Bell hooks

In her book Black Looks: Race and Representation, in the chapter The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators, hooks discusses what she calls an “oppositional gaze”. She discusses it as a position and strategy for black people, especially black women, to develop a critical spectatorship in relation to mass media. Describing how for her, the "gaze" had always been political, hooks explains how she began to grow curious of the results of black slaves being punished for looking at their white owners. She wondered how much had been absorbed and carried on through the generations to affect not only black parenting, but black spectatorship as well. hooks writes that because she remembered how she had dared to look at adults as a child, even though she was forbidden, she knew that slaves had looked too. Drawing on Foucault’s thoughts about power always coexisting with the possibility of resistance, hooks discusses this looking as a form of resistance, as a way of finding agency, and declaring: "Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality."

For black women however, the spectatorship looked different. Since bodies of black females were mostly absent in early films, the development of black women's spectatorship was complicated. If black females were present, there bodies were there to: “[...] enhance and maintain white womanhood as object of the phallocentric gaze.” According to hooks, the conventional representations of black females have been an assault to black womanhood. In response to this, many black women rejected looking at the images altogether. Another response of some black women, were to turn off their criticism and identify with the white woman on the screen, through this victimization being able to experience cinematic pleasure. A third option, is to look through the lens of the oppositional gaze. This is a critical gaze that, according to hooks, goes beyond Laura Mulvey’s analysis of how the Hollywood film constructs the man as the subject, and the woman as the object. This “woman” is in fact, a white woman. hooks criticizes mainstream feminist film theory for ignoring the subject of race, and by that also ignoring the role of black female spectatorship.

The focus of hooks' writing has been the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she describes as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She has published more than 30 books and numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. She has addressed race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism. In 2014, she founded the bell hooks Institute at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky.

In 2004, she joined Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, as Distinguished Professor in Residence, where she participated in a weekly feminist discussion group, "Monday Night Feminism"; a luncheon lecture series, "Peanut Butter and Gender"; and a seminar, "Building Beloved Community: The Practice of Impartial Love". Her 2008 book, belonging: a culture of place, includes a candid interview with author Wendell Berry as well as a discussion of her move back to Kentucky. She has undertaken three scholar-in-residences at The New School. Mostly recently she did one for a week in October 2014. She engaged in public dialogues with Gloria Steinem, Laverne Cox, and Cornel West.

In 2004, 10 years after the success of Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks published Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope. In this book, hooks offers advice about how to continue to make the classroom a place that is life-sustaining and mind expanding, a place of liberating mutuality where teacher and student together work in partnership. She writes that education as a practice of freedom enable us to confront feelings of loss and restore our sense of connections and consequently teaches us how to create community. She locates hope in places of struggle where she witnessed individuals positively transforming their lives and the world around them. For hooks, educating is always a vocation rooted in hopefulness.

In 2002, hooks gave a commencement speech at Southwestern University. Eschewing the congratulatory mode of traditional commencement speeches, she spoke against what she saw as government-sanctioned violence and oppression, and admonished students who she believed went along with such practices. This was followed by a controversy described in the Austin Chronicle after an "irate Arizonian" had criticized the speech in a letter to the editor. The newspaper reported that many in the audience booed the speech, though "several graduates passed over the provost to shake her hand or give her a hug".

In her 1994 book Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, hooks writes about a transgressive approach in education where educators can teach students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom. To educate as the practice of freedom, bell hooks describes it as "a way of teaching that anyone can learn." Hooks combines her practical knowledge and personal experiences of the classroom with feminist thinking and critical pedagogy. Hooks investigates the classroom as a source of constraint but also a potential source of liberation. She argues that teachers' use of control and power over students dulls the students' enthusiasm and teaches obedience to authority, "confin[ing] each pupil to a rote, assembly-line approach to learning." She advocates that universities should encourage students and teachers to transgress, and seeks ways to use collaboration to make learning more relaxing and exciting. She describes teaching as a performative act and teachers as catalysts that invite everyone to become more engaged and activated. Performative aspect of learning "offers the space for change, invention, spontaneous shifts, that can serve as a catalyst drawing out the unique elements in each classroom." Hooks also dedicated a chapter of the book to Paulo Freire, written in a form of a playful dialogue between herself, Gloria Watkins and her writing voice, bell hooks. In the last chapter of the book, hooks raised the critical question of eros or the erotic in classrooms environment. According to hooks, eros and the erotics do not need to be denied for learning to take place. She argues that one of the central tenets of feminist pedagogy has been to subvert the mind-body dualism and allow oneself as a teacher to be whole in the classroom, and as a consequence wholehearted.

Noting a lack of diverse voices in popular feminist theory, hooks published Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center in 1984. In this book, she argues that those voices have been marginalized, and states: "To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body." She argues that if feminism seeks to make women equal to men, then it is impossible because in Western society, not all men are equal. She claims, "Women in lower class and poor groups, particularly those who are non-white, would not have defined women's liberation as women gaining social equality with men since they are continually reminded in their everyday lives that all women do not share a common social status."

In 1983, after several years of teaching and writing, she completed her doctorate in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a dissertation on author Toni Morrison.

She taught at several post-secondary institutions in the early 1980s and 1990s, including the University of California, Santa Cruz, San Francisco State University, Yale, Oberlin College and City College of New York. In 1981 South End Press published her first major work, Ain't I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism, though it was written years earlier while she was an undergraduate student. In the decades since its publication, Ain't I a Woman? has gained widespread recognition as an influential contribution to feminist thought.

Her teaching career began in 1976 as an English professor and senior lecturer in Ethnic Studies at the University of Southern California. During her three years there, Golemics, a Los Angeles publisher, released her first published work, a chapbook of poems titled And There We Wept (1978), written under the name "bell hooks". She adopted her maternal great-grandmother's name as a pen name because her great-grandmother "was known for her snappy and bold tongue, which [she] greatly admired". She put the name in lowercase letters "to distinguish [herself from] her great-grandmother." She said that her unconventional lowercasing of her name signifies what is most important is her works: the "substance of books, not who I am."

Watkins was born in Hopkinsville, a small, segregated town in Kentucky, to a working-class family. Her father, Veodis Watkins, was a custodian and her mother, Rosa Bell Watkins, was a homemaker. She had five sisters and one brother. An avid reader, she was educated in racially segregated public schools, and wrote of great adversities when making the transition to an integrated school, where teachers and students were predominantly white. She later graduated from Hopkinsville High School in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. She obtained her BA in English from Stanford University in 1973, and her MA in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1976.

Gloria Jean Watkins (born September 25, 1952), better known by her pen name bell hooks, is an American author, professor, feminist, and social activist. The name "bell hooks" is borrowed from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks.