Feminism: A Transformational Politic*

1. Feminism: A Transformational Politic* bell hooks

2. Biography • bell hooks (b. 1952) a.k.a. Gloria Watkins (her lower-case pseudonym is derived from her desire to remain humble as an academic as well as a reminder of African-American culture). • hooks grew up in Kentucky, then studied at Stanford, Wisconsin, and UC-Santa Cruz. • She is currently professor of English and women’s studies at City College, New York. She was also a prominent professor of African-American studies at Yale. • hooks has written extensively on topics such as representations of African-Americans in literature, film, and media; black feminism; race and anger; and even various children’s books. • Her most famous works include: Ain’t I a Woman, Outlaw Culture, Teaching to Transgress, and Killing Rage.The following selection is taken from her work: Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black.

3. Feminism • “We live in a world in crisis—a world governed by politics of domination, one in which the belief in a notion of superior and inferior, and its concomitant ideology—that the superior should rule over the inferior—effects the lives of all people everywhere.” • What philosophy is hooks likely influenced by here (i.e., that hierarchical binary relationships of domination pervade society)? • hooks then mentions how some feminists have seen the oppression of women by men as the source of the contemporary “world crisis,” as well as all other forms of domination (e.g., racial domination, class-based domination). • This notion that gender/sex domination is the root of all social evils is something about which hooks is skeptical. She is also skeptical of feminists who claim that gender and race “difference[s] [are] the factor which becomes the occasion for separation and domination.” Rather, for hooks, differences must be embraced and celebrated. • What do you think hooks would say about Zackian deracination?

4. Feminism • The idea that male-domination is the central political problem is “an assumption [that] has fostered the notion that elimination of sexist oppression would necessarily lead to the eradication of all forms of domination.” • “[T]hinking in this direction enables Western women, especially privileged white women, to suggest that racism and class exploitation are merely the offspring of the parent system: patriarchy.” • The problem with these assumptions is that “women can and do participate in politics of domination,” specifically in race-oppression and class-oppression. White women of privilege can subjugate persons of color and economic disadvantage, and parents can dominate their children. • Pointing this out is “one way to deconstruct and challenge the simplistic notion that man is the enemy, woman is the victim;… that men have always been the oppressors.”

5. Feminism • Why is it so important, hooks argues, for us to realize that other forms of domination prevail today besides patriarchy? Because the U.S. is not just a male-centered society—it is a “white-supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal society.” • What does hooks mean by this phrase? • For example, hooks imagines, “[r]ight now as I speak, a man who is himself victimized, wounded, hurt by racism and class exploitation is actively dominating a woman in his life…[and] women who are exploited…are dominating children.” • What is hooks’ example supposed to illustrate? • That race, class, and gender exploitation are inter-woven, and these matrices of power/domination mutually reinforce (and feed into) one another. Thus, those interested in “liberation” politics should care about all three.

6. Feminism • Given that feminism has been the parlance of white, upper-class women, some women of color have rejected feminism. • hooks argues, though, that “[t]he intent is not to dissuade people of color from becoming engaged in feminist movement. Feminist struggle to end patriarchal domination should be of primary importance to women and men globally.” • Why is feminist struggle important to men? How does patriarchy (i.e., male-dominated society) hurt men as well as women? Think here about gender roles and expectations. • Moreover, hooks argues that it is important for everyone to recognize the existence of patriarchy because “it is that form of domination we are most likely to encounter in an ongoing way in everyday life.” • In what ways do you encounter patriarchy in everyday life?

7. Feminism • The Personal is Political: • “Unlike other forms of domination, sexism directly shapes and determines relations of power in our private lives, in familiar social spaces” (i.e., home and family). • Personal question: when you lived at home, who did your laundry, made your dinner, etc, and (many times) was still expected to work a full shift? And, conversely, who was boss? • “Usually, it is within the family that we witness coercive domination and learn to accept it…” Care and domination become interwoven. • For example, hooks discusses her domineering father and how he was more of a threat growing up than either race or class exploitation. Moreover, “experiencing exploitation and oppression in the home made one feel all the more powerless…” • How might we eliminate this type of bourgeois family dynamic?

