With little fanfare, bell hooks has influenced your favorite industry leaders worldwide and has been named one of TIME’s 100 Women of the Year. Like many Black women scholars before her, Bell Hooks gave so much of herself: to theories, writers aspiring to be writers, and the future she sought to create. She understood the sense of urgency in her work and wasted no opportunity to push any and every conversation forward. She has published between thirty and forty written works in her lifetime; hooks wrote feverishly while never allowing the quality of her work to falter.
Participating in calls to action and attending events start most people’s journeys into activism, intending to change others’ behavior. Hooks reminded us that true transformation begins on the inside, without cliches or empty jargon. We must change ourselves first. To live in a more loving society, we all must become love. To live in a non-patriarchal society, we all need to question what causes the desire to dominate others. To live in an anti-racist society, we must be more human-centric.
From the very beginning, reading Bell Hooks taught me that there is no such thing as “instead”; You need to engage with the emotion and respect it as a valuable source of information. She told me that the loneliness, self-control, feelings of lovelessness, and unwantedness that come with teenage territory are inherently political issues, even when people try to say no. Reading “All About Love” was a very valuable moment for me.
bell hooks took love seriously. She theorized love and anchored it as a central political/feminist question and solution in all her work. I feel like people still underestimate the tremendous contribution of feminist theory that puts love at the center in this way. According to Bell Hooks, a society structured around love is in direct contrast to the status quo of a society structured around domination. Not only that, she persistently argued that loving is more honest and natural than any logic of hierarchy and domination for us as human beings. By acknowledging the question of one’s ability to attain and exercise the primacy of love, Hook’s work undermined the patriarchal impulses and Machiavellian machinations that underpin virtually all Western political theories, thereby radically challenging our understanding of the world.
While hooks emphasized love, she acknowledged that the concept can be dismissed or overlooked in a society ruled by the dictates of the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” Consider love as a serious political issue or a feminist issue. It showed us how we’re doing ourselves a disservice by relegating a subject as necessary as love to the realm of the supposedly analytical frivolity: Self-help, rom-coms (and, of course, I disagree, but) art and poetry. In theorizing about love, Bell Hooks emphasized its centrality to nearly all political questions, presenting it to us as a ubiquitous and overwhelmingly obvious answer.
We are still scratching the surface when it comes to realizing the enormous implications of hooks’ work. When you read “All About Love,” or any writing by hooks for that matter, the imagination that she demands from you feels easy and familiar. This is no simple feat and a testament to the power of bell hooks. While you feel like you know the world she describes, you also know that our world is very different – or is it?
