bell hooks (born September 25, 1952) is a Black feminist thinker and social critic best known for recognizing and seeking to change thinking that supports and perpetuates what she terms "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" into movements that will bring about a more uplifting and affirming society.
Born Gloria Watkins, she uses the name bell hooks, spelled without capital letters, to honor her mother and her grandmother. In 1973, she graduated Stanford University in 1976, following that with a degree from University of Wisconsin and with a Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1983.
hooks believes, among other things, that many of the issues that confront society today (such as race, gender, sex, class, and sexual orientation) are inextricably interconnected; and that these issues must be confronted as a whole in order to bring about positive social change.
Monographs by hooks include:
- Ain't I a Woman: Black women and feminism (1981)
- Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (1984)
- Talking Back: thinking feminist, thinking black (1989)
- Yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics (1990)
- Breaking Bread: insurgent Black intellectual life (1991) (with Cornel West)
- Black Looks: race and representation (1992)
- Sisters of the Yam: black women and self-recovery (1993)
- Teaching to Transgress: education as the practice of freedom (1994)
- Outlaw Culture: resisting representations (1994)
- Art on My Mind: visual politics (1995)
- Killing Rage: ending racism (1995)
- Bone Black: memories of girlhood (1996)
- Reel to Real: race, sex, and class at the movies (1996)
- Wounds of Passion: a writing life (1997)
- Happy to be Nappy (1999) (a children's book, with Christopher Raschka)
- Remembered Rapture: the writer at work (1999)
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