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Feminist Theory From Margin to Center by bell hooks. Publisher: Pluto Press, 2000.

September 25, 1952

December 15, 2021

bell hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins, was one of the greatest cultural critics and writers of the twentieth century. She was a Black feminist leader, an educator, an author, and a poet. She wrote over forty books, including All About Love (2000) , The Will to Change (2004) , and Feminist Theory (1984) . Her scholarship addressed race, gender, sexuality, class, and more.

Personal Information

Gloria Jean Watkins; bell hooks

Date and place of birth

September 25, 1952, in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, USA

Date and place of death

December 15, 2021, in Berea, Kentucky, USA

Mother: Rosa Bell

Father: Veodis Watkins

Marriage and Family Life

Unmarried; No Children; Siblings include: Angela, Theresa, Valeria, Gwenda, Sarah, and Kenneth

Education (short version)

Graduated from the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a Ph.D. in Literature in 1983; Graduated from University of Wisconsin–Madison with an M.A. in English in 1976; Graduated from Stanford University with a B.A. in English in 1973. 

Education (longer version)

After graduating from Hopkinsville High School in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, hooks pursued her academic career and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in English from Stanford University in 1973. Later, in 1976, she obtained her Master of Arts in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After dedicating a few years to teaching and writing, she completed her doctorate in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1983. The topic of her dissertation was Toni Morrison’s books, The Bluest Eye and Sula . 

Buddhist-Christian

Transformation(s)

hooks was born in the U.S. South in what she would later call a “racial apartheid.” Her experiences as a young Black girl in Kentucky deeply informed her views on geography, race, class, and gender. While an undergraduate student at Stanford University, hooks wrote her first book , Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, though it was published in 1981. In this text, hooks examines Black womanhood through the sites of oppression like sexism and racism and structures like “the imperialism of patriarchy.” She also contends with the devaluation of Black women in society and white feminism. This text is one of many in which hooks tackles structural forces like the “imperialist capitalist white supremacist patriarchy” through her personal story or those of Black women around her. hooks is also known for her commentary on teaching. In 1994, her book Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom was published, in which she shares her philosophy on engaged teaching and invites educators of all stripes to consider how teaching is “an act of resistance countering the overwhelming boredom, uninterest, and apathy that so often characterize the way professors and students feel about teaching and learning, about the classroom experience.”

Despite her celebrity in academic circles, hooks was committed to writing books that were “easy to read without being simplistic,” as she explained in Feminism is for Everyone . She accomplished this and using a blend of personal history and cultural criticism, she gained a global readership and inspired many to consider the lives of Black women, feminist theory, critical race theory, and many other subjects. 

Contemporaneous Network(s)

Spelman College Women's Research and Resource Center National Advisory Board Member; Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame .

Significance

Works/Agency

hooks is the author of over forty books and numerous articles that span topics from feminism to visual arts and media to masculinity and colorism and even children’s books–all in her signature writing style that was accessible to anyone. She is most known for her works on feminism and gender studies, race and racism, and criticism of Black cultural production. She won multiple awards for her writing, which include but are not limited to the American Book Award/Before Columbus Foundation Award; Bank Street College Children’s Book of the Year; and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association’s Best Poetry Award .

In addition to writing, hooks was a beloved professor, having taught at Stanford University, Yale University, Oberlin College, and The City College of New York to name a few. She concluded her teaching and mentorship at Berea College in her home state of Kentucky, where she established the bell hooks Institute in 2014 to  promote feminist programming , now The bell hooks center. The bell hooks papers, a collection of fourteen boxes , are held at the Berea College Hutchins Library despite being pursued by other institutions. hooks insisted that her papers remained in the place that made her who she was .  

From 2013-2016, hooks was in residence at The New School, where she was in conversation with luminaries from across disciplines and industries that, on occasion, sparked controversy. A catalog of the conversations can be found here .

hooks was a celebrated writer in her lifetime with a reputation as one of the foremost feminist thinkers and writers in the 20th and 21st centuries. Her work even permeated social media, gaining the attention of millennials. A Tumblr account was started in 2015 called “Saved by the bell hooks” which mixes and matches still shots from the 1990s television show, Saved By the Bell and bell hooks quotes. 

In 2018, she was inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame . In 2020, she was honored with TIME Magazine’s 100 Women of the Year, where writer/producer dream hampton wrote, “For generations of black girls, hooks has been a rite of passage. ”

Legacy and Influence

Since hooks’s passing, several symposia have been held in her honor across the U.S. In February 2022, Northeastern University Africana Studies Program began holding its annual bell hooks symposium . Since the fall of 2022, Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee & Books, a Philadelphia-based café, has held an annual bell hooks symposium featuring noted Black academics and activists like Brittany Cooper, Eddie Glaude and Tarana Burke. The bell hooks center at Berea College held their inaugural bell hooks symposium in June 2023, featuring Black academic feminists like Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Alexis Pauline Gumbs. In September 2023, Austin Peay State University held a bell hooks Education Symposium . 

In 2023, the journal, Women, Gender and Families of Color honored hooks with a special edition called “Honoring bell hooks.” The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy published its special journal issue in December 2023 entitled, “The Liberatory Legacy of bell hooks: Pedagogies and Praxes that Heal and Disrupt."

In 2023, hooks was awarded posthumously the UC Santa Cruz Alumni Achievement Award .   

Controversies

As a cultural critic, hooks was no stranger to controversy. She wrote critiques of cultural producers like Madonna, Ice Cube, Spike Lee and Beyoncé. Essays like “Madonna: Plantation Mistress or Soul Sister” and “Sorrowful Black Death is not a Hot Ticket” are examples of critical essays that stirred conversation about what hooks called the “oppositional gaze” of cultural objects albeit music or film or otherwise. In 2015-2016, hooks again caused a stir by critiquing pop culture queen Beyoncé Knowles. At the bell hooks residency at The New School, hooks likened Knowles to a terrorist. While hooks can offer a penetrating critique, she is not beyond changing her mind, even after going public.

Also, hooks has been critiqued by fellow Black feminist Michelle Wallace for overly simplistic writing . She was also critiqued by New School students for using the word “transexual” rather than “transgender.”

Clusters & Search Terms

Current Identification(s)

Feminist Studies; Black Feminist Intellectual Thought; Critical Race Theory; Critical Pedagogy; Love; Buddhism 

Black Feminists; Public Intellectuals; Kentucky Writers; Race, Class and Gender Studies; Cultural Criticism; Critical Pedagogical Practices; Black Buddhism 

Search Terms

Black Women in Academia; Black Women Writers; Black Cultural Criticism; Black Feminism

Bibliography

Web Resources (selected): 

“APSU to Host Bell Hooks Educational Symposium Sept. 5-7.” Austin Peay State University , www.apsu.edu/news/august-2023-bell-hooks-0830.php. Accessed 19 Mar. 2024.

“Bell Hooks at the New School.” YouTube , YouTube, www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWhTJDazgMDlKssI73cgIdIYQKidYUNUM. Accessed 19 Mar. 2024.

“Bell Hooks.” Poetry Foundation , Poetry Foundation, www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/bell-hooks. Accessed 19 Mar. 2024.

“Get to Know Bell Hooks.” Berea College , 26 Apr. 2023, www.berea.edu/centers/the-bell-hooks-center/about-bell.

Hoff, Victoria Dawson. Bell Hooks Thinks Beyoncé Is a Terrorist - Bell Hooks and Janet ... , www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/news/a19232/bell-hooks-beyonce-terrorist/. Accessed 19 Mar. 2024.

“Honoring Bell Hooks’s Legacy: Humanist, Feminist, Public Intellectual, Social Critic, and Educator.” Women Gender and Families of Color , womengenderandfamilies.ku.edu/honoring-bell-hookss-legacy-humanist-feminist-public-intellectual-social-critic-and-educator/. Accessed 19 Mar. 2024.

hooks, bell -- 1952-2021. “Bell Hooks Papers.” Collection: Bell Hooks Papers | , bereaarchives.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/resources/137. Accessed 19 Mar. 2024.

Lee, Min Jin. “In Praise of Bell Hooks.” The New York Times , The New York Times, 28 Feb. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/books/bell-hooks-min-jin-lee-aint-i-a-woman.html.

Lytle, Alan. “Poet, Author, Educator Bell Hooks Headlines 2018 Hof Class.” WUKY , 31 Jan. 2018, www.wuky.org/local-regional-news/2018-01-30/poet-author-educator-bell-hooks-headlines-2018-hof-class.

Mmorikawa. “Talking Back: The Genius of Bell Hooks.” Africana Studies Program , 16 May 2022, cssh.northeastern.edu/africana/talking-back-the-genius-of-bell-hooks/.

Nittle, Nadra. “New Book Explores the Influences behind the Life and Work of Bell Hooks.” The 19th , 8 Nov. 2023, 19thnews.org/2023/11/bell-hooks-spiritual-vision-nadra-nittle/.

