Cultural studies is an academic field grounded in critical theory and literary criticism. Characteristically interdisciplinary, cultural studies provides a reflexive network of intellectuals attempting to situate the forces constructing our daily lives. It concerns the political dynamics of contemporary culture, as well as its historical foundations, conflicts and defining traits. It is distinguished from cultural anthropology and ethnic studies in both objective and methodology. Researchers concentrate on how a particular medium or message relates to ideology, social class, nationality, ethnicity, sexuality and/or gender, rather than investigating a particular culture or area of the world.^[1]

Cultural studies approaches subjects holistically, combining feminist theory, social theory, political theory, history, philosophy, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, communication studies, political economy, translation studies, museum studies and art history/criticism to study cultural phenomena in various societies. Thus, cultural studies seeks to understand the ways in which meaning is generated, disseminated, and produced through various practices, beliefs and institutions. Also politically, economically and even social structures within a given culture.

History[link]

The term was coined by Richard Hoggart in 1964 when he founded the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies or CCCS^{[citation needed]}. It has since become strongly associated with Stuart Hall, who succeeded Hoggart as Director.

From the 1970s onward, Stuart Hall's pioneering work, along with his colleagues Paul Willis, Dick Hebdige, Tony Jefferson, Michael Green and Angela McRobbie, created an international intellectual movement. Many cultural studies scholars employed Marxist methods of analysis, exploring the relationships between cultural forms (the superstructure) and that of the political economy (the base). By the 1970s, the politically formidable British working classes were in decline. Britain's manufacturing industries were fading and union rolls were shrinking. Yet millions of working class Britons backed the rise of Margaret Thatcher. For Stuart Hall and other Marxist theorists, this shift in loyalty from the Labour Party to the Conservative Party was antithetical to the interests of the working class and had to be explained in terms of cultural politics.

In order to understand the changing political circumstances of class, politics and culture in the United Kingdom, scholars at the CCCS turned to the work of Antonio Gramsci, an Italian thinker of the 1920s and 30s. Gramsci had been concerned with similar issues: why would Italian laborers and peasants vote for fascists? In other words, why would working people vote to give more control to corporations and see their own rights and freedoms abrogated? Gramsci modified classical Marxism in seeing culture as a key instrument of political and social control. In this view, capitalists used not only brute force (police, prisons, repression, military) to maintain control, but also penetrated the everyday culture of working people. Thus, the key rubric for Gramsci and for cultural studies is that of cultural hegemony.

Scott Lash writes:

In the work of Hall, Hebdige and McRobbie, popular culture came to the fore... What Gramsci gave to this was the importance of consent and culture. If the fundamental Marxists saw power in terms of class-versus-class, then Gramsci gave to us a question of class alliance. The rise of cultural studies itself was based on the decline of the prominence of fundamental class-versus-class politics.^[2]

Edgar and Sedgwick write:

The theory of hegemony was of central importance to the development of British cultural studies [particularly the CCCS]. It facilitated analysis of the ways in which subordinate groups actively resist and respond to political and economic domination. The subordinate groups needed not to be seen merely as the passive dupes of the dominant class and its ideology.^[3]

This line of thinking opened up fruitful work exploring agency, a theoretical outlook which reinserted the active, critical capacities of all people.^{[citation needed]} Notions of agency have supplemented much scholarly emphasis on groups of people (e.g. the working class, primitives, colonized peoples, women) whose political consciousness and scope of action was generally limited to their position within certain economic and political structures.^{[citation needed][original research?]} In other words, many economists, sociologists, political scientists and historians have traditionally deprived everyday people of a role in shaping their world or outlook. Although anthropologists since the 1960s have foregrounded the power of agents to contest structure, first in the work of transactionalists like Fredrik Barth and then in works inspired by resistance theory and post-colonial theory.^{[citation needed][original research?]}

