Introduction: In memoriam: bell hooks, 1952–2021

Abstract

It feels as if there is a bell hooks essay for every occasion in studies of race, gender, and sexuality. That is to say, it seems that bell hooks, who wrote over 30 books of criticism, five children's books, and the memoir Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood (1996), penned everything we need to know—or has already prompted us to consider what we still need to understand—about interlocking systems of oppression during her coming of age, at the height of her professional career, for the now of the present day, and in the future. A social and cultural critic, poet, and unapologetic feminist scholar and activist, hooks disseminated the knowledge she gleaned from her intersectional positionality within the academy and with general audiences in mind. Moreover, she challenged the untutored who needed the truth about historical institutions of power deconstructed in plain speak by naming it in no uncertain terms: the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” On December 15, 2021, hooks died of end-stage renal failure at the age of 69 in her home of Berea, Kentucky, which was also home to Berea College, where she was the Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies and where she founded the bell hooks center in 2014. On the occasion of hooks's death, Women, Gender, and Families of Color joins the choir of thinkers and lifelong students in honoring her legacy, which will continue to shape conversations, theories, and paradigms about feminism, patriarchy, white supremacy, and class for the political, social, economic, and cultural liberation of women of color, communities of color, and anyone who wants to learn.In George Yancy's tribute to bell hooks published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, the philosopher, who was both her friend and colleague, offers the term kenosis to honor hooks's name-claiming, politics and principles, Buddhist Christian spirituality, radical pedagogy, and commitment to “the liberated voice” (Yancy et al. 2021). Yancy defines kenosis as “to empty oneself or a process of self-emptying,” and he recognizes the term as threaded throughout hooks's writing and life journey, which invited dialogue, acceptance, surrender, renewal, anger, resistance, transgression, self-recovery, salvation, compassion, belonging, parenthood, communion, love, and possibility. While he identifies kenosis aligning with hooks's extensive critical work and the personal work she called for others to do, Yancy also suggests the concept might allow us to view hooks's life and death as a synthesis of “radical transformation, generative opening, self-forgiveness, and the forgiveness of others, a powerful sense of letting go.” He extends kenosis as a means of unburdening, exchange, and intersubjective change during individual and collective mourning. Within this context, the process of letting go also envisions a way of making room to hold and sustain hooks who, in Brittney Cooper's (2021) poignant words, “left more of herself to all of us than any Black woman could ever owe to anybody.”Such a metanarrative framing of the academic community and broader public's loss is cogent and congruous, and in the school of bell hooks, it is both theory and praxis. To reconnect with hooks, to discover her anew, then, we must continually practice letting go of our all-consuming and self-defeating isms and return again and again to what she left behind in her writing. Such a process promises to free our own voices and engender the radical social transformation that she advocated. Rather than a means of mourning, or simply another theoretical concept, Yancy offers a measure of living that is cathartic, self-reflective, and productive—a generative honoring of hooks's legacy. In addition to Yancy's introduction to kenosis, the collaborative tribute convenes Karlyn Crowley, Joy James, Bettina L. Love, john a. powell, Stephanie Troutman Robbins, and Gloria Steinem—all privileged to “to have had the chance to converse with and be-with bell hooks”—to celebrate her multiplicity, likes and dislikes, generous acts, words, thrifting, humility, and eminence. For example, Troutman Robbins extols, “bell hooks was not only a trailblazer or a feminist icon. It seems more befitting to call her a folk hero and a legend” (Yancy et al. 2021). Steinem extends these sentiments by reminding us that hooks was an aspirational everywoman: “she gave emotional and intellectual birth to her unique self, as so many women are forbidden to do” (Yancy et al. 2021).hooks charted her intellectual birth and path to critical consciousness in her essays. In “Black Women Shaping Feminist Theory” (1984), she describes the emergence of Black feminist theorizing by way of her early observations in the domestic space. “Growing up in a Southern, black, father-dominated, working-class household,” she writes, “I experienced . . . varying degrees of patriarchal tyranny, and it made me angry . . . Anger led me to question the politics of male domination and enabled me to resist sexist socialization” (2000, 11). To those who doubt Black women's foundational contributions to feminist theory, or the value of everyday feminism, she goes on to explain, “The implication being that people who are truly oppressed know it even though they may not be engaged in organized resistance or unable to articulate in written form the nature of their oppression” (2000, 11). She returns to her childhood in her essay “Theory as a Liberatory Practice” to delineate the power and intentionality of a feminist theoretical praxis. “Theory is not inherently healing, liberatory, or revolutionary,” she clarifies. “It fulfills this function only when we ask that it do so and direct our theorizing towards this end” (1994, 61). Further, she asserts that theory's imperative anticipates action: “we needed new theories rooted in an attempt to understand both the nature of our contemporary predicament and the means by which we might collectively engage in resistance that would transform our current reality” (1994, 67).With degrees in English literature from Stanford and the University of