Schuessler, Jennifer. “The Wide-Angle Vision, and Legacy, of Bell Hooks.” The New York Times , The New York Times, 17 Dec. 2021, www.nytimes.com/2021/12/16/books/bell-hooks-black-women-feminism.html.

Staff, TIME. “Bell Hooks: 100 Women of the Year.” Time , Time, 5 Mar. 2020, time.com/5793676/bell-hooks-100-women-of-the-year/.

Stetson, Grace. “Bell Hooks’s Legacy Turns a New Page.” UC Santa Cruz News , news.ucsc.edu/2023/11/bell-hooks-alumni-awards.html. Accessed 19 Mar. 2024.

“Subject and Course Guides: Bell Hooks: Home.” Home - Bell Hooks - Subject and Course Guides at University of Illinois at Chicago , researchguides.uic.edu/bellhooks. Accessed 19 Mar. 2024.

Swan, Shea Carmen. “She Came, She Saw, She Transgressed.” The New School Free Press , 9 Mar. 2016, www.newschoolfreepress.com/2014/11/10/she-came-she-saw-she-transgressed/.

“Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee & Books: Events.” Uncle Bobbie’s , www.unclebobbies.com/events. Accessed 19 Mar. 2024.

’91, J. Morgan, et al. “Bell Hooks Archive Finds a Home at Berea College.” Berea College Magazine , 16 June 2017, magazine.berea.edu/spring-2017/bell-hooks-archive-finds-a-home-at-berea-college/. 

Publication date: Mar 19, 2024

Last updated: Aug 27, 2024

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The Wide-Angle Vision, and Legacy, of bell hooks

The pioneering feminist scholar, who died this week, wrote about women, race, love, healing, pop culture and much more, always keeping Black women at the center.

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By Jennifer Schuessler

The news that bell hooks had died at 69 spread quickly across social media on Wednesday, prompting a flood of posts featuring favorite quotes about love, justice, men, women, community and healing, as well as testimonials about how this pioneering Black feminist writer had changed, or saved, lives.

If the outpouring felt more intense than the usual tributes to departed scholars, admirers say that merely reflected the extraordinary way she mixed the emotional with the intellectual in her quest to make the experiences of Black women not just visible, but central to a sweeping reimagining of society.

“I think we can’t overstate her influence,” Imani Perry, a professor of African American studies at Princeton said. “For so many people, bell hooks was their first introduction to social theory, critiques of patriarchy, white supremacy and capitalism.”

But even more, she said, hooks’s writing — and her impact — was personal.

“She came from this really sophisticated world of cultural theory, but she connected it to her very particular experience of growing up in Jim Crow Kentucky,” Perry said. “She had all the chops to write in this more traditional, drier academic style, but she chose differently because she wanted to connect with everyday people.”

Perry first met hooks in the early 1990s. She was working as an intern at South End Press, which had published “Ain’t I a Woman,” hooks’s groundbreaking 1981 book about the impact of both racism and sexism on Black women.

It was a book about intersectionality, before there was a word for it — just one example of how the more than 30 books she wrote anticipated debates and concepts, from self-care to cultural appropriation , that are mainstays today.

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To Read bell hooks Was to Love Her

bell hooks taught the world two things: how to critique and how to love. Perhaps the two lessons were both sides of the same coin. To read bell hooks is to become initiated into the power and inclusiveness of Black feminism whether you are a Black woman or not. With her wide array of essays of cultural criticism from the 1980s and 1990s, hooks dared to love Blackness and criticize the patriarchy out loud; she was generous and attentive in her analysis of pop culture as a self-proclaimed “bad girl.” Sadly, the announcement of her death this week, at 69 , adds to a too-long list of Black thinkers, artists, and public figures gone too soon. While many of us feel heavy with grief at the loss of hooks and her contributions to arts, letters, and ideas, we are also voraciously reading and rereading both in mourning and celebration of her impact as a critical theorist, a professor, a poet, a lover, and a thinker.

As a professor of Black feminisms at Cornell University, where I often teach classes featuring bell hooks’s work, I see a syllabus as having the potential to be a love letter, a mixtape for revolution. hooks’s voice was daring, cutting, and unapologetic, whether she was taking Beyoncé and Spike Lee to task or celebrating the raunchiness of Lil’ Kim. What hooks accomplished for Black feminism over decades, on and off the page, was having built a movement of inclusively cultivated communities and solidarity across social differences. Quotes and ideas of Black feminist thinkers tend to circulate across the internet as inspirational self-help mantras that can end up being surface-level engagements, but as bell hooks shows us, there has always been a vibrant radical tradition of Black women and femmes unafraid to speak their minds. bell hooks was the prerequisite reading that we are lucky to discover now or to return to as a ceremony of remembrance. Here are nine texts I’d suggest to anyone seeking to acquaint or reacquaint themselves with her work.

Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981)

Publishing over 30 books over the course of her career, perhaps the most well-known is her first, Ain’t I a Woman. Referencing Sojourner Truth’s famous words, hooks drew a direct line between herself and the radical tradition of outspoken Black women demanding freedom. Before Kimberlé Crenshaw coined “intersectionality” in 1991, hooks exemplified the importance of the interlocking nature of Black feminism within freedom movements, weaving together the histories of abolitionism in the United States, women’s suffrage, and the Civil Rights era. She refused to let white feminism or abolitionist men alone define this chapter of America’s past. Finding power and freedom in the margins, she lived a feminist life without apology by centering Black women as historical figures.

Keeping a Hold of Life: Reading Toni Morrison’s Fiction (1983)

To read bell hooks is to become enrolled as a student in her extensive coursework. Keeping a Hold of Life shows us her student writing and another side of her political formation as Black feminist literary theorist. hooks earned her Ph.D. from University of California Santa Cruz in 1983 despite having spent years teaching literature beforehand, and in her dissertation she analyzes two novels by Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye and Sula, celebrating both books’ depictions of Black femininity and kinship. For those who are students, it may be encouraging to see hooks’s dedication to learning: Before she got her degree, she had already published a field-defining text. But that wasn’t the end of her scholarly journey by a long shot.

Black Looks : Race and Representation (1992)

I love teaching the timeless essay “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance” from this collection above all because it is the first one of hers I read as a college sophomore. In it, she reflects on what she overhears as a professor at Yale about so-called ethnic food and interracial dating. In some ways, the through-line of hooks’s writing can be summed up here, in the way she examines what it means to consume and be consumed, especially for women of color. In another essay from the collection, “The Oppositional Gaze,” hooks taught her readers the subversive power of looking , especially looking done by colonized peoples; drawing on the writings of Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Stuart Hall, she grappled with the power of visual culture and its stakes for domination in the lives of Black women, in particular. (She mentions that she got her start in film criticism after being grossed out by Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It .) Her criticism shaped feminist film theory and continues to be celebrated as a crucial way to understand the politics of looking back.

Teaching to Transgress: Education As the Practice of Freedom (1994)

bell hooks was a diligent student of Black feminism, and she was more than happy to pass along what she learned, having taught at various points during her career at the University of Southern California, the New School, Oberlin College, Yale University, and CUNY’s City College. In turn, she often reflected on what she learned from teaching in her writings. In this volume, hooks contributes to radicalizing education theory in ways that even now have been understated: She understood schooling as a battleground and space of cultivating knowledge, writing that “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility.” In 2004, she returned to her home state, Kentucky, for her final teaching post at Berea College, where the bell hooks Institute was founded in 2014 and to which she dedicated her papers in 2017.

“ Hardcore Honey: bell hooks Goes on the Down Low With Lil’ Kim ,” Paper Magazine (1997)

In this 1997 interview, hooks vibes with Lil’ Kim and probes the rapper’s politics of desire, sex work. It’s an example of how she was invested in remaining part of the contemporary conversations around Black life and feminine sexuality. Though she described Lil’ Kim’s hyperfemme aesthetic as “boring straight-male porn fantasy” and wondered out loud who was responsible for the styling of her image as a celebrity and part of the Notorious B.I.G.’s Junior M.A.F.I.A. (“the boys in charge”), she defends Lil’ Kim against the puritanical attacks that she notes have been made against Black women time and again: In hooks’s opening question, she tells Lil’ Kim, “Nobody talks about John F. Kennedy being a ho ’cause he fucked around. But the moment a woman talks about sex or is known to be having too much sex, people talk about her as a ho. So I wanted you to talk about that a little bit.”

All About Love: New Visions (2000)

hooks was especially prolific during the 1990s, publishing about a book a year. The early aughts marked a shift in her intellectual focus away from cultural theory and toward love as a radical act. In this book, she details her personal life, drawing on romantic experiences and what she learned from experiences with boyfriends. With words from 20 years ago that remain trenchant to this day, hooks writes, “I feel our nation’s turning away from love … moving into a wilderness of spirit so intense we may never find our way home again. I write of love to bear witness both to the danger in this movement, and to call for a return to love.” For her, love was not a mere sentiment but something deeply revolutionary that should inform all of Black feminist thought.

