53 pages • 1-hour read
Communion: The Female Search for Love
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Themes
The Redefinition of Love in Feminist Terms
Love is the most important concept in bell hooks’s Communion. The culmination of her Love Trilogy, Communion seeks to place love within the context of gender, specifically in the context of women and their journey towards finding love. hooks works towards a redefinition of love within a feminist framework, evaluating the role of patriarchal society in shaping women’s experiences with love. She begins by illustrating the patriarchal conception of love, which is rooted in the false belief that love, and the emotional vulnerability that love requires, is a sign of weakness. In earlier iterations of feminism during the second wave, hooks illustrates that women believed that they needed to prioritize power over love in order to find success in a patriarchal world, acting “as though power was more important than love” (59). However, hooks disagrees with this prioritization, arguing that feminists must “place love on the agenda again—and insist that there has to be a balance between work and love” (59). hooks wants to place love at the heart of feminism, to put love in its “proper place,” as she establishes in Chapter 2.
In this reframing, hooks pushes back against the assumption that love and ambition are mutually exclusive, offering a nuanced feminist perspective that challenges the notion that power must always take precedence over emotional fulfillment. Rather than viewing love as an obstacle to women’s independence, hooks suggests that love—when properly understood and divorced from patriarchal constraints—can serve as a source of strength, renewal, and political transformation.
In her work to place love at the heart of feminism, hooks encourages young women to see the impact and importance of love by looking to their female elders as examples of how to love and how to center love in their lives. While the journey towards finding love is difficult, as hooks explains, it’s a journey that women ought to undertake. Even the women who turn away from love eventually return, which hooks establishes as a positive example of love’s resilience: “It should give young women hope to know that so many of their female elders who had given up on love when we were younger now return to love to reclaim, rediscover, remake, and rejoice” (234). Traditional patriarchal thinking on love dictates that women who do not find love in their youth will struggle to find it in midlife or beyond, but hooks pushes back on this false belief, illustrating that if young women look at the women around them, to the communities around them, they will find examples of love, its resilience, and its importance, which will guide them to place love at the center of their lives and their feminist practice.
In her quest to find a feminist redefinition of love, hooks interrogates the structure of romantic relationships, particularly heterosexual relationships, continuing to examine patriarchal notions of love, as she writes, “Old ideas about romantic love taught females and males to believe that erotic tension depended on the absence of communication and understanding. This misinformation about the nature of love has helped to further the politics of domination, particularly male domination of women” (240). hooks carefully investigates the role of communication and understanding in relationships, which patriarchy discourages because of their role in fostering equitable and mutual relationships. Love, as hooks establishes throughout the entirety of Communion, cannot exist in relationships that are built upon the tenets of patriarchy. In order for women to experience real love and thrive in healthy relationships, they must extricate love from patriarchy and redefine love in terms of mutuality, equality, and equity. By reclaiming love as a feminist issue, hooks positions it as a necessary force for healing, both personally and collectively.
The Role of Self-Love as Foundational to Other Forms of Love
Self-love plays a crucial role in all of hooks’s Love Trilogy, especially Communion. hooks establishes that self-love is the bedrock upon which real love rests. Women cannot experience actual love if they do not first do the work of cultivating self-love, which takes real dedication: “Genuine love requires time and commitment. And this is simply the case for love in the context of partnership. Self-love takes time and commitment, particularly on the part of those who are wounded in the space where we would know love in our childhoods” (224). She clearly establishes the connection between love and self-love. Her use of repetition of time and commitment links love and self-love together as processes that require work, and the work of self-love must be done first. hooks knows personally the importance of self-love, as she personally became “wounded” in her relationship with love as a child because of her father’s mistreatment of her. She had to do the work to develop self-love so that she could experience love in her relationships with others.
