bell hooks

Gloria Jean Watkins (Hopkinsville, Kentucky, 1952 - Berea, Kentucky, 2021), known by her pen name bell hooks, was an American writer, professor and feminist activist. Her work, which moves between academic essays, cultural criticism and personal memoir, is widely regarded as an early and decisive contribution to the idea of intersectionality, the way race, class and gender overlap in systems of oppression.

She grew up in a working-class family in a small segregated town in Kentucky. Her father worked as a janitor and her mother was a homemaker. An early and avid reader, she went to segregated schools and later to an integrated one, an experience that shaped her views on education. She earned a bachelor's degree in English at Stanford University in 1973, a master's at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1976, and a doctorate in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1983, with a dissertation on the novelist Toni Morrison.

Her first book, a collection of poems called And There We Wept (1978), appeared under the name bell hooks, written in lowercase. Her breakthrough, Ain't I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism (1981), was drafted while she was still an undergraduate and examines how racism and sexism have weighed on Black women throughout history. Its title borrows from the speech by the abolitionist Sojourner Truth.

In Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), she argued that feminism should begin from the voices left outside the dominant story, especially those of poor and non-white women. She criticized a movement that, in her view, spoke for all women from the experience of middle-class white women. She also held that real change required men to take part and a new understanding of power. In Teaching to Transgress (1994) she developed the idea of engaged pedagogy, influenced by the Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, in which education should serve freedom rather than reproduce hierarchies.

She taught at several universities, including Yale, Oberlin College and the City College of New York, and in 2004 she joined Berea College. She wrote more than forty books, from memoirs such as Bone Black (1996) to essays on film, Black masculinity, love and community. Her influence reaches feminist theory, cultural studies and critical pedagogy, and in 2014 she founded the bell hooks Institute at Berea College to keep her work in circulation.