“ Beyoncé’s Lemonade is capitalist money-making at its best ,” The Guardian (2016)

In bell hooks’s scathing review of Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade , she took issue with what she perceived as the singer’s commodification of Black sexualized femininity as liberatory. She calls out Beyoncé’s branding and links the legacy of the auction block to what hooks sees as a repetition of the valuation of Black women’s sexualized bodies, warning of the dangers of circulating such images as faux sexual liberation, dictated by capitalist marketing dollars. “Even though Beyoncé and her creative collaborators daringly offer multidimensional images of black female life,” hooks wrote, “much of the album stays within a conventional stereotypical framework, where the black woman is always a victim.” (As was to be expected, the Beyhive did not take kindly to the critique, and it remains an ideological fault line for many of the singer’s fans.)

Happy to Be Nappy (2017)

While most likely first encountered the writings of bell hooks in a college seminar on feminism or decolonization, some were introduced to bell hooks in their early years, during bedtime stories. Understanding self-esteem and image for Black children as deeply political and encoded in the way they view their hair, she wrote a children’s book for them, Happy to Be Nappy. Remembering the impact of the Doll Test — the 1940s psychological experiment cited by the NAACP lawyers behind Brown v. Board of Education , where Black children were observed to assign positive qualities to white dolls and negative ones to Black dolls — and how important representation is, writing this book was a radical act of love.

Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place (2012)

From interviews to cultural criticism to academic dissertations, bell hooks did not limit herself to a singular form of writing. She was promiscuous in genre, and her approach was to say whatever needed urgent saying about the interlocking structure of patriarchy, capitalism, and racism — however it needed to be said. Reading one of her final books, a poetry collection, helps us to return with her to Kentucky, where she spent her last years. She loved the expanse of the Black diaspora, but she held close the U.S. South, particularly Black Appalachia. Here, she paints in words the rural landscape and its local ecologies, where stolen land and stolen lives converge, touching on how the landscape of the mountains has been home to people like her, whom she describes as “black, Native American, white, all ‘people of one blood.’” It is a literary homecoming that frames her homegoing. To truly read bell hooks necessitates rereading her again and again, and this act forms its own ritual of elegy, of celebrating the life of someone whose foundational impact cannot be overstated.

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The Revolutionary Writing of bell hooks

Before she became bell hooks, one of the great cultural critics and writers of the twentieth century, and before she inspired generations of readers—especially Black women—to understand their own axis-tilting power, she was Gloria Jean Watkins, daughter of Rosa Bell and Veodis Watkins. hooks, who died on Wednesday, was raised in Hopkinsville, a small, segregated town in Kentucky. Everything she would become began there. She was born in 1952 and attended segregated schools up until college; it was in the classroom that she, eager to learn, began glimpsing the liberatory possibilities of education. She loved movies, yet the ways in which the theatre made us occasionally captive to small-mindedness and stereotype compelled her to wonder if there were ways to look (and talk) back at the screen’s moving images. Growing up, her father was a janitor and her mother worked as a maid for white families; their work, rife with minor indignities, brought into focus the everyday power of an impolite glare, or rolling your eyes. A new world is born out of such small gestures of resistance—of affirming your rightful space.

In 1973, Watkins graduated from Stanford; as a nineteen-year-old undergraduate, she had already completed a draft of a visionary history of Black feminism and womanhood. During the seventies, she pursued graduate work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of California, Santa Cruz. In the late seventies, she began publishing poetry under the pen name bell hooks—a tribute to her great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. (The lowercase was meant to distinguish her from her great-grandmother, and to suggest that what mattered was the substance of the work, not the author’s name.) In 1981, as hooks, she published the scholarship she began at Stanford, “ Ain’t I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism ,” a landmark book that was at once a history of slavery’s legacy and the ongoing dehumanization of Black women as well as a critique of the revolutionary politics which had arisen in response to this maltreatment—and which, nonetheless, centered the male psyche. True liberation, she believed, needed to reckon with how class, race, and gender are facets of our identities that are inextricably linked. We are all of these things at once.

In the eighties and nineties, hooks taught at Yale University, Oberlin College, and the City College of New York. She was a prolific scholar and writer, publishing nearly forty books and hundreds of articles for magazines, journals, and newspapers. Among her most influential ideas was that of the “oppositional gaze.” Power relations are encoded in how we look at one another; enslaved people were once punished for merely looking at their white owners. hooks’s notion of a confrontational, rebellious way of looking sought to short-circuit the male gaze or the white gaze, which wanted to render Black female spectators as passive or somehow “other.” She appreciated the power of critiquing or making art from this defiantly Black perspective.

I came to her work in the mid-nineties, during a fertile era of Black cultural studies, when it felt like your typical alternative weekly or independent magazine was as rigorous as an academic monograph. For hooks, writing in the public sphere was just an application of her mind to a more immediate concern, whether her subject was Madonna, Spike Lee, or, in one memorably withering piece, Larry Clark’s “Kids.” She was writing at a time when the serious study of culture—mining for subtexts, sifting for clues—was still a scrappy undertaking. As an Asian American reader, I was enamored with how critics like hooks drew on their own backgrounds and friendships, not to flatten their lives into something relatably universal but to remind us how we all index a vast, often contradictory array of tastes and experiences. Her criticism suggested a pulsing, tireless brain trying to make sense of how a work of art made her feel. She modelled an intellect: following the distant echoes of white supremacy and Black resistance over time and pinpointing their legacies in the works of Quentin Tarantino or Forest Whitaker’s “Waiting to Exhale.”

Yet her work—books such as “ Reel to Real ” or “ Art on My Mind ,” which have survived decades of rereadings and underlinings—also modelled how to simply live and breathe in the world. She was zealous in her praise—especially when it came to Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust,” a film referenced countless times in her work—and she never lost grasp of how it feels to be awestruck while standing before a stirring work of art. She couldn’t deny the excitement as the lights dim and we prepare to surrender to the performance. But she made demands on the world. She believed criticism came from a place of love, a desire for things worthy of losing ourselves to.

She reached people, and that’s what a generation of us wanted to do with our intellectual work. She wrote children’s books ; she wrote essays that people read in college classrooms and prisons alike. Picking up “Reel to Real” made me rethink what a book could be. It was a collection of her film essays, astute dissections of “Paris Is Burning” or “Leaving Las Vegas.” But the middle portion consists of interviews with filmmakers like Wayne Wang and Arthur Jafa, where you encounter a different dimension of hooks’s critical persona—curious, empathetic, searching for comrades. “Representation matters” is a hollow phrase nowadays, and it’s easy to forget that even in the eighties and nineties nobody felt that this was enough. She was at her sharpest in resisting the banal, market-ready refractions of Blackness or womanhood that represent easy, meagre progress. (One of her most famous, recent works was a 2016 essay on Beyoncé’s self-commodification , which provoked the ire of the singer’s fans. Yet, if the essay is understood within the broader context of hooks’s life and intellectual project, there are probably few pieces on Beyoncé filled with as much admiration and love.)

This has been a particularly trying time for critics who came of age in the eighties and nineties, as giants like hooks, Greg Tate , and Dave Hickey have passed. hooks was a brilliant, tough critic—no doubt her death will inspire many revisitations of works like “Ain’t I a Woman,” “ Black Looks ,” or “ Outlaw Culture .” Yet she was also a dazzling memoirist and poet. In 1982, she published a poem titled “in the matter of the egyptians” in Hambone , a journal she worked on with her then partner, Nathaniel Mackey . It reads:

ancestral bodies buried in sand sun treasured flowers press in a memory book they pass through loss and come to this still tenderness swept clean by scarce winds surfacing in the watery passage beyond death

In 2004, hooks returned to Kentucky to teach at Berea College, where she also founded the bell hooks Institute. Over the past two decades, hooks’s published criticism turned from film and literature to relationships, love, sexuality, the ways in which members of a community remain accountable for one another. Living together was always a theme in hooks’s work, though now intimacy became the subject, not the context. Much like the late Asian American activist and organizer Grace Lee Boggs , who turned to community gardening in later years, hooks’s twenty-first-century writings about love as “an action, a participatory emotion,” and companionship were prophetic, a return to the basis for all that is meaningful. The social and political systems around us are designed to obstruct our sense of esteem and make us feel small. Yet revolution starts within each of us—in the demands we take up against the world, in the daily fight against nihilism.

“If I were really asked to define myself,” she told a Buddhist magazine in the early nineties, “I wouldn’t start with race; I wouldn’t start with blackness; I wouldn’t start with gender; I wouldn’t start with feminism. I would start with stripping down to what fundamentally informs my life, which is that I’m a seeker on the path. I think of feminism, and I think of anti-racist struggles as part of it. But where I stand spiritually is, steadfastly, on a path about love.”