California, Santa Cruz, hooks drew on Black women's speeches and writing to historicize their theorizing, and she engaged in visual culture to illustrate contemporary manifestations of their oppressions and strategies for resistance. As an undergraduate student, she began writing Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981), which signifies on the repeated refrain in abolitionist Sojourner Truth's address of the same title. In Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992), hooks points out the perpetuation of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy in popular cultural production. Specifically in the essay “Selling Hot Pussy: Black Female Sexuality in the Cultural Marketplace,” she surveys the sexual stereotypes perpetuated through spectacles of Black women's bodies in film, music, and fashion. After briefly recounting the efforts of British Black film collective Sankofa (which counts Isaac Julien among its founders) and filmmaker Kathleen Collins to disrupt narratives of Black women's sexual pathology, hooks indicates the political and social implications of representation by pushing us to contemplate, “How and when will black females assert sexual agency in ways that liberate us from the confines of colonized desire, of racist/sexist imagery and practice?” (1992, 75).Elsewhere hooks distinguishes Black women's critical tools for dismantling their distorted image by discerning that they not only dare to look, but they also resourcefully and dexterously seize the interpretive power of the gaze. “Even in the worse circumstances of domination,” she affirms, “the ability to manipulate one's gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency” (1992, 116). A distinct Black female spectatorship emerges in response to Black women's absence and misrepresentation in hegemonic culture: a censuring gaze that observes racism and sexism but critically looks beyond it to recognize and interrupt its solicitation and seduction. Importantly, hooks maintains there is pleasure in Black looks, with which “critical Black female spectators construct a theory of looking relations where cinematic visual delight is the pleasure of interrogation” (1992, 126). One can watch movies from a “politicized standpoint” and claim joy in their analytical deconstruction (1992, 126). hooks deploys Black women's oppositional gaze to counter a cultural landscape with limited opportunities for them to be creatives. Yet in the era of Beyoncé as well as the recent ruptures on our small screens with Regina King's heroic turn as Angela Abar in Watchman, Issa Rae's Insecure, and Lizzo's Watch Out for the Big Grrrls, we might ask what the critical afterlives of bell hooks will be.Contributors to Women, Gender, and Families of Color, which is approaching its ten-year anniversary, have utilized hooks's work to frame their analyses of interlocking oppressions and cultural representations as well as to articulate their own calls for social interventions and community-building. Simone Drake reflects on her spectatorship as a Black woman in “The Marketability of Black Joy: After ‘I Do’ in Black Romance Film,” in which she identifies The Best Man Holiday (2013) as a “black-black” film to register how “its depiction of black marriage and black children . . . enables blackness to function as an analytic that gives meaning to black joy in twenty-first century popular culture” (2019, 161). Marking the impact of stereotypes on social policy and health behaviors, several WGFC articles cite hooks to contextualize racist and sexist paradigms as well as reparative and agential mechanisms. In “‘Tired and Hungry’ in North Carolina: A Critical Approach to Contesting Eugenic Discourse,” Elliot M. Hamer, Margaret M. Quinlan, and Daniel A. Grano discuss the centrality of supposed sexually deviant bodies in the discursive and material implications of eugenic practices for marginalized populations in their case study of Elaine Riddick Jessie, whom the state sterilized without consent after she gave birth at the age of fourteen (2014). Idethia Shevon Harvey, Lashaune Johnson, and Corliss Heath recall the “long suffering, religious maternal figure,” who engages in “self-sacrificing self-denial for those she loves” (hooks, 1981, 10), to “explicate a womanist epistemological framework that can support the development of self-management intervention designs aimed at assisting older African American women in health-promoting behaviors” (2013, 59). Comparably, in “Doing What's Right for the Baby: Parental Responses and Custodial Grandmothers’ Institutional Decision Making,” LaShawnDa Pittman outlines the distinct ways Black women experience motherhood due to their lack of access to jobs, living wages, education, training, and affordable childcare and, as grandmothers, model a range of care-types in kinship care policy. Pittman contends that “institutional decisions enable custodial grandmothers to achieve family stability by offering them an opportunity to be a safety net of protection to grandchildren, to respond to a range of parental responses that emerge as they work to eradicate child welfare threats, and to navigate institutions” (2014, 32, italics original).Additionally, several past WGFC contributors have employed hooks's theoretical concepts advocating for social transformation. Hannah Oliha-Donaldson engages hooks's concept of “homeplace,” which she identifies as “a place of nurturance and resistance; a place to return to lick our wounds, to be rejuvenated, and, oftentimes, to be reminded of who we are” (2018, 8). Moreover, Oliha-Donaldson claims “homeplace” as a self-care model for higher education faculty, students, and staff to collectively create a climate of renewal and self-recovery in the “Trumpian era” (2018, 4). Belinda Deneen Wallace extends hooks's concept of renegade speech to conceptualize a radical argot, a gendered language of resistance against Western discourses, and to explore the work of Caribbean writers in the essay “Accessing Pan-African Feminist Humanism: Unlocking the Metacolonial in the Poetry of Una Marson and Dionne Brand” (2016, 238). Similarly, Dawn M. Thomas (2014) and Erin Ranft model hooks's