At times, cultural studies' romance with agencies nearly excluding the possibility of oppression, overlooking the fact that the subaltern have their own politics, and romanticizes agency overblowing its potentiality and pervasiveness.^{[citation needed][original research?]} Popular in the 1990s, many cultural studies scholars discovered in consumers ways of creatively using and subverting commodities and dominant ideologies.^{[citation needed]} This orientation has come under fire for a variety of reasons.^{[citation needed]}

Cultural studies concerns itself with the meaning and practices of everyday life. Cultural practices comprise the ways people do particular things, such as watching television or eating out, in a given culture. In any given practice, people use various objects (such as iPods or crucifixes). Hence, this field studies the meanings and uses peoples attributes to various objects and practices. Recently, as capitalism has spread throughout the world (a process associated with globalization), cultural studies has begun to analyse local and global forms of resistance to Western hegemony.^{[citation needed]}

The movement toward globalization in our world serves as an important reason to examine Cultural Studies. According to Richard Longworth, author of “Caught in the Middle: America’s Heartland in the Age of Globalism,” it is just getting started. We are now in the stage of re-invention instead of industrialization. In the past 20 years, communication technology has made this possible and has moved very rapidly^[4]. Because we are increasing communication worldwide, globalization has a major effect on how we look at Cultural Studies because we are constantly being exposed to the ideologies of mass media. In addition, human culture itself is becoming more unified as a result of globalization. For example, Stuart Hall has striven to combine many topic areas of study, such as interpersonal relationships and the influence of the media. He believes we should be studying the unifying atmosphere in which they all occur and from which they emanate—human culture^[5]. This human culture is starting to become more and more unified itself because of globalization and therefore can be further examined through Cultural Studies.

Overview[link]

In his book Introducing Cultural Studies, Ziauddin Sardar lists the following five main characteristics of cultural studies:

• Cultural studies aims to examine its subject matter in terms of cultural practices and their relation to power. For example, a study of a subculture (such as white working class youth in London) would consider the social practices of the youth as they relate to the dominant classes.
• It has the objective of understanding culture in all its complex forms and of analyzing the social and political context in which culture manifests itself.
• It is both the object of study and the location of political criticism and action. For example, not only would a cultural studies scholar study an object, but she/he would connect this study to a larger, progressive political project.
• It attempts to expose and reconcile the division of knowledge, to overcome the split between tacit cultural knowledge and objective (universal) forms of knowledge.
• It has a commitment to an ethical evaluation of modern society and to a radical line of political action.

Approaches[link]

Scholars in the United Kingdom and the United States developed somewhat different versions of cultural studies after the field's inception in the late 1970s. The British version of cultural studies was developed in the 1950s and 1960s mainly under the influence of Richard Hoggart, E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall and others at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. This included overtly political left-wing views and criticisms of popular culture as 'capitalist' mass culture. It absorbed some of the ideas of the Frankfurt School critique of the "culture industry" (i.e. mass culture). This emerges in the writings of early British Cultural Studies scholars and their influences, (see the work of, for example, Raymond Williams, Stuart Hall, Paul Willis, and Paul Gilroy).

In contrast, Cultural Studies was grounded in a pragmatic, liberal-pluralist tradition in the United States (Lindlof & Taylor, 2002,p. 60).The American version of Cultural Studies initially concerned itself more with understanding the subjective and appropriative side of audience reactions to and uses of mass culture. For example, American Cultural Studies advocates wrote about the liberatory aspects of fandom; the distinction between American and British strands has faded.

Stuart Hall asserts that mainstream mass communication in the United States holds the illusion of democratic pluralism- “the pretense that society is held together by common norms, including equal opportunity, respect for diversity, one person-one vote, individual rights and rule of law”^[6]. One of his goals in looking at Cultural Studies is to raise awareness and combat societal power imbalances and dominant ideology. “The ultimate issue for cultural studies is not what information is presented but whose information it is”^[7]. Also, he contends that the aim of theory and research is to delegate power to marginalized people and allow them to have a say in this world. One criticism of Hall offered suggestions of ways to change the problem he cites. However, he has worked hard to raise awareness of racism in the media.

In Canada, Cultural Studies has sometimes focused on issues of technology and society, continuing the emphasis in the work of Marshall McLuhan, George Grant, and others. In Australia, there has sometimes been a special emphasis on cultural policy. In South Africa, human rights and Third World issues are among the topics treated. There were a number of exchanges between Birmingham and Italy resulting in work on Italian leftism and theories of postmodernism.  On the other hand, there is a debate in Latin America about the relevance of Cultural Studies with some researchers calling for more action-oriented research.  Cultural Studies is relatively undeveloped in France, where there is a stronger tradition of semiotics, as in the writings of Roland Barthes. Also in Germany it is undeveloped, probably due to the continued influence of the Frankfurt School, which has developed a body of writing on such topics as mass culture, modern art and music.

Some researchers, especially in early British cultural studies, apply a Marxist model to the field. This strain of thinking has some influence from the Frankfurt School, but especially from the structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and others. The main focus of an orthodox Marxist approach concentrates on the production of meaning. This model assumes a mass production of culture and identifies power as residing with those producing cultural artifacts. In a Marxist view, those who control the means of production (the economic base) essentially control a culture.

Other approaches to Cultural Studies, such as feminist cultural studies and later American developments of the field, distance themselves from this view. They criticize the Marxist assumption of a single, dominant meaning, shared by all, for any cultural product. The non-Marxist approaches suggest that different ways of consuming cultural artifacts affect the meaning of the product. This view is best exemplified by the book Doing Cultural Studies: The Case of the Sony Walkman (by Paul du Gay et al.), which seeks to challenge the notion that those who produce commodities control the meanings that people attribute to them. Feminist cultural analyst, theorist and art historian Griselda Pollock contributed to cultural studies from viewpoints of art history and psychoanalysis. The writer Julia Kristeva was an influential voice in the turn of the century, contributing to Cultural Studies from the field of art and psychoanalytical French feminism.

Ultimately, this perspective criticizes the traditional view, assuming a passive consumer, particularly by underlining the different ways people read, receive and interpret cultural texts. On this view, a consumer can appropriate, actively reject or challenge the meaning of a product. These different approaches have shifted the focus away from the production of items. Instead, they argue that consumption plays an equally important role, since the way consumers consume a product gives meaning to an item. Some closely link the act of consuming with cultural identity. Stuart Hall and John Fiske have become influential in these developments.

Why is consumerism considered part of culture? According to Jeremy Gilbert, “We now live in an era when, throughout the capitalist world, the overriding aim of government economic policy is to maintain consumer spending levels. This is an era when ‘consumer confidence’ is treated as the key indicator and cause of economic effectiveness^[8]. Not only is it the government’s goal to keep the public buying and spending, but it’s also that of many businesses and corporations. This is a major problem when looking through an environmental lens, because this significant rate of consumption is leading our planet to a point where it can no longer be sustained, threatening the human race and all living things. However, if we are constantly being exposed to advertisements, consumerism doesn’t look like it’s heading to a halt. This is a major issue when looking at Cultural Studies, because of mass media’s influence on the ideology of consumerism.^[9].

In the context of Cultural Studies, the idea of a text, not only includes written language, but also films, photographs, fashion or hairstyles: the texts of Cultural Studies comprise all the meaningful artifacts of culture. Similarly, the discipline widens the concept of "culture". "Culture" for a cultural studies researcher, not only includes traditional high culture (the culture of ruling social groups)^[10] and popular culture, but also everyday meanings and practices. The last two have become the main focus of Cultural Studies. A further and more recent approach is comparative Cultural Studies, based on the discipline of comparative literature and Cultural Studies.

Contemporary cultural studies[link]

Sociologist Scott Lash has recently put forth the idea that Cultural Studies is entering a new phase. Arguing that the political and economic milieu has fundamentally altered from that of the 1970s. He writes, "I want to suggest that power now... is largely post-hegemonic... Hegemony was the concept that de facto crystallized Cultural Studies as a discipline. Hegemony usually refers to the “preponderant influence or domination of one nation over another."^[11] It has meant domination through ideology or discourse...^[12] He writes that the flow of power is becoming more internalized, that there has been "a shift in power from the hegemonic mode of 'power over' to an intensive notion of power from within (including domination from within) and power as a generative force."^[13] Resistance to power, in other words, becomes complicated when power and domination are increasingly (re)produced within oneself, within subaltern groups and within exploited people.