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Mobile navigation, revolutionary love: remembering bell hooks.

By Natasha Becker

March 8, 2022

After four decades of trailblazing feminist scholarship, author and activist bell hooks died on December 15, 2021, at age 69. Born Gloria Jean Watkins in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1952, she later honored the women in her family by taking her maternal great-grandmother’s name as her pen name, setting it in lowercase to emphasize “the substance of books, not who I am.”

I first encountered bell hooks as an undergraduate student in Cape Town, South Africa, and I was instantly in awe. She wrote about challenging topics with confidence and ease — and from a black woman’s perspective. Her ideas resonated with me, even though she was from a different part of the world and of a different generation. 

I was born and raised in a country that enforced centuries of racism and inequality. I was 20 years old when black people were finally allowed to vote in the first truly democratic elections in 1994, overwhelmingly electing Nelson Mandela as their president. But I mostly grew up within the South African paradox: a country of incredible diversity, stunning natural beauty, and rich cultures divided by racial injustices and inequalities. My quest to understand this paradox was inseparable from my desire to understand myself. 

I was drawn to bell hooks because she went deep into analyzing the American paradox and her position within it. She was radical not only for her views on race, gender, and inequality but also for proposing love as an act of resistance and for saying that black women were not just their work (or labor) but deserved, as much as anyone, their own affection and tenderness. 

bell hooks in 1995. Photograph by Monica Almeida/The New York Times/Redux

In the first collection of her essays I read, Black Looks: Race and Representation , she argued for alternative ways to look at blackness and whiteness. Each essay in the book analyzed the ways blackness and black people are viewed and experienced in mainstream culture, especially popular culture. As she described it, “The essays in Black Looks are meant to challenge and unsettle, to disrupt and subvert.” This is exactly what I experienced! 

For instance, like everyone else in the 1990s, I was a big fan of Tina Turner and Madonna without thinking much about how either of them might represent womanhood or stereotypes about women or what impact their images might have on me. But hooks argued that black women in film and music are often seen only as objects, not as people, causing problems in white-black relationships, especially in how black women view themselves: they either oppose the sexist pop-culture image or quietly absorb the stereotypes. She cited Tina Turner as an example of a black woman who must be represented as sexually free-spirited and driven by lust in order to be successful in entertainment and demonstrated how this representation creates paths of abuse and violence against black women. She compared Madonna’s self-representation as a “mother figure” to people of color (“Madonna” denotes the Virgin Mary, after all) to the way white colonialists saw themselves as saviors and parental figures to supposedly inferior races. Worse still, she argued, Madonna appropriates black culture for popular entertainment. Her analysis was unsettling but convincing. I understood the point: such images of black and white women strongly influence people’s perception and treatment of people of color.

However, it was her thoughts on “revolutionary love” that left the most profound and long-lasting impression. She took seriously the idea that social change had to center love and that this was as much about transforming ourselves as it was about changing the world. In her 1999 book  All About Love: New Visions , she focused on the importance of love, community, and self-care, not as escapism or distraction but as an essential part of changing the world. She argued that we cannot continue to hurt, undermine, and belittle each other and simultaneously build a better society. “Whenever domination is present love is lacking,” she wrote in her 2000 book  Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics . 

bell hooks had a big vision for humanity. She believed that we are all connected but also that we cannot ignore our inequalities and privileges. “The soul of our politics,” she said, “is the commitment to ending domination.” She insisted that all of our relationships must be built on a foundation of mutual respect. She diagnosed that our societies are lacking in love and the only way to heal this situation is with forgiveness, compassion, and community.  She expressed this intention and vision in her book Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery . “This is a book about reconciliation,” she wrote. “It is meant to serve as a map, charting a journey that can lead us back to that place dark and deep within us, where we were first known and loved, where the arms that held us hold us still.” As a young black woman living through a tumultuous time in South Africa, I soaked up her wisdom and perspective. 

Installation view of the exhibition Radical Love at the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice Art Gallery. Photograph by Sebastian Bach

Decades later I had an amazing opportunity to center hook’s ideas, activism, and feminism in my work as a curator. In 2019 I was invited to co-curate an exhibition at the new Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice and Gallery in New York. We conceived an exhibition titled Radical Love that was underpinned by a belief in the dignity of all people, highlighting artists who are working to advance humanity. The exhibition was guided by hooks’s powerful words: “Were we all seeing more images of loving human interaction, it would undoubtedly have a positive impact on our lives.” We chose to center love in the exhibition and defined it as a commitment to the interconnectedness of people and the planet.

Our exhibition statement proclaimed:

“ Radical Love  offers a joyous vision of love’s transformative power and calls for a return to love. While we may know about love, many of us have forgotten what love is or why we need love to sustain life. This exhibition is inspired by love as a transformative force and begins by thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling; love assumes responsibility and accountability. What is urgent about the politics of love in our present moment is that we are claiming a space within culture, with no sense of fear or apology, for society’s others.”

Installation view of Radical Love at the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice Art Gallery. Photograph by Sebastian Bach

We selected 23 artists from around the world whose artwork is grounded in ideas of love, kindness, and compassion as a force for social change and who celebrate those on the margins of society. Because their artworks explored ideas of devotion, abundance, and beauty, we transformed the environment of the gallery from a typical white space to a bright red one. The enveloping red walls of the gallery allowed us to literally and metaphorically recalibrate the space, and create a positively exhilarating center for the importance of love in creating community and connection. Because we considered the exhibition through human connection and social justice, it was important to frame the gallery as a space of community, celebration, and devotion.

In my curatorial essay “ An Ode to Love ,” I elaborated on the multifaceted nature of love — as compassion, as social justice, as inclusion, as celebration, as connection — through the different artistic strategies of artists in the exhibition. The artists in Radical Love proposed that to heal our wounded communities, we must return to an all-encompassing practice of love. My essay concludes that we all yearn to end cruelty, to live in a culture where kindness can flourish, and to create a world where everyone knows compassion. As such, love and compassion is our hope and our salvation. 

As a curator I am positioned between being an exhibition maker, collection manager, educator, and creative practitioner. However, the etymology of the word curator is cura in Latin, and it means “to help or to care.” While there are distinct differences between curators, we are all to some degree engaged in a practice of “care.” How we express this depends on the context. For instance, it can be expressed as caring for artworks, caring for artists, caring for audiences, or all of the above. One of the truest ways I express myself as a curator is to find meaning and purpose in curating as a practice of care — even when I am creating friction or pushing new ideas. I learned this from bell hooks.

“To give ourselves love, to love Blackness,” said hooks, “is to restore the true meaning of freedom, hope, and possibility in all our lives.” Her legacy lives on in the minds and hearts of everyone she awakened and inspired.

Text by Natasha Becker, curator of African art.

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What Madonna Knows

The artist is always one step ahead—and has a unique power to scandalize each generation anew.

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W e like our female icons, as they age, to go quietly—to tiptoe backwards into semi-reclusion, away from our relentless curiosity and our unforgiving gaze. Tina Turner managed this arguably better than anyone else, holed up for the last decade of her life in a gated Swiss château with an adoring husband and a consulting role on the hit musical about her life, watching a younger performer step nimbly into her gold tassels. Joni Mitchell retreated to her Los Angeles and British Columbia properties for so long that when she reappeared for a full set at the Newport Folk Festival last year , it was as though God herself was suddenly present, ensconced in a gilded armchair, her voice still so sonorous that practically every single person onstage with her wept.

Explore the November 2023 Issue

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If you age in private, the deal goes, you can reemerge triumphantly as royalty in your silver era. But Madonna never signed up for dignified placating. At 47, as sinewy as an impala in a hot-pink leotard and fishnets, she moved with such controlled, physical sensuality in the video for “Hung Up” that the 20-something dancers around her seemed bland by comparison. At 53, she headlined a Super Bowl halftime show—part gladiatorial circus, part intergalactic ancient-Egyptian cheerleading meet—while 114 million people watched. At 65, Madonna regularly uploads videos of herself to TikTok, her face plumped into uncanny, doll-like smoothness, strutting to snippets of obscure dialogue or electronica in psychedelic outfits categorized by one commenter as “colorful granny.”

What’s most striking to me about the videos is how Madonna retains the power to scandalize each generation anew—even teenagers nourished on a cultural diet of Euphoria and hard-core pornography—with her adamantly sexual self-presentation. “Lost her mind,” one TikTok commenter wrote as Madonna, wearing a black lace fetish mask, simply stared confrontationally at the camera. About a clip of her waving her arms in a diamanté cowboy hat, her chest festooned with chains, a cheerful-looking boy posted, “Someone come get Nana she’s wandering again.”

