Recently it had dawned on me that a significant voice in black feminist cultural criticism had virtually disappeared from academic and liberal public media. In the previous decade, bell hooks (née Gloria Watkins) eagerly shared her thoughts with us on Oprah Winfrey, Spike Lee, the Anita Hill vs. Clarence Thomas Senate hearings, art, Madonna and the […]
Year: 2010
hanging out with bell hooks in kentucky
Ten years or so ago, I heard bell hooks speak at Berea College as a visiting scholar. Her lecture, about why You’ve Got Mail was a deeply cynical movie, struck a cord. Although I wasn’t the pert blond owner of an independent bookstore (played by Meg Ryan in this version), I had run an independent […]
Black Women M.I.A.
Missing black women rarely blow up the blogosphere. Unless you’re Lauryn Hill. Or bell hooks. In the wake of the monumental success of The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Ms. Hill (as she prefers to be called) had it all—a multi-platinum innovative album that she had produced, written and arranged herself, five Grammy awards, a Time […]
Oscar Grant and LeBron James: What Would bell hooks Have Said?
I thought about bell hooks on July 8 as basketball star LeBron James made the highly publicized announcement that he would be playing with the Miami Heat. That same day the verdict was read against Johannes Mehserle, the cop who shot and killed Oscar Grant, an unarmed young black man. That day marked critical turning […]
Five Years Later: Life in the Lower Ninth Ward
On the eve of the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, we decided to travel to New Orleans to volunteer at the Lower Ninth Ward Village Community Center. We were visiting New Orleans for the third time after having written a book that included a chapter on how historical memory was unleashed during the hurricane and […]
The Perfect Tan: An Imperialist Fantasy?
The National Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 included a provision that requires salon tanners to pay a 10 percent tax each time they drop in for some faux sunbathing. The tax will generate an estimated $2.7 billion over the next ten years that will go toward the cost of extending health-care coverage […]
Yoga’s Feminist Awakening
The online yoga community is still feeling the aftershocks of a recent debate about the use of women’s bodies in asana-related advertising, and the conversation is far from finished. It all started when the grand dame of U.S. yoga and Yoga Journal co-founder Judith Hanson Lasater wrote a letter expressing her unhappiness with the increasing […]
bell hooks week!
“If I do not speak in a language that can be understood, then there is little chance for dialogue.” -bell hooks, from Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black This week at the Ms. Blog, we are running a series of essays celebrating the life and works of the extraordinary bell hooks. hooks has made a […]
What If You Refuse to Be Seduced by Violence?
With great homage to the brilliant bell hooks, I offer these thoughts on how we might actively refuse to be seduced by violence. They come from a speech I gave a few years ago at the campus where I teach and were inspired by my concern over the violent messages in Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight saga that […]
10 Years of “Feminism is for Everybody”
At the dawn of this new millennium, bell hooks published Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics, a slim, bright-yellow book with a powerful goal: to introduce feminist politics in an accessible format in order to reach the widest possible audience. She begins with a story of how proud she is to talk to everyone she […]