• bell hooks, Pathbreaking Black Feminist, Dies at 69 - The New York Times
    https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/books/bell-hooks-dead.html

    bell hooks, whose incisive, wide-ranging writing on gender and race helped push feminism beyond its white, middle-class worldview to include the voices of Black and working-class women, died on Wednesday at her home in Berea, Ky. She was 69.

    Her sister Gwenda Motley said the cause was end-stage renal failure.

    Starting in 1981 with her book “Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism,” Ms. hooks, who insisted on using all lowercase letters in her name, argued that feminism’s claim to speak for all women had pushed the unique experiences of working-class and Black women to the margins.

    “A devaluation of Black womanhood occurred as a result of the sexual exploitation of Black women during slavery that has not altered in the course of hundreds of years,” she wrote.

    Womanhood, Ms. hooks said, could not be reduced to a singular experience, but had to be considered within a framework encompassing race and class. She called for a new form of feminism, one that recognized differences and inequalities among women as a way of creating a new, more inclusive movement — one that, she later said, had largely been achieved.

    Her first book was a collection of poems, “And There We Wept,” which was published in 1978 while she was teaching at the University of Southern California. It was the first time she used the pen name bell hooks — in homage to her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks, to whom she was often compared as a child. She insisted on rendering it in lowercase letters to emphasize, she often said, the “substance of books, not who I am.”

    (une position très semblable à celle de danah boyd, y compris sur l’usage du nom de sa grand-mère. On retrouve d’ailleurs la figure de la grand-mère comme chez Zeynep Tufekci... quelque chose à creuser)

    Especially in her later work, Ms. hooks emphasized the importance of community and of healing as the end goal of movements like feminism and antiracism. Some criticized this position as papering over deep social divisions.

    But Ms. hooks, who described herself as a “Buddhist Christian” and spoke often of her friendship with the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, insisted that love was the only way to overcome what she called the “imperialist white supremacy capitalist patriarchy.”

    “I believe wholeheartedly that the only way out of domination is love,” she told the philosopher George Yancy in an interview for The New York Times in 2015, “and the only way into really being able to connect with others, and to know how to be, is to be participating in every aspect of your life as a sacrament of love.”

    #bell_hook #Féminisme #Intersectionnalité