Read: The dark teen show that pushes the edge of provocation

This is, mark you, almost 40 years after Madonna rolled around on the floor at the MTV Video Music Awards in a corseted wedding dress, her white underwear and garters fully visible to the cameras, in an early TV appearance that an outraged Annie Lennox called “very, very whorish … It was like she was fucking the music industry.” At the time, Madonna’s manager, Freddy DeMann, told her she’d ruined her career. One of the few who approved was Cyndi Lauper, perpetually compared to Madonna in those days. Lauper seemed to recognize what her contemporary was trying to do, and what she’s been doing ever since, often operating just beyond the frequency of comprehension. “I loved that,” Lauper said. “It was performance art.”

People have argued about Madonna from the very beginning. That people are still arguing about her—over whether she’s too old, too brazen, too narcissistic, too sexual, too deluded, too Botoxed, too shameless—underscores the scope and endurance of Madonna’s oeuvre. She makes music, but she’s not a musician. She’s not an actor either, or a director, or a children’s-book author, even though she’s embodied each of these roles (with varying degrees of success). She is, rather, an artist. More than that, she’s a living, breathing, constantly metamorphosing work of art, a Gesamtkunstwerk —her life, her physical self, her sexuality, her presence in the media interweaving and coalescing into the totality of the spectacle that is Madonna. “My sister is her own masterpiece,” Christopher Ciccone told Vanity Fair in 1991 , the year Madonna: Truth or Dare , a movie capturing her Blond Ambition tour, became the then-highest-grossing documentary in history.

In her reverent, 800-page Madonna: A Rebel Life , the writer Mary Gabriel offers the argument that Madonna’s entire biography is an exercise in reinventing female power. She crystallizes this mission of masterful defiance in a chapter about Madonna’s Sex , a 1992 coffee-table collection of photographic erotica that sold more than 1.5 million copies and almost torched her career. A decade into her stardom, Madonna had already

inhabited all the stereotypes that patriarchal society concocted for women—dutiful daughter, gamine, blond bombshell, adoring wife, bitch—in her pursuit of a new woman, a person who exercised her power freely, joyously, even wantonly, if that’s what she wanted. Her quest was what the French philosopher Hélène Cixous described as the search for a “feminine imaginary … an ego no longer given over to an image defined by the masculine.”

Before long, Madonna had broken multiple records for a female solo artist, having sold more than 150 million albums around the world. She had also “transformed the traditional pop-rock concert format into a full-scale theatrical experience,” Gabriel writes, “raised music video from a sales tool to an art form, and put a woman—herself—in control of her own music, from creation to development to distribution.”

All of this is true, and yet the volume of evidence that Gabriel amasses reveals something even greater: not just a cultural phenomenon, or even a postmodern artist transforming herself into the ultimate commodity, but a woman who intuits and manifests social change so far ahead of everyone else that she makes people profoundly uncomfortable. We may not understand her in the moment, but rarely is she wrong about what’s coming.

Read: What we talk about when we talk about ‘unruly’ women

To try to write about Madonna is to stare into an abyss of content: the music, the videos, the movies, the books, the fashion, but also the responses that those things generated, a corpus almost as significant to the construction of Madonna as the work itself. More than 60 books have been devoted to her, encompassing biography, critical analysis, comic books, sleazy profiteering, and even a collection of women’s dreams about her. “With the possible exception of Elvis, Madonna is without peer in having inscribed herself with such intensity on the public consciousness in multiple and contradictory ways,” Cathy Schwichtenberg wrote in The Madonna Connection , a 1993 book of essays summarizing the growing academic field known as Madonna Studies.

Gabriel’s biography is astonishingly granular in its attention to biographical detail, and also to historical context. You could, if you wanted, read the book as a kind of late-20th-century history of women’s ongoing fight for liberation, filtered through the lens of someone whom Joni Mitchell variously derided as “manufactured,” “a living Barbie doll,” and “death to all things real” and Norman Mailer described as “our greatest living female artist.” More often, A Rebel Life reads like a Walter Isaacson biography of a Great Man, a thorough life-and-times synthesis of a world-changing, civilization-defining genius—only with a lot of cone bras and syncopated beats.

Gabriel’s attention to context is key, because trying to understand Madonna as a flesh-and-blood person—the biographer’s traditional endeavor—is a trap. Self-exposure, for her, is about obfuscation more than revelation. Every new identity she disseminates into the world is just a different layer; the more you see of her, the more the “truth” of her is obscured. Truth or Dare famously includes a contretemps between Madonna and her boyfriend at the time, the actor Warren Beatty, while Madonna is having her throat examined by a doctor mid-tour. “Do you want to talk at all off camera?” the doctor asks. “She doesn’t want to live off camera, much less talk,” Beatty interjects. “Why would you say something if it’s off camera? What point is there of existing?”

Beatty was then the embodiment of Old Hollywood, square-jawed and restrained, while the considerably younger Madonna supposedly represented the MTV generation, coarse and venal, willing to trade even her most intimate moments for hard profit. ( Truth or Dare premiered a full year before The Real World ushered in a new realm of “reality” entertainment.) What Beatty, along with many others, missed was that exposure wasn’t about selling out in any conventional sense. For Madonna, the construction of her public-facing persona was about spinning masquerade, fantasy, and fragments of self-disclosure into mass-media magic that confounded, again and again, efforts to categorize her.

She teased ideas about gender fluidity and bisexuality; she declared herself to be a “gay man”; she played up her friendship with the comedian Sandra Bernhard as rumors flew that the two were sleeping together. The main constant through her kaleidoscopic permutations was the response they elicited: As the cultural theorist John Fiske once put it, her sexuality was perceived as a new caliber of threat—“not the traditional and easily contained one of woman as whore, but the more radical one of woman as independent of masculinity.” (No wonder Beatty, the most masculine of screen stars, chafed at it.)

And yet, believe it or not, Madonna is human, and she was born—to a woman also named Madonna and a man named Silvio “Tony” Ciccone—in Bay City, Michigan, in 1958. When she was 5 years old, her mother died, a fact that seems as fundamental to the arc of her career as music or sex or religion. Tony, Gabriel writes, struggling alone with a houseful of unruly children, simply raised Madonna in the same way that he raised her two older brothers. (At the time of her mother’s death, Madonna had three younger siblings; two more followed when Tony married the family’s housekeeper.) She played as they played; she fought and bit and belched and yelled just as they did. When we think about Madonna later, effortlessly disrupting conventions of feminine sexual presentation and power dynamics, this upbringing makes perfect sense. (In one of my favorite photos from Sex , Madonna stands by a window, facing outward, wearing just a white tank top, motorcycle boots, and no underwear, her buttocks exposed as she appears to scratch an imaginary pair of balls.)

Gabriel, from the start, is alert to signs of Madonna’s self-transfiguring urges: how, in elementary school, she put wires in her braids to make them stick up like those of her young Black friends; how, in eighth grade, she scandalized her junior-high-school audience with a risqué, psychedelic dance sequence set to the Who’s “Baba O’Riley”; how, at 15, she first presented herself to her dance teacher and mentor, Christopher Flynn, as a childlike figure carrying a doll under her arm, as if to signal that she was a blank slate for him to work on.

But the years that seem most crucial are the ones she spent in New York City trying to make it as a modern dancer after dropping out of the University of Michigan. In 1978, when she arrived, the city was experiencing ungovernable urban blight and a simultaneous creative renaissance. Modes of artistic expression were becoming ever more fluid; the Warholian creation of a persona, and the postmodern appropriation of original ideas and images into new art forms, expanded performance possibilities. After quickly realizing her limitations as a dancer, Madonna did a stint as a drummer in a New Wave band called the Breakfast Club. She did nude modeling to pay for a series of truly scuzzy apartments. When her father begged her to come home, she’d say, “You don’t get it, Dad. I don’t want to be a doctor. I don’t want to be a lawyer. I want to be an artist.”

Her desire to make art was tied up with her ferocious ambition, her early comprehension that celebrity could be its own kind of art form. A friend of Madonna’s recalls to Gabriel that when she first met her, in a club in New York in the early ’80s, Madonna said, “I’m going to be the most famous woman in the world.” By 1982, she had redirected her focus toward music and become embedded in what Gabriel describes as “a radical art kingdom” that melded high and low culture, where punk kids and street artists were suddenly the new creative aristocracy. The previous year, MTV had transformed music into a visual medium. Madonna started writing songs, and seems right from the start to have had a sweeping conception of what pop music could provide: not the kind of plastic, bubblegum stardom that jeering critics believed she was after, but a global canvas on which she aimed to project her vision.

Kim Gordon, of the band Sonic Youth, once wrote that “people pay to see others believe in themselves.” Madonna’s earliest fans were girls, gay men, queer teenagers of color who found community in the same spaces where her own sense of self was honed. In the video for her first single, “Everybody,” in 1982, Madonna dances onstage at a nightclub in a strikingly unsexy, punk-esque outfit: brown leather vest, plaid shirt, tapered khaki pants, theatrical makeup. The camera keeps its distance; you can hardly see her face. But by the video for her second, “Burning Up,” a year later, she’s unmistakably Madonna, with teased blond hair, armfuls of rubber bracelets, the mole above her lip and the slight gap between her teeth underscoring her confrontational, intent gaze. This was the moment when the product of Madonna seems to have coalesced. She wasn’t just making music (one critic famously described her vocals on her early albums as “Minnie Mouse on helium”). Provocation was part of her act—her second record, 1984’s Like a Virgin , was clear on that front—but not the point of it.