On the same subject, American feminist theorist and author of Gender Trouble Judith Butler wrote in the scholarly journal Diacritics an essay entitled "Further Reflections on the Conversions of Our Time", in which she described the shift in these terms:

"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure. It has marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."

Institutionally, the discipline has undergone major shifts. The Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, which was descended from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, closed in 2002. Although by this time the intellectual centre of gravity of the discipline had long since shifted to other universities throughout the world. Strong Cultural Studies programs can be found in the United Kingdom, North and South America, Europe, Australia, Asia and there are a host of journals and conferences where Cultural Studies research is published and presented.

Academic reception[link]

Cultural Studies is not a unified theory, but a diverse field of study encompassing many different approaches, methods and academic perspectives. In any academic discipline, Cultural Studies academics frequently debate among themselves. However, some academics from other fields have criticised the discipline as a whole. It has been popular to dismiss Cultural Studies as an academic fad. Yale literature professor Harold Bloom has been an outspoken critic of the Cultural Studies model of literary studies. Critics such as Bloom see cultural studies as it applies to literary scholarship as a vehicle of careerism by academics, instead of promoting essentialist theories of culture, mobilising arguments that scholars should promote the public interest by studying what makes beautiful literary works beautiful.

Bloom stated his position during the September of 2000 episode of C-SPAN's Booknotes:

[T]here are two enemies of reading now in the world, not just in the English-speaking world. One [is] the lunatic destruction of literary studies...and its replacement by what is called cultural studies in all of the universities and colleges in the English-speaking world, and everyone knows what that phenomenon is. I mean, the...now-weary phrase 'political correctness' remains a perfectly good descriptive phrase for what has gone on and is, alas, still going on almost everywhere and which dominates, I would say, rather more than three-fifths of the tenured faculties in the English-speaking world, who really do represent a treason of the intellectuals, I think, a 'betrayal of the clerks'."^[14]

Literary critic Terry Eagleton is not wholly opposed to Cultural Studies theory like Bloom, but has criticised certain aspects of it, highlighting what he sees as its strengths and weaknesses in books such as After Theory (2003). For Eagleton, literary and cultural theory have the potential to say important things about the "fundamental questions" in life, but theorists have rarely realized this potential.

Whereas, sociology was founded upon various historic works, which purposefully set out to distinguish the subject as distinct from philosophy or psychology. Cultural Studies lacks any fundamental literature explicitly founding a new discipline. A relevant criticism comes from Pierre Bourdieu, who working in the sociological tradition, wrote on similar topics such as photography, art museums and modern literature. Bourdieu's point is that Cultural Studies lacks scientific method.^[15] His own work makes innovative use of statistics and in-depth interviews. Cultural Studies is relatively unstructured as an academic field. It is difficult to hold researchers accountable for their claims, because there is no agreement on the methods and validity.

The Sokal Affair[link]

One of the most prominent critiques of Cultural Studies came from physicist Alan Sokal, who submitted an article to a Cultural Studies journal, Social Text. This article was what Sokal thought would be a parody of what he perceived to be the "fashionable nonsense" of postmodernists working in Cultural Studies. As the paper was coming out, Sokal published an article in a self-described "academic gossip" magazine Lingua Franca, revealing the hoax. His explanation for doing this was:

