Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics

According to hooks’s biography on the Berea College website, where bell hooks is a Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies, hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. Her pen name of bell hooks is “based on the names of her mother and grandmother,” and she chooses to spell it in the lower case, bell hooks, in order “to emphasize the importance of the substance of her writing as opposed to who she is.”

hooks is the author of over 30 books, and the bell hooks institute website at Berea College identifies her as “an acclaimed intellectual, feminist theorist, cultural critic, artist, and writer” who has written poetry and children’s books as well as writings about gender, race, class and spirituality.

In Feminism is for Everybody, hooks presents the reader with a clear guide to feminism written in the first person. Usually, hooks employs the plural first person “we” in order to emphasize the collective nature of her arguments and to invite readers to participate in feminist thinking alongside hooks, but her occasional use of the singular first person, “I,” allows the reader a glimpse into hooks’s personal history and private life. These glimpses humanize the theoretical and political themes of the book, while giving the reader an idea of what it might feel like to have a conversation with hooks in person about these important topics.

Some examples of these personal revelations in Feminism is for Everybody include hooks’s discussions of her experiences at college at Stanford University in the 1970s as well as her relationships with professors and other mentors who encouraged her intellectual pursuits and motivated her to write and to develop feminist theory. hooks also writes openly of her mother’s generous nature and her father’s domineering interpersonal style, as well as her own heterosexuality. hooks makes a striking confession when explaining that she had discovered herself as a feminist before her first sexual experience; when hooks wrote her first book, she did not know to incorporate a discussion of sexuality as a political issue, and this omission led to accusations of anti-gay bias by lesbian feminists, which took hooks by surprise. She admits that with more experience, she would have known to address the omission to avoid confusion and bad feelings. Also somewhat unexpectedly, hooks writes about a group of lesbian students challenging her heterosexuality, as to them, hooks’s sexual inclination toward men seemed to indicate a kind of hypocrisy and/or disloyalty to the feminist cause.   

hooks’s careful and deliberate use of personal anecdotes within the context of feminist theory packs her arguments with emotional depth. Her clear and conversational tone is inclusive of all possible readers of Feminism is for Everybody, especially readers who might feel alienated by academic jargon and/or excessive literary flair.