8. Feminism • “We must understand that patriarchal domination shares an ideological foundation with racism and other forms of group oppression, that there is no hope that it can be eradicated while these [other] systems remain in tact.” • “[S]ex, race, and class, and not sex alone, determine the nature of any female’s identity, status, and circumstance…” • What do you think of the claim that patriarchy, racism, and class-oppression must be confronted and overcome together? What do you think of the Foucauldian claim that a woman’s identity is constituted (iterated) through sexism, racism, and class? • “I believe women and men must share a common understanding—a basic knowledge of what feminism is—if it is ever to be a powerful mass-based political movement.” • Do you agree with this claim? What do you think a “basic knowledge of what feminism is” entails? Do you like hooks definition, that feminism is: “a movement to end sexism and sexist oppression”?

9. Feminism • “Imagine a group of women from diverse backgrounds coming together to talk about feminism. First they concentrate on working out their status in terms of sex, race, and class, using this as the standpoint from which they begin discussing patriarchy…Broadening the discussion to include an analysis of race and class would expose many additional differences even as commonalities emerged.” • What point do think hooks is making with this passage? • hooks wishes to point up that one can forge solidarity between women while recognizing differences… • Note: the theme of embracing difference(s) is possibly the central theme in post-Enlightenment philosophy as opposed to a humanism that posits universal sameness.

10. Feminism • Levinas and an Ethics of Difference: • Before moving forward to hooks’ discussion of feminist groups and small-group action, it is worth briefly mentioning the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and his postmodern ethics. • Rather than create an ethics based on building character (Aristotle/Nietzsche) or abstract rules (Kant/Bentham), Levinas focuses on our face-to-face encounter with Others. • When we encounter an/other person, we typically attempt to whollyunderstand them and define them. In doing so, we totalize them. We may relate to them as just-like-me or as nothing more than a “Dirty Jew,” etc. We’ve erased their differences from us, or defined them in a reductionist manner. • Levinas asks us to “listen” for the trace of the Other as Other—to remember that there is always “some more” to a person than how they are “just-like-me,” or than the reductivist way in which we may have defined them. There is always an excess…

11. Feminism • “Small groups are no longer the central place for feminist consciousness-raising. Much feminist education takes place in Women’s Studies classes or at conferences,” and thus non-academics and “masses of people who do not read” have no access. • “The separation of grass-roots ways of sharing feminist thinking across kitchen tables from the spheres where much of that thinking is generated, the academy, undermines feminist movement.” • What point about the “Ivory Tower” is hooks making here? • Would you be interested in meeting with your friends and/or classroom colleagues with the agenda of discussing your experiences as women (both personal and political)? • What do you think would happen at such a meeting? What kind of social transformation might it bring about?

12. Feminism • “True politicization…demands that we give up set ways of thinking and being, that we shift our paradigms, that we open ourselves to the unknown, the unfamiliar.” • “If we do not change our consciousness, we cannot change our actions or demand change from others.” • In other words, for hooks, being political means thinking fluidly, breaking down old models of thought, revaluing, embracing Otherness and that which exceeds our categories. • “More and more, we seem to form select interest groups composed of individuals who share similar perspectives,” i.e., we are ethnocentric, we reject cosmopolitanism. • Of course, hooks rejects this insulary feminism calling for a solidarity between different women and different types of feminism. She calls for a feminism that realizes the enemy is not men, but “an entire structure of domination” (and changing this structure means changing ourselves).

13. Feminism • “Embedded in the commitment to feminist revolution is the challenge to love. Love can be and is an important source of empowerment when we struggle to confront issues of sex, race, and class.” • The reason love is so important, for hooks, is that it “sustain[s] us so that we are not broken [or despairing]” in the process of facing the “ways we dominate and are dominated.” Love also “challenges and resists domination.” • hooks argues that feminism calls “women to love womanness,” “men to resist dehumanizing concepts of masculinity,” and to usher in a “free” and “full” world. What does she mean here, and what might it be like to live in a “post-patriarchal” world? • And so, as we began the class with “love of wisdom,” we part with “wisdom of love,” but this parting is itself a beginning…

14. Homework • Please answer the following questions in your homework journals: • Page 534 • 1.), 3.), 4.), 5.) • “Let us draw upon love to heighten our awareness, deepen our compassion, intensify our courage, and strengthen our commitment.” – bell hooks

15. Philosophy 1301* • Thank You! • “The unexamined life is not worth living” - Socrates