"Politically, I'm angered because most (though not all) of this silliness is emanating from the self-proclaimed Left. We're witnessing here a profound historical volte-face. For most of the past two centuries, the Left has been identified with science and against obscurantism; we have believed that rational thought and the fearless analysis of objective reality (both natural and social) are incisive tools for combating the mystifications promoted by the powerful -- not to mention being desirable human ends in their own right. The recent turn of many "progressive" or "leftist" academic humanists and social scientists toward one or another form of epistemic relativism betrays this worthy heritage and undermines the already fragile prospects for progressive social critique. Theorizing about "the social construction of reality" won't help us find an effective treatment for AIDS or devise strategies for preventing global warming. Nor can we combat false ideas in history, sociology, economics and politics if we reject the notions of truth and falsity."^[16]

Founding works[link]

Hall identifies some originating texts, or the original 'curriculum', of the field of cultural studies:

• Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy
• Raymond Williams' Culture and Society and The Long Revolution
• E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class^[17]

See also[link]

Related authors[link]

References[link]

Notes

Bibliography

• Du Gay, Paul, et al. Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. Culture, Media and Identities. London ; Thousand Oaks Calif.: Sage in association with The Open University, 1997.
• During, Simon. The Cultural Studies Reader. 2nd ed. London ; New York: Routledge, 2003.
• Edgar, Andrew and Peter Sedgwick. 2005. Cultural Theory: The Key Concepts. 2nd edition. NY: Routledge.
• Engel, Manfred: "Cultural and Literary Studies". Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 31 (2008): 460-467.
• Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler. Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 1992.
• Theory, Culture and Society, 21(1), 2004.
• Hall, Stuart. Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972-79. London Birmingham, West Midlands: Hutchinson Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies University of Birmingham, 1992.
• Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms." Media, Culture, and Society 2 (1980).
• Hall, Stuart. "Race, Culture, and Communications: Looking Backward and Forward at Cultural Studies." Rethinking Marxism 5.1 (1992): 10-18.
• Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working Class Life (Chatto and Windus, 1957) ISBN 0-7011-0763-4
• Johnson, Richard. "What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?" Social Text 16 (1986–87): 38-80.
• Johnson, Richard. "Multiplying Methods: From Pluralism to Combination." Practice of Cultural Studies. London; Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2004. 26-43.
• Johnson, Richard. "Post-Hegemony? I Don't Think So" Theory, Culture and Society. 24(3): 95-110.
• Lash, Scott. 2007. "Power after Hegemony: Cultural Studies in Mutation?" Theory, Culture, and Society. 24(3): 55-78.
• Lewis, Jeff, Cultural Studies, Second Edition, Sage, London, 2008.
• Longhurst,Brian, Smith,Greg, Bagnall, Gaynor, Crawford, Garry and Michael Ogborn, Introducing Cultural Studies, Second Edition, Pearson, London, 2008, ISBN 978-1-4058-5843-4
• Lindlof, T. R., & Taylor, B. C. (2002). Qualitative Communication Research Methods, 2nd Edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
• Pollock, Griselda (ed.), Generations and Geographies: Critical Theories and Critical Practices in Feminism and the Visual Arts. Routledge, 1996.
• Pollock, Griselda. Psychoanalysis and the Image. Boston and Oxford: Blackwell, 2006.
• Smith, Paul. Questioning Cultural Studies: An Interview with Paul Smith. 1994. MLG Institute for Culture and Society at Trinity College. OSF1.gmu.edu, 31 August 2005.
• Smith, Paul. "Looking Backwards and Forwards at Cultural Studies." Companion to Cultural Studies. Ed. Toby Miller. Oxford; Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001. 331-40.
• Smith, Paul. "A Course In "Cultural Studies"." The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 24.1, Cultural Studies and New Historicism (1991): 39-49.
• Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
• Williams, Raymond. Culture and Society, 1780-1950. New York,: Harper & Row, 1966.