Rather, what her fans immediately recognized in Madonna was the animating spirit of her work: complete certainty in her worth, and a pathological unwillingness to give credence to anyone other than herself. Everything else about Madonna may change, but this fundamental self-conviction is always there. And for anyone who’s been raised to be or to feel like a modified, shamed, incomplete version of themselves, it’s intoxicating. At 7, in 1990, I wore out my cassette tape of I’m Breathless —the concept album Madonna recorded to accompany her role in Dick Tracy —thrilled by the unthinkable bravado, the cockiness of “Sooner or Later.” At 40, I keep coming back to her “Hung Up” video, stunned at the visual evidence that a middle-aged mother of young children could be so strong, so strange and charismatic and compelling.

This kind of power is unnerving to observe in women; instinctively, we’re either drawn to it or driven to destroy it. A Rebel Life sometimes feels excessively boosterish, noting and then brushing over criticism of Madonna’s more questionable acts over the years—her decision to forcibly kiss Drake at Coachella in 2015 , to his apparent distress, among them. But Gabriel’s useful goal is perhaps to get beyond a debate that’s been stoked by an extraordinary amount of vilification. Madonna, the most successful female artist of all time, is also indubitably the most loathed. And her haters often respond to the same quality in her self-presentation that her most ardent fans do: her confidently incisive mockery of the way culture prefers women to be portrayed. People reacted to Sex —a work that constantly identifies and then undercuts how people want to see her—with the pearl-clutching faux horror that tends to accompany Madonna’s provocations, as though she had done something utterly novel and irredeemably graceless.

Read: Madonna’s kamikaze kiss

In fact, the book was right in step with contemporaneous art-world forays into hard-core erotica. Sex scandalized a mainstream audience that had presumably never seen Cindy Sherman’s Sex Pictures (the artist was one of Madonna’s inspirations) or Jeff Koons’s Made in Heaven series, in which the artist created explicit renderings of himself having sexual intercourse with the porn performer Ilona Staller, who was briefly his wife. Madonna has said she intended her book to be funny (in more than one photo, she outright laughs). But Sex also asserts her engagement with a lineage of artists who helped shape her, and highlights her determination to unsettle the conventional gaze.

Madonna’s videos and live shows, Gabriel argues, tend to be where you get the most complete sense of her vision, “a new kind of feminism, a lived liberation” that pointed the way for a woman to be captivating “not because she was so ‘pretty’ but because she was so free.” In her 1986 video for “Open Your Heart,” which features a giant Art Deco nude by the Polish painter Tamara de Lempicka, Madonna struts in a black corset in front of an audience that watches her—sneeringly, or with feigned lack of interest—but doesn’t see anything more than surface-level sexuality. At the video’s end, Madonna (dressed now in a suit and a bowler cap, with cropped hair) dances away with a preteen boy who’s been waiting for her outside. The spectators in the club want to possess and objectify Madonna; the boy wants to be her, recognizing her as an artistic kindred spirit, not just a sex object. (The video has long been interpreted by Madonna’s queer and trans fans as a gesture of affirmation.)

Three years later, in “Express Yourself,” directed by David Fincher, Madonna stages a riff on the 1927 Fritz Lang movie Metropolis , in which she rides a stone swan through a dystopian cityscape. She’s a kind of Ayn Randian femme fatale in a green silk gown, holding a cat; later, dressed in an oversize suit, she flexes her muscles and grabs her crotch; in another scene, she lies naked, in chains, on a bed. (“I have chained myself,” she later clarified in an interview with Nightline . “There wasn’t a man that put that chain on me.”) Madonna moves fluidly from subject to object, man to woman, captor to captive, skewering misogynistic Hollywood tropes. Her potent allure, whatever her guise, is unexpectedly disconcerting.

The video also has almost nothing whatsoever to do with the song, which is a totally generic, upbeat pop confection encouraging women to pick men who validate their mind and their self-worth. The discrepancy is, I think, purposeful: It begs us to notice the different registers her work is operating in, and to observe how “pop star,” for her, is just another chameleonic guise. I love Madonna’s music, which functions at a level that enables her to be stupendously successful, ridiculously wealthy, a public figure of a sort no one has ever seen before. But those accomplishments are so much less interesting than everything else her music allows her to do through the performance she choreographs around it: blast through boundaries of sexuality and presentation; explore the permeability of gender; expose the hypocrisy of a music-video landscape in which, as she said in that same Nightline interview, violence against women is readily portrayed but sex gets you banned from MTV.

Thirty years later, in a culture where bombastic, sexless superhero movies now dominate mass entertainment and where erotica—as opposed to porn—has been all but banished to the nonvisual realm of fiction, her explorations of sexuality feel as radical as ever. And we continue to resist them, to reflexively recoil. When I told people I was writing about Madonna, they invariably responded with some dismayed version of “Her face!!!” It’s easy to assume that she’s just another woman navigating the horror of aging in plain sight via an overreliance on cosmetic enhancements, just another former bombshell who won’t concede that her time as the ultimate sex object has ended.

But Madonna has never seemed to think of herself as a sex object. An objectifier who greedily prioritizes her own pleasure, yes; an alpha, absolutely; but never a sop to someone else’s fantasy. And the AI-esque strangeness of her appearance now suggests something else, too. I keep thinking about bell hooks’s argument, in a 1992 essay, that Madonna “deconstructs the myth of ‘natural’ white girl beauty” by exposing how artificial it is, how unnatural. She bends every effort, hooks notes, to embody an aesthetic that she herself is simultaneously satirizing. One might deduce that Madonna senses better than anyone where female beauty standards are heading, in an era of Facetune, Ozempic, livestreamed TikTok surgeries, and Instagram face . And that she knows what she’s doing: Her current mode of self-presentation is Madonna supplying yet another dose of what the media want from women—sexiness, youth, erasure of maturity—distorted just enough to make us flinch.

This article appears in the November 2023 print edition with the headline “Madonna Forever.”

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16.2 Textual Analysis Trailblazer: bell hooks

Textual analysis trailblazer: bell hooks, learning outcomes.

By the end of this section, you will be able to:

• Demonstrate critical thinking and communicating in varying rhetorical and cultural contexts.
• Integrate the writer’s ideas with ideas of others.

“Writing and performing should deepen the meaning of words, should illuminate, transfix, and transform.”

Talking Back

Born Gloria Jean Watkins , bell hooks adopted the name of her great-grandmother, a woman known for speaking her mind. In choosing this pen name, hooks decided not to capitalize the first letters so that audiences would focus on her work rather than her name. However, this stylistic choice has become as memorable as her work.

She is well known for her approach to social critique through textual analysis. The writing interests and research methods hooks uses are wide ranging. They began in poetry and fiction writing and eventually developed into critical analysis. She started writing at an early age, as her teachers (in the church) impressed on hooks the power in language. With this exposure to language, hooks began to understand the “sacredness of words” and began to write poetry and fiction. Over time, hooks’s writing became more focused on advancing and reviving the texts of Black women and women of color, for even though “black women and women of color are publishing more… there is still not enough” writing by and about them. Texts live on through others’ analyses, hooks argues. Therefore, she believes the critical essay “is the most useful form for the expression” between her thoughts and the books she is reading. The critical essay allows hooks to create a dialogue, or “talk back” to the text. The critical essay also extends “the conversations I have with other critical thinkers.” It is this “talking back” that has advanced hooks’s approach to literary criticism. This action, for which hooks eventually named a volume of essays, refers to the development of a strong sense of self that allows Black women to speak out against racism and sexism.

Although young hooks continued to write poetry—some of which was published—she gained a reputation as a writer of critical essays about systems of domination. She began writing her first book, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism , when she was 19 and an undergraduate student at Stanford University . The book is titled after Sojourner Truth’s (1797–1883) “ Ain’t I a Woman ” speech given at the Woman’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851. In this work, hooks examines the effects of racism and sexism on Black women, the civil rights movement, and feminist movements from suffrage to the 1970s. By “talking back” to formerly enslaved abolitionist Sojourner Truth throughout, hooks identifies ways in which feminist movements have failed to focus on Black women and women of color. This work is one of many in which thorough analysis “uncovered” the lived experiences of Black women and women of color.

Discussion Questions

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Access for free at https://openstax.org/books/writing-guide/pages/1-unit-introduction

• Authors: Michelle Bachelor Robinson, Maria Jerskey, featuring Toby Fulwiler
• Publisher/website: OpenStax
• Book title: Writing Guide with Handbook
• Publication date: Dec 21, 2021
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Perspective

With the death of bell hooks, a generation of feminists lost a foundational figure.