parsing of interlocking oppressions, respectively, to attend to disability within culturally diverse communities and, along with Gloria Anzaldúa, to theorize intersectional nepantla, an “individual grappling and interrogation . . . [that] entail examinations of white heterosexist patriarchy at the personal and societal levels” (Ranft, 2013, 207). The contributors, readers, and editors of Women, Gender, and Families of Color have been and will continue to be in conversation with hooks's work, which has banked fertile intellectual ground for our understanding of our interpretations, needed interventions, cultural production, collectivity, and additional theorizing.In this issue of Women, Gender, and Families of Color, contributors continue in the legacy of hooks's commitment to demystify white supremacist capitalist patriarchy and make legible Black women's intersectional identities. Co-authors Danielle Taylor Phillips-Cunningham and Veronica Popp and author Heather Montes Ireland center the economic struggles of women of color in different historical periods. Whereas Montes Ireland applies an intersectional framework to dissect the specific economic violence Black and Brown mothers experience, Aishah D. Scott analyzes media narratives about HIV/AIDS to interrogate the complexities of race, gender, class, and sexuality during the late twentieth and twenty-first century.More specifically, Phillips-Cunningham and Popp's essay “Labor Organizer Nannie Helen Burroughs and Her National Trade School for Women and Girls” returns to the historic efforts of the educator, orator, activist, businesswoman, and feminist. The authors document Burroughs's commitment to the social justice aims of Black clubwomen's racial uplift doctrine by delineating her endeavors to foster leadership among working-class Black women—particularly domestic workers. Despite the achievement of Burroughs's trade school (which taught a curriculum based on Christian values, racial pride, and domestic science), her establishment of the school's monthly publication The Worker, and her launch of the National Association of Wage Earners, the authors contend scholars have not yet fully recognized Burroughs's distinction as a labor leader. Nonetheless, Phillips-Cunningham and Popp demonstrate “Burroughs's assertion that domestic workers are significant community leaders who can form a broad-based political movement . . . impact[s] . . . Black domestic workers organizing today” (35).In a more contemporary context, Heather Montes Ireland draws attention to Black and Brown women's systemic economic precarity in “‘She's Been Doing Everything Right:’ Mothers of Color and Economic Violence.” Her essay's premise “seeks to reveal the deadly logics . . . [of] economic violence, the exposure to great damage, harm, and injury produced by differential suffering under a racial capitalist order” (42). In her analysis of several narrative cases, including the fatal police-shooting of Eula May Love in 1979, Montes Ireland illustrates how a system of governmentality denies Black and Brown women's material access while policy, law enforcement, and media criminalize their strategies for survival with devastating consequences for them and their families. Attending to the institutional economic violence targeting mothers of color, Montes Ireland argues, is pivotal for critical feminist policy analysis and re-imagining intersectional economic justice.Finally, in “Erased by Respectability: The Intersections of AIDS, Race, and Gender in Black America,” Aishah Scott grapples with the HIV/AIDS epidemic's correlation with the subjections and exclusions promoted by white supremacy and enabled by respectability politics, an early-twentieth-century strategy for racial uplift turned intra-racial rationale for moral policing. Scott explains, “Similar to how forces outside the Black community weaponized respectability politics to sustain white supremacy, the practice of respectability politics within the Black community cast Black women as passive victims while demonizing Black men in order to maintain respectability” (72). Exploring media discourses and archival resources, Scott shows how Black women and Black men negotiated respectability during the HIV/AIDS crisis from the 1980s to the early 2000s.Women, Gender, and Families of Color accompanies this open-call print and electronic issue with the online publication of brief critical and reflective essays honoring bell hooks's life and legacy on the journal's website, https://womengenderandfamilies.ku.edu/. In conjunction with this introduction to issue 10.1, the editors wanted to provide scholars with a venue for kenosis to heed the lesson George Yancy suggests we take from hooks's life and work. We desired to convene a special-issue colloquium for theorists and teachers, practitioners, and activists across disciplinary and professional fields, from diverse communities and social justice causes, to empty themselves, discover, and share what of hooks remains—and continues to sustain—for them.The editorial staff thanks editorial board members Cécile Accilien, Manisha Desai, and Luz Maria Gordillo for suggesting this call for papers, guest-editing the special issue, and gathering to share their own insights in an introductory video for the collection of essays available on the journal's website. The editors are grateful, too, for board members Sharon Harley's and Sarah Deer's efforts to enrich the issue. Women, Gender, and Families of Color is also honored to have Beverly Guy-Sheftall, hooks's longtime friend and colleague, to share her reflections. Although most of the issue's contributors did not know hooks personally, and perhaps never had the opportunity to attend one of her talks, they have given deep thought to her prolific body of work. We asked contributors to remember how hooks impacted their scholarly and professional work, and we invited them to tell us how her work transformed their private and professional lives. We hope readers will view this online collection of essays as an additive to other tributes to hooks, as we believe there can never be too much of—just as we trust it is never too late for—bell hooks.