External links[link]

• The Cultural Studies Association (U.S.)
• Cultural Studies
• The International Journal of Cultural Studies
• (The Journal of) Cultural Studies
• The Need for Cultural Studies
• CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
• Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths College
• Centre for Cultural Studies Research, University of East London
• Theory, Culture & Society
• New Formations: A Journal of Culture / Theory / Politics
• Culture Machine
• [1]

Chris or Christopher Cook may refer to:

• Chris Cook (racing driver) (born 1971), NASCAR racing driver and instructor
• Christopher Cook, English swimmer
• Christopher Cook (journalist), American journalist
• Christopher Cook (writer) (born 1952), American writer
• Chris Cook (bodybuilder), professional bodybuilder
• Chris Cook (energy market strategist), former director of the International Petroleum Exchange in London and active in the creation of the Iranian oil bourse
• Chris Cook (sailor) (born 1974), Canadian sailor in the Finn class
• Chris Cook (American football) (born 1987), American football player
• Chris Cook (swimmer) (born 1979), English swimmer
• Christopher Cook (composer) (born 1962), American composer of contemporary classical music

See also[link]

• Christian Cook (born 1975), American lacrosse player
• Christian Cooke (born 1987), English television actor
• Christine Cook (born 1970), field hockey player who represented Great Britain at the 1996 Summer Olympics

This disambiguation page lists articles about people with the same name. If an internal link led you here, you may wish to change the link to point directly to the intended article.

bell hooks
Born	Gloria Jean Watkins (1952-09-25) September 25, 1952 (age 59) Hopkinsville, Kentucky, USA
Pen name	bell hooks
Occupation	Author, social activist
Notable work(s)	Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism All About Love: New Visions We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
Influences Sojourner Truth, Paulo Freire, Gustavo Gutiérrez, Erich Fromm, Lorraine Hansberry, Thich Nhat Hanh, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr.

Gloria Jean Watkins (born September 25, 1952), better known by her pen name bell hooks (intentionally uncapitalized),^[1][2] is an American author, feminist, and social activist. She took her nom de plume from her maternal great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks.^[3]

Her writing has focused on the interconnectivity 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 over thirty books and numerous scholarly and mainstream articles, appeared in several documentary films and participated in various public lectures. Primarily through a postmodern perspective, hooks has addressed race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality, mass media and feminism.

Biography[link]

Early life[link]

Gloria Jean Watkins was born on September 25, 1952 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. She grew up in a working class family with five sisters and one brother. Her father, Veodis Watkins, was a custodian and her mother, Rosa Bell Watkins, was a homemaker. Throughout her childhood, she was an avid reader.

Her early education took place in racially segregated public schools, and she wrote of great adversities when making the transition to an integrated school, where teachers and students were predominantly white. She graduated from Hopkinsville High School in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, earned her B.A. in English from Stanford University in 1973, and earned her M.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1976. In 1983, after several years of teaching and writing, she completed her doctorate in the literature department from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a dissertation on author Toni Morrison. She also taught at Yale.

Career[link]

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 (Los Angeles) released her first published work, a chapbook of poems titled "And There We Wept" (1978), written under her pen name, "bell hooks". She adopted her grandmother's name as her pen name because her 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 grandmother." Her name's unconventional lowercasing signifies what is most important in her works: the "substance of books, not who I am."^[4]

She taught at several post-secondary institutions in the early 1980s, including the University of California, Santa Cruz and San Francisco State University. South End Press (Boston) published her first major work, Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism in 1981, though it was written years earlier, while she was an undergraduate student.^[5] In the decades since its publication, Ain't I a Woman? has gained widespread recognition as an influential contribution to postmodern feminist thought.^[6]

Ain’t I a Woman? examines several recurring themes in her later work: the historical impact of sexism and racism on black women, devaluation of black womanhood, media roles and portrayal, the education system, the idea of a white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy, the marginalization of black women, and the disregard for issues of race and class within feminism.

Since the publication of Ain’t I a Woman?, she has become eminent as a leftist and postmodern political thinker and cultural critic. She targets and appeals to a broad audience by presenting her work in a variety of media using various writing and speaking styles. As well as having written books, she has published in numerous scholarly and mainstream magazines, lectures at widely accessible venues, and appears in various documentaries.