Lisa B. Thompson

Author and cultural critic bell hooks poses for a portrait on December 16, 1996 in New York City, New York. Karjean Levine/Getty Images hide caption

Author and cultural critic bell hooks poses for a portrait on December 16, 1996 in New York City, New York.

"We black women who advocate feminist ideology, are pioneers. We are clearing a path for ourselves and our sisters. We hope that as they see us reach our goal – no longer victimized, no longer unrecognized, no longer afraid – they will take courage and follow." bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman

Arts & Life

Trailblazing feminist author, critic and activist bell hooks has died at 69.

There are well-worn bell hooks books scattered throughout my library. She's in nearly every section – race, class, film, cultural studies – and, as expected, her books take up an entire shelf in the feminism section. I doubt I would have survived this long without her work, and the work of other Black feminist thinkers of her generation, to guide me. I've retrieved every bell hooks book today, and the unwieldy stack comforts me as I assess the impact of her loss.

If you ever heard hooks speak, it would come as no surprise that she first attended college to study drama, as she recounted in a 1992 essay. In the 1990s she blessed my college campus for a week, and I was mesmerized by lectures that were deliciously brilliant yet full of humor. Her banter with the audience during the Q&A floated easily between thoughtful answers, deep questioning and sly quips that kept us at rapt attention. Her words garner just as much attention on the page. She was a prolific writer, and her intellectual curiosity was boundless.

Discovering bell hooks changed the lives of countless Black women and girls. After picking up one of her many titles – Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center; Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics; Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism – the world suddenly made sense. She reordered the universe by boldly gifting us with the language and theories to understand who we were in an often hostile and alienating society.

She also made clear that, as Black women, we belonged to no one but ourselves. A bad feminist from the start, hooks was clearly uninterested in being safe, respectable or acceptable, and charted a career on her own terms. She implored us to transgress and struggle, but to do so with love and fearlessness. Her brave, bold and beautiful words not only spoke truth to power, but also risked speaking that same truth to and about our beloved icons and culture.

As we traversed hostile spaces in academia, corporate America, the arts, medicine and sometimes our own families, hooks not only taught us how to love ourselves, but also insisted that we seek justice. She helped us to better understand and, if necessary, forgive the women who birthed and raised us. She claimed feminism without apology, and encouraged Black women in particular to embrace feminism, and to do more than simply identify their oppression, but to envision new ways of being in the world. She called on us to honor early pioneers such as Anna Julia Cooper and Mary Church Terrell, who first claimed the mantle of women's rights.

The lower-case name bell hooks published under challenged a system of academic writing that historically belittled and ignored the work of Black scholars. She also used language that was as plain and as clear as her politics. While her writing was deeply personal, often carved from her own experiences, her ideas were relentlessly rigorous and full of citations—even though she eschewed footnotes, another refusal of the academy's standards that endeared her to those of us determined to remake intellectual traditions that denied our very humanity.

Rejecting footnotes seemed to symbolize the fact that the knowledge hooks most valued could not fit into those tiny spaces. Her writing style hinted at the fact that her ideas were always more expansive than even her books could hold. While there were no footnotes, her books were love notes to a people she loved fiercely.

No matter where she taught or lived, bell hooks always kept Kentucky and her family ties close. She frequently claimed her southern Black working-class background and an abiding love for her home. Although she was educated at prestigious schools, she always spoke with the wisdom and wit of our mothers, grandmothers and aunties. Her return to the Bluegrass State and Berea College towards the end of her career has a narrative elegance. A generation of feminists has lost a foundational figure and a beloved icon, but her legacy lives on in her writing, which will provide sustenance for generations to come.

Lisa B. Thompson is a playwright and the Bobby and Sherri Patton Professor of African & African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Follow her @drlisabthompson on Twitter and Instagram .

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Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

Saint petersburg.

Ewer and basin (lavabo set)

Probably made at Chisinau Court Workshop

Andrei Nikiforovich Voronikhin

Alexander Danilovich Menshikov (1673–1729)

Unknown Artist, Swiss, Austrian, or German, active Russia ca. 1703–4

Samuel Margas Jr.

The Empress Elizabeth of Russia (1709–1762) on Horseback, Attended by a Page

Attributed to Georg Christoph Grooth

Table snuffbox

Niello scenes after a print entitled Naufrage (Shipwreck) by Jacques de Lajoüe , published in Paris 1736

Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) (1694–1778)

Jean Antoine Houdon

Imperial Porcelain Manufactory, St. Petersburg

Cup with cover and saucer

Two bottle coolers

Zacharias Deichman the Elder

Catherine II The Great, Empress of Russia

Jean-Baptiste Nini

Coffee service

Johan Henrik Blom

Tureen with cover

Tureen with cover and stand

Jacques-Nicolas Roettiers

Possibly by Pierre-François-Mathis de Beaulieu (for Jean Georges)

Pair of scallop-shell dishes

Sugar bowl (from a tea service)

Workshop of David Roentgen

Beaker and saucer

David Roentgen and Company in Saint Petersburg

Johann Friedrich Anthing

Drop-front desk (secrétaire à abattant or secrétaire en cabinet)

Attributed to Martin Carlin

Pair of Flintlock Pistols of Empress Catherine the Great (1729–1796)

Johan Adolph Grecke

Gardner Manufactory

Center table

Imperial Armory, Tula (south of Moscow), Russia

Female Shaman

Pair of vases

Nikolai Stepanovich Vereshchagin

Jugate busts of Czarevitch Paul and Maria Feodorovna of Russia

James Tassie

Wolfram Koeppe Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2003

The Birth of Saint Petersburg Russia, or “Muscovy” as it was often called, had rarely been considered a part of Europe before the reign of Czar Peter I (Piotr Alexeievich), known as Peter the Great (r. 1682–1725). His supremacy marked the beginning of the country’s “Westernization,” whereby the political, economic, and cultural norms of the western European monarchies would become the basis for “civilizing” Russia. A radical transformation was needed to launch Russia into the modern world, a transformation later called the Petrine Revolution. The young czar, feeling oppressed by the medieval traditions and ecclesiastical patriarchy of seventeenth-century Moscow, wanted to Westernize Russia in a hurry, defying the sluggish pace of history.

Saint Petersburg was born on May 16, 1703 (May 5 by the old Julian Russian calendar). On that day, on a small island on the north bank of the Neva River, Peter cut two pieces of turf and placed them cross-wise. The setting was inauspicious. The area was a swamp that remained frozen from early November to March, with an annual average of 104 days of rain and 74 days of snow. The army, under the command of Alexander Menshikov ( 1996.7 ), had conquered the region shortly before. To show his gratitude, the czar later appointed Menshikov the first governor-general of Saint Petersburg. The fortification of the territory kept the Swedish enemy at bay and secured for Russia permanent access to the Baltic Sea. The partially ice-free harbor would be crucial to further economic development. All buildings on the site were erected on wooden poles driven into the marshy, unstable ground. Stones were a rare commodity in Russia, and about as valuable as precious metals.

The Dutch name “Piterburkh” (later changed to the German version, “Petersburg”) embodied the czar’s fascination with Holland and its small-scale urban architecture. He disliked patriarchal court ceremony and felt at ease in the bourgeois domestic life that he experienced during his travels throughout Europe on “the Great Embassy” (1697–98). However, the primary purpose of this voyage was to acquire firsthand knowledge of shipbuilding—his personal passion—and to learn about progressive techniques and Western ideas.

The victory over the Swedish army at Poltava in June 1709 elevated Russia to the rank of a European power, no longer to be ignored. Peter triumphed: “Now with God’s help the final stone in the foundation of Saint Petersburg has been laid.” By 1717, the city’s population of about 8,000 had tripled, and grew to around 40,000 by the time of Peter’s death in 1725. Saint Petersburg had become the commercial, industrial, administrative, and residential “metropolis” of Russia. By the 1790s, it had surpassed Moscow as the empire’s largest urban vicinity and was hailed as the “Venice of the North,” an allusion to the waterway system around the local “Grand Canal,” the Neva River.

Peter the Great’s Successors The short reign of Peter’s second wife, Empress Catherine I (r. 1725–27), who depended on her long-time favorite Menshikov, saw the reinstatement of the luxurious habits of the former imperial household. The archaic and ostentatious court display in the Byzantine tradition  that Peter had so despised was now to be restored under the pretext of glorifying his legacy. Enormous sums of money were lavished on foreign luxury items, demonstrating the court’s new international status and its observance of western European manners ( 68.141.133 ).

