the migration of sea turtles and birds who navigate by the stars and by moonlight. We light up the night in order not to get lost in the dark, but perhaps we all have lost our way by being too much in the light. We were born out of darkness, and like the spring bulb that needs cold and dark in order to bloom, so do we need the nourishment of the deep dark to restore our creativity and power. 

In our longing for darkness, it is not just the physical dark that we crave, but the metaphysical, the spiritual, the deep well of the ancient dark divine, the original matrix.  As China Galland mused, “The longing for darkness [is] also a longing for the womb of god” (54). In her Longing for Darkness, Galland reminds us of the persistence of this longing, and her emergence as Ishtar, Isis, Astarte, Asherah, Tara, Kali, Parvati, Durga, as well as Mary and the Christian mystics writing of the motherhood of the divine. Her iconographic representations abound throughout the world, from the temples to Tara throughout Asia to the many shrines to the Black Madonna throughout Europe. It’s no wonder that it is within this time of deep darkness that Mary is celebrated within Christianity – Mary not as passive, but as the strong, courageous, fiercely protective, earthy maternal divine.

 Lucia Birnbaum reminds us that the first African mother is everyone’s genetic inheritance, honored for millennia as Erishkegal, Isis, Lilith, Kali, Oshun, Hagar.  It was only with the rise of patriarchy that the dark feminine divine was demoted, displaced, erased, and forced underground. Yet she continues to rise in our psyches and our deepest longings.  Each year, thousands walk hundreds of miles in pilgrimage to visit these shrines, all seeking connection with dark, divine, pre-patriarchal female energies of which we are all sorely in need.

Galland writes, “To say that one is ‘longing for darkness’ is to say that one longs for transformation, for a darkness that brings balance, wholeness, integration, wisdom, insight” (152).  Certainly, if there was ever a time when we have needed to restore balance, and to gain insight and wisdom, it is now.  We are a world profoundly out of balance.  It is theorized that dark matter is what holds the stars and galaxies together -- “matter,” from the same root word as “mother” – mater. Banishing the dark mater has thrown us off balance.  I image our world thrown off its axis, wobbling through the universe.  The energies and acts of hate, violence, oppression, domination, and patriarchy that have been surging throughout the world have thrown us off kilter.  We need the qualities of the dark feminine divine -- compassion, justice, equality to restore our balance, and to transform the violent, hierarchical, patriarchy which governs too much of our lives into a peaceful, radically egalitarian democracy (Birnbaum, 147). We have been there before; we can return.

To do so requires our vision and energies. bell hooks wrote of how as a child she would make the treacherous walk through a white section of town, where she could feel the hate pouring down on her, to the safety and homecoming of her grandparents’ home.  It was in the homes of Black women that she found her spirit nurtured.  Black women resisted white oppression by creating places to heal and be affirmed, and have one’s dignity restored – places where possibility could rise again.  The matrix of the dark feminine divine is such a homeplace, fostering both our resistance and the creation of new possibilities, in defiance of systems of hate and oppression. Like the places of renewal and resistance hooks found in the homes of Black women, dwelling with the dark feminine divine was for her an encounter with “ . . . the ground of our being, the place of mystery, creativity, and possibility, for it is there that we can construct the mind that can resist, that can revision, that can create the maps that when followed will liberate us” (2009, 243).  We can begin this resistance and revisioning by, as Audre Lorde said, “re-member[ing] what is dark and ancient and divine within yourself” (69), for it is in these dark places within “. . . where hidden and growing our true spirit rises. . . (36). The dark feminine divine renews us, strengthening our capacity to resist, and inspiring our vision for a different way to be possible.  

In the far north where I now live, the winter Solstice is celebrated with bonfires and candle lighting and feasting. For many years, I attended a women-only Solstice celebration at a lesbian collective homeplace. We would gather in a circle; an invocation to the Solstice would be read; and then as anyone in the circle felt so moved, she would light one of the thirteen candles, expressing her thanks or hopes or blessing – for health, for a loved one, for the earth, and always for the four-leggeds. Then the great potluck feast began with soups and stews, tater tot and pasta hot dishes, green and fruit salads, smoked fish, vegetables of all kinds, quiches, breads, and a plethora of desserts.  At some point in the evening, the announcement would come that the fire had been lit.  We’d pile on our winter jackets and boots and head out in the night, often in below zero temperatures. Each in turn would place the wreath upon her head and then, with clear intention, jump the fire, leaving behind the ills of the previous year and leaping forward into those things we hoped for in the new year.  Three of us who made music together would link arms and leap the fire together, before making our individual jumps.  It is at cherished times like these that I have truly felt the dark, divine, ancient, pre-patriarchal feminine energy – that place of possibility. The world could be like this.

Living in a place of such a long dark, I do rejoice in the return of the light at the Solstice, but now with a great appreciation for the gifts of the long night as well. The woman who was the firekeeper of the Solstice gathering recently passed, and as I was writing the section on bell hooks, I learned that she, too, had just passed.  This year, I will jump the fire in their memory and honor, and in honor of the ancient, dark, rich, feminine divine in us all.

“bell hooks” by Kris Simonson

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Notes                                                                               

Birnbaum, Lucia Chiavola. Dark Mother: African Origins and Godmothers.  San Jose: Authors Choice Press, 2001. 

Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. NY: Harper One, 1988. 

Galaxies Protected by Dark Matter | Space 

Galland, China. Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna. NY: Penguin, 1990. 

hooks, bell. “Lorde: The Imagination of Justice.” in Byrd, Rudolph et. al. eds. I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde. New York: Oxford U. Press, 2009. 

______. Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990. 

Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. 

Light Pollution | National Geographic Society 

Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1984. 

Thomsen, Sara. “Darkness Cover Me.” Fertile Ground. 1999.