| Years old: | I'm 25 years old | |
| Nationality: | I was born in Ukraine | |
| Gender: | Girl | |
| What is the color of my hair: | Auburn | |
| I know: | English, Czech |
InI was a sophomore at Yale. Gloria — as we were allowed to address her in the classroom — had a slight figure with elegant wrists that peeked out of her tunic sweater sleeves. She was soft-spoken with a faint Southern accent, which I attributed to her birthplace, Hopkinsville, Ky.
She was in her mids then but looked much younger.
Large, horn-rimmed glasses framed the open gaze of her genuinely curious mind. You knew her classes were special. The temperature in the room seemed to change in her presence because everything felt so intense and crackling like the way the air can feel heavy before a long-awaited rain. No, I think, we were falling in love with thinking and imagining again.
Watkins wanted her pen name to be spelled in lowercase to shift the attention from her identity to her ideas. Since then she has published three dozen books and teaches in her home state of Kentucky at Berea College, a liberal arts college that does not charge tuition to any of its students.
She is the founder of the bell hooks Institute and is recognized globally as a feminist activist and cultural critic. For nearly four decades, hooks has written and published with clarity, novel insight and extraordinary precision about art, media, race, gender and class.
Race, ethnicity, and nationality while away
I am neither white nor black, but through her theories, I was able to understand that my body contained historical multitudes and any analysis without such a measured consideration was limited and deeply flawed. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Virginia Woolf, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, among other white women, and perhaps, because I was foreign-born — rightly or wrongly — I had not expected that people like me would be included in their vision of feminist liberation.
Her book of theory taught me to ask for more from art, literature, media, politics and history — and for me, a Korean girl who had been born in a divided nation once led by kings, colonizers, then a succession of presidents who were more or less dictators, and for millenniums, that had enforced rigid class systems with slaves and serfs until the early 20th century, and where women of all classes were deeply oppressed and brutalized, I needed to see that the movement had a space for me.
In fostering a feminist movement, which can include and empower women from all different races and classes, hooks calls for an honest reckoning of its history.
She indicts the origins of the white feminist movement for its racist and classist treatment of African-American women and repudiates its goals of imitating the power structure of white patriarchy. The sad irony is of course that black women are often most victimized by the very sexism we refuse to collectively identify as an oppressive force.
If a woman chooses to hurt another person or herself in the guise of feminism, surely that cannot eradicate sexism. In college, I did not imagine that I could be a fiction writer. The wish to make art seemed like some incredibly expensive store I could never enter.
Books In Praise of bell hooks.