She is frequently cited by feminists^[who?] as having provided the best solution to the difficulty of defining something as diverse as "feminism", addressing the problem that if feminism can mean everything, it means nothing. She asserts an answer to the question "what is feminism?" that she says is "rooted in neither fear nor fantasy... 'Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression'".^[7]

She has published more than 30 books, ranging in topics from black men, patriarchy and masculinity to self-help, engaged pedagogy to personal memoirs, and sexuality (in regards to feminism and politics of aesthetic/visual culture). A prevalent theme in her most recent writing is the community and communion, the ability of loving communities to overcome race, class, and gender inequalities. In three conventional books and four children's books, she suggests that communication and literacy (the ability to read, write, and think critically) are crucial to developing healthy communities and relationships that are not marred by race, class, or gender inequalities.

She has held positions as Professor of African and African-American Studies and English at Yale University, Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and American Literature at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, and as Distinguished Lecturer of English Literature at the City College of New York.

A commencement speech hooks gave in 2002 at Southwestern University was considered controversial. 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. Many in the audience booed the speech, though "several graduates passed over the provost to shake her hand or give her a hug."^[8]

In 2004 she joined forces with Berea College in Berea, Kentucky as Distinguished Professor in Residence,^[9] 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 most recent book is entitled belonging: a culture of place, which includes a very candid interview with author Wendell Berry as well as a discussion of her move back to Kentucky.

Influences[link]

Writers who have influenced hooks include African-American abolitionist and feminist Sojourner Truth (whose speech Ain't I a Woman? inspired her first major work), Brazilian educator Paulo Freire (whose perspectives on education she embraces in her theory of engaged pedagogy), Peruvian theologian and Dominican priest Gustavo Gutierrez, psychologist Erich Fromm, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, African-American writer James Baldwin, Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, African-American black nationalist leader Malcolm X, and African-American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr (who addresses how the strength of love unites communities).^[10][11]

Teaching to Transgress[link]

In her book Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, hooks investigated the classroom as a source of constraint but also a potential source of liberation. She argued 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.”^[12] She advocated that universities encourage students and teachers to transgress, and sought ways to use collaboration to make learning more relaxing and exciting. She described teaching as “a catalyst that calls everyone to become more and more engaged”.^[13]

Criticism[link]

She has attracted a measure of criticism, often from conservative writers. Peter Schweizer has accused her of hypocrisy in sexual politics.^[14] Writer David Horowitz has specifically objected to a passage in the first chapter of Killing Rage,^[15] in which hooks states that she is "sitting beside an anonymous white male that [she] long[s] to murder" because he was complicit in a boarding pass misunderstanding that resulted in the harassment of her black, female friend.^[16] Of these kind of "irrational, violent impulses," hooks states, "My irrational impulse to want to kill people who bore me or whose ideas are not very complex clearly has to do with an exaggerated response to situations where I feel powerless."^[17]

Awards and nominations[link]

• Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics: The American Book Awards/ Before Columbus Foundation Award (1991)
• Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism: "One of the twenty most influential women’s books in the last 20 years" by Publishers Weekly (1992)
• bell hooks: The Writer’s Award from the Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Fund (1994)
• Happy to Be Nappy: NAACP Image Award nominee (2001)
• Homemade Love: The Bank Street College Children's Book of the Year (2002)
• Salvation: Black People and Love: Hurston Wright Legacy Award nominee (2002)
• bell hooks: Utne Reader's "100 Visionaries Who Could Change Your Life"
• bell hooks: The Atlantic Monthly's "One of our nation’s leading public intellectuals"

Select bibliography[link]

• Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism (1981) ISBN 0-89608-129-X
• All About Love: New Visions (2000) ISBN 0-06-095947-9
• And There We Wept: Poems. (1978). OCLC 6230231. 
• Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (1995) ISBN 1-56584-263-4
• Be Boy Buzz (2002) ISBN 0-7868-0814-4
• Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992) ISBN 0-89608-433-7
• Bone Black: memories of girlhood (1996) ISBN 0-8050-5512-6
• Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (1991) (with Cornel West) ISBN 0-89608-414-0
• Communion: The Female Search for Love (2002) ISBN 0-06-093829-3
• Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2000) ISBN 0-89608-629-1
• Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984) ISBN 0-89608-614-3
• Grump Groan Growl (2008) ISBN 0-7868-0816-0
• Happy to be Nappy (1999) ISBN 0-7868-0427-0
• Homemade Love (2002) ISBN 0-7868-0643-5
• Justice: Childhood Love Lessons (2000). ISBN 0-688-16844-2. OCLC 41606283. 
• Killing Rage: Ending Racism (1995) ISBN 0-8050-5027-2
• Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (1994) ISBN 0-415-90811-6
• Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies (1996) . ISBN 0-415-91823-5. OCLC 35229108. 
• Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work (1999) ISBN 0-8050-5910-5
• Rock My Soul: Black People and Self-esteem (2003) ISBN 0-7434-5605-X
• Salvation: Black People and Love (2001) ISBN 0-06-095949-5
• Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-recovery (1993) ISBN 1-896357-99-7
• Skin Again (2004) ISBN 0-7868-0825-X
• Soul Sister: Women, Friendship, and Fulfillment (2005) ISBN 0-89608-735-2
• Space (2004) ISBN 0-415-96816-X
• Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989) ISBN 0-921284-09-8
• Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope (2003) ISBN 0-415-96817-8
• Teaching to Transgress: Education As the Practice of Freedom (1994) ISBN 0-415-90808-6
• We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (2004) ISBN 0-415-96926-3
• Where We Stand: Class Matters (2000) ISBN 978-0-415-92913-4
• The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (2003) ISBN 0-7434-5607-6
• Witness (2006) ISBN 0-89608-759-X
• Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life (1997) ISBN 0-8050-5722-6
• Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990) ISBN 0-921284-34-9
• ″Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom‘’ (2010) ISBN 09780415968201

Film appearances[link]

• Black Is... Black Ain't (1994)
• Give a Damn Again (1995)
• Cultural Criticism and Transformation (1997)
• My Feminism (1997)
• I Am a Man: Black Masculinity in America (2004)
• Voices of Power (1999)
• Baadasssss Cinema (2002)
• Writing About a Revolution: A Talk (2004)
• Happy to Be Nappy and Other Stories of Me (2004)
• Is Feminism Dead? (2004)

Further reading[link]

• Florence, Namulundah. bell hooks's Engaged Pedagogy. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1998. ISBN 0-89789-564-9 . OCLC 38239473. 
• Leitch et al., eds. "bell hooks." The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. pages 2475–2484. ISBN 0-393-97429-4 . OCLC 45023141. 
• South End Press Collective, eds. "Critical Consciousness for Political Resistance"Talking About a Revolution.Cambridge: South End Press, 1998. 39–52. ISBN 0-89608-587-2 . OCLC 38566253. 
• Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto, ed. Other Sisterhoods: Literary Theory and U.S. Women of Color. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1998. ISBN 0-252-02361-7 . OCLC 36446785. 
• Wallace, Michelle. Black Popular Culture. New York: The New Press, 1998. ISBN 1-56584-459-9 . OCLC 40548914. 
• Whitson, Kathy J. (2004). Encyclopedia of Feminist Literature. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. ISBN 0-313-32731-9. OCLC 54529420. 

References[link]

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: bell hooks

• allaboutbellhooks.com (A site dedicated to the revolutionary activist & healer bell hooks)
• Ejournal website (several critical resources for bell hooks)
• Real Change News (interview with hooks by Rosette Royale)
• bell hooks articles published in Shambhala Sun Magazine
• South End Press (books by hooks published by South End Press)
• University of California, Santa Barbara (biographical sketch of hooks)
• "Postmodern Blackness" (article by hooks)
• Whole Terrain (articles by hooks published in Whole Terrain)
• Challenging Capitalism & Patriarchy (interviews with hooks by Third World Viewpoint)
• Ingredients of Love (an interview with ascent magazine)
• bell hooks at the Internet Movie Database
• Booknotes interview with hooks on Killing Rage: Ending Racism, November 19, 1995.
• In Depth interview with hooks, May 5, 2002