During the reigns of Empress Anna Ioannovna (r. 1730–40), niece of Peter I ( 1982.60.330a,b ), and her successor Elizabeth (Elizaveta Petrovna, r. 1741–62; 1978.554.2 ), Peter’s daughter, Saint Petersburg was transformed into a Baroque extravaganza through the talents of architect Bartolomeo Francesco Rastrelli (1700–1771) and other Western and Russian artisans. Foreign powers began to recognize Russia’s importance and competed for closer diplomatic relations. Foreign immigrants increased much faster than the local population, as scholars, craftsmen, artisans, and specialists of all kinds flocked to the country, and especially to Saint Petersburg ( 65.47 ; 1982.60.172,.173 ; 1995.327 ).

Catherine the Great (r. 1762–96) In a coup d’état assisted by the five Orloff brothers ( 33.165.2a–c ; 48.187.386,.387 ), Catherine II overthrew her husband, the ill-fated Peter III (r. 1762) and became empress. Catherine saw herself as the political heir of Peter the Great. A German-born princess of Anhalt-Zerbst who, after her marriage, became more Russian than any native, Catherine aimed at completing Peter’s legacy ( 52.189.11 ; 48.73.1 ). Having lived in isolation in the shadow of Elizabeth I since her marriage to the grand duke in 1745, the time had come to satisfy her thirst for life and her insatiable quest for culture and international recognition. An admirer of the Enlightenment and devoted aficionada of Voltaire’s writings, Catherine stimulated his cult in Russia ( 1972.61 ). In response, the French philosopher dedicated a poem to the czarina; her reply, dated October 15, 1763, initiated a correspondence that influenced the empress on many matters until Voltaire’s death in 1778. The hothouse cultural climate of Saint Petersburg during Catherine’s reign can be compared to the artistic and intellectual ferment in New York City in the second half of the twentieth century.

Catherine’s desire to enhance her fame and her claim to the throne was immortalized by her own witty play on words in Latin: “Petro Primo / Catharina Secunda” (To Peter the First / from Catherine the Second). This she had inscribed on the vast lump of granite in the form of a wave supporting the Bronze Horseman on the banks of the Neva in front of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral in Saint Petersburg. This triple-lifesize equestrian figure of Peter the Great took the French sculptor Falconet twelve years to complete, until it was finally cast—after three attempts—in 1782.

Catherine had military expansion plans for Russia and a cultural vision for its capital Saint Petersburg. Above all, she knew how to attract devoted supporters. Only nine days after the overthrow of her husband, Catherine wrote to Denis Diderot, offering to print his famous Encyclopédie , which had been banned in France. Catherine recognized the power of art to demonstrate political and social maturity. She acquired entire collections of painting ( Watteau , for example), sculpture, and objects. The empress avoided anything that could be called mediocre or small. With the help of sophisticated advisors, such as Prince Dmitrii Golitsyn, her ambassador in Paris, Denis Diderot, Falconet, and the illustrious Baron Friedrich Melchior von Grimm, the empress assembled the core of today’s State Hermitage Museum. Catherine favored luxury goods from all over Europe ( 33.165.2a–c ; 48.187.386,.387 ; 17.190.1158 ). She commissioned Sèvres porcelain and Wedgwood pottery as well as hundreds of pieces of ingeniously conceived furniture from the German manufactory of David Roentgen in Neuwied ( 48.73.1 ). Furthermore, she encouraged and supported Russian enterprises and craftsmen, like local silversmiths ( 47.51.1–.5 ; 1981.367.1,.2 ) and the Imperial Porcelain Manufactory ( 1982.60.171 ; 1982.60.177,.178 ; 1982.60.175 ), as well as privately owned manufactories ( 1982.60.158 ). Catherine especially liked the sparkling decorative products of the Tula armory steel workshop ( 2002.115 ), genuine Russian art forms with a fairy-tale-like appearance, and in 1775 merged her large collection of Tula objects with the imperial crown jewels in a newly constructed gallery at the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg.

Catherine’s son and successor Paul I (Pavel Petrovich, r. 1796–1801) disliked his mother and her aesthetic sensibility ( 1998.13.1,.2 ). As grand duke, he had spent most of his time with his second wife Maria Feodorovna ( 1999.525 ) outside of Saint Petersburg, in Gatchina Palace and Pavlovsk Palace. These they transformed into the finest Neoclassical architectural gems in Europe ( 1976.155.110 ; 2002.115 ).

Koeppe, Wolfram. “Saint Petersburg.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/stpt/hd_stpt.htm (October 2003)

Further Reading

Cracraft, James. The Petrine Revolution in Russian Imagery . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Koeppe, Wolfram, and Marina Nudel. "An Unsuspected Bust of Alexander Menshikov." Metropolitan Museum Journal 35 (2000), pp. 161–77.

Shvidkovsky, Dmitri, and Alexander Orloff. St. Petersburg: Architecture of the Tsars . New York: Abbeville, 1995.

Additional Essays by Wolfram Koeppe

• Koeppe, Wolfram. “ Abraham and David Roentgen .” (June 2013)
• Koeppe, Wolfram. “ Hungarian Silver .” (February 2016)
• Koeppe, Wolfram. “ Collecting for the Kunstkammer .” (October 2002)

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6th and 7th Lines of Vasilevsky Island

6th and 7th Lines is one of the most interesting and picturesque streets of Vasilevskiy Island and is rich in sights from many different eras. This street is a good representation of one of the island's quirky characteristics - the two lines were originally planned to be the opposite embankments of a single canal. 7th Line is the east side of the street and 6th Line is the west. The channel was never built, but the names remained. The pedestrian part of the street between Bolshoy Prospekt and Sredny Propsekt is very popular with locals and visitors alike.

The history of the 6th and 7th lines of Vasilievsky Island began in the 1720s, when the two-story metochion (mission) of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery (No. 12) was built close to the Neva River by Jean-Baptiste Le Blond. Around the same time, the Troekurov House (No. 13) was built by Nikolay Myasoedov- an example of the "template" houses of the first third of the 18th century, built for a stolnik or page of Peter the Great. In 1729-1732, the first Cathedral of St. Andrew was built in wood at the intersection of the street with the Bolshoy Prospekt. To accommodate worshipers during Petersburg's harsh winters, it was decided to build a church in stone nearby. It took twenty years to construct the Church of Three Saints - one of the oldest surviving churches in St. Petersburg. Subsequently, the church was given to the Georgian diaspora and it was here that worship in the Georgian language sounded for the first time in St. Petersburg.

After the original cathedral burned from a lightning strike in 1761, it was decided to rebuild the Cathedral of St. Andrew in stone also. Construction began in 1764 to designs by architect Alexander Vist. In 1764, the cuppola of the new cathedral collapsed, and Vist was arrested. The cathedral and bell tower were eventually completed in 1781. Today the cathedral has been restored, and an obelisk in honor of the Order of St. Andrew stands nearby. Another church on the 6th and 7th Lines was built by an unknown architect near Maly Prospekt in 1750. The Church of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary is unique in that it has the largest number of altars of all the churches of St. Petersburg - seven. It also has a three-tiered, 52-meter bell tower making it the highest on Vasilevsky Island.

Other monuments of note are the Larinsky School (No. 15), one of the first schools in St. Petersburg, which moved to this site in 1794; the Andreevskaya Market (No. 9), built in the second half of 18th century and one of the first gostiny dvors (markets for travelling merchants) in St. Petersburg; and the Art Nouveau Meltzer House (No. 37), built by the owner, Ernest Meltzer. The Pharmacy of Dr. Pel (No. 16-18) is of greater interest. It was built in the 1900s and now has a Pharmacy Museum. In the courtyard one can see the round tower where, according to an urban legend, Alexander Pel conducted alchemical experiments and bred griffins. In 1994, the "Tower of Griffins" was painted by artists and became a monument of the St. Petersburg underground.

The history of the street is closely connected with the history of horse-drawn railways or "konki". In 1863, one of the first passenger lines was launched runnign from Admiralteyskaya Ploschad via Konnogvardeisky Prospekt to the 6th Line. There is a monument to this type of tram, used from 1872-1878, at the intersection with Sredny Prospekt. It consists of a wagon, a bronze horse, and driver. After the monument, the pedestrian area known as Andreevsky Boulevard begins. Here, apart from a large number of shops and cafes, is a monument to military engineer Vasily Korchmin. There are many legends of how Vasilievsky Island received its name, and the idea that the name came from Korchmin, Peter the Great's friend and artillery engineer, is one of the most popular. It is highly recommended to take a stroll in the pedestrian area, which is particularly convenient as it is next to Vasileostrovskaya Metro Station.

Accommodation near the 6th and 7th Lines of Vasilevsky Island

Trezzini art hotel, attractive small hotel located in the heart of historic vasilevskiy island, trezzini palace hotel, all-suites boutique hotel with a prime location next to the neva river, solo sokos hotel vasilievskiy, superior business hotel with stylish interiors and attractive location, dining near the 6th and 7th lines of vasilevsky island, russian kitsch, traditional and modern russian cuisine in riotously colorful interiors, small georgian restaurant with a top reputation for low-cost, authentic fare, helsinki bar, cozy café serving affordable nordic cuisine and homemade liqueurs.

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