Self-love, hooks argues, allows women to tend to the needs of their soul, which helps in the building of relationships with others, as she writes, “We see ourselves clearly as we really are. And that clarity is the source of our strength and peace of mind. It is the space of mindful awareness where we can search for love together, communing and celebrating, cherishing the sweetness of sustained female solidarity” (139). Self-love allows women to understand themselves and enter into communion with other women and create loving bonds with each other. Without knowledge and understanding of the self, and then love of the self, the relationships women form can only be superficial and lacking in love.
hooks further emphasizes that self-love is not a destination but an ongoing practice, one that must be nurtured and protected against societal pressures. In a world that often demands self-sacrifice from women, self-love becomes a radical act of resistance. By rejecting self-neglect and internalized misogyny, women reclaim their right to joy, fulfillment, and self-determination.
Self-love also allows women to grow in their relationships with themselves, especially as it relates to their bodies. hooks analyzes the role that body image plays in the cultivation of self-love. Women are often told their bodies are a source of shame, especially in the context of thinness. Society holds women to impossible beauty standards, especially at the time of Communion’s publication in the early 2000s, when the standard of extreme thinness was nearly impossible to achieve and many women lived with eating disorders as a result. hooks connects self-love to a love of the body; self-love is important for women to know themselves, but it is also important for women to love their bodies, as hooks writes, “The more we love our flesh, the more others will delight in its bounty. As we love the female body, we are able to let it be the ground on which we build a deeper relationship to ourselves—a loving relationship uniting mind, body, and spirit” (120). When women love their bodies, they are able to deepen their self-love and grow more connected to themselves physically, psychologically, and emotionally, allowing them to learn to love themselves and others even better.
The Impact of Societal Expectations on Women’s Love Lives
In her evaluation of love, hooks explores how the patriarchal society of the United States impacts women’s love lives and romantic relationships, especially in heterosexual relationships. hooks evaluates the way that patriarchy primes men to treat women poorly in relationships as they fail to grasp how to love. Even as feminism made steps towards equality and women began pursuing careers outside the home, equality in relationships did not follow suit. hooks notes this discrepancy, writing:
At the end of the day it was infinitely easier for men to make way for women in the workforce, to do some if not an equal portion of the work at home, even to take on a more primary parenting role, than it was for them to give more emotionally (51).
Men were willing to allow women to find jobs and to take on more domestic labor themselves, but they were not willing to be more emotionally open and vulnerable with their female partners, which is a necessary piece of true loving relationships. Without emotional openness, hooks asserts, the relationships women engage in with men lack actual love.
Men are also unwilling to talk about love, as they are “simply not interested in the subject” (171). Talking about love requires learning about love, which also requires emotional vulnerability, something men, especially patriarchal men, are disinterested in. hooks takes this argument even further, stating, “An honest patriarchal man will boldly proclaim that he pretends interest in love to get sex” (171). Women struggle to form meaningful romantic relationships with men who ascribe to patriarchal beliefs, because those beliefs push men to prioritize their sexual desires over the work of forming genuine connections with women based in love.
Additionally, hooks critiques how capitalist values reinforce patriarchal dynamics in relationships. The commodification of love, she argues, has led to transactional relationships where economic stability often takes precedence over emotional depth. This materialistic framing of love further distances both men and women from experiencing genuine emotional connection, reducing love to an exchange rather than a transformative force.
The structure of these relationships, even when lacking love, further illustrates the detrimental impact of patriarchal societal expectations on women’s experiences with love. hooks describes that regardless of women’s socioeconomic statuses, they still can fall into patriarchal relationships, as she gives the example of comedian Jane Fonda’s marriage, which Fonda found overly traditional and repressive, though she initially acquiesced to the patriarchal structure. hooks writes of the marriage, “How can anyone be genuinely surprised by the outcome of this bonding, since it represents the traditional patriarchal model of marriage, the wife being absorbed in the identity of the husband?” (222). Though others were shocked by Fonda’s marriage being repressive, given Fonda’s feminist activism, hooks acknowledges that the traditional structure of marriage, and the expectations that accompany such a structure, makes this outcome predictable. Relationships, without the feminist reinterpretation of love that hooks works to establish, negatively impact women and keep them from reaching the self-actualization and self-knowledge that come with experiencing love.
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