Audio Interview
Interviewed by Gary A. Olson and Elizabeth Hirsch, The Theory Project
Feminist and cultural critic bell hooks
is resolutely committed to promoting literacy. For hooks, literacy is
essential to the future of the feminist movement because the lack of
reading, writing, and critical skills serves to exclude many women and
men from feminist consciousness. Yet, as hooks argues in the interview
that follows, “The class standpoint of much feminist theory leads to a
deprivileging of and a disrespect for the politics of reading and
writing.” She makes a cogent case for encouraging “every feminist
thinker in the academy” to acknowledge literacy to be “an important
feminist agenda,” and she expresses “anguish” over the neglect of
literacy among feminists: “If we truly want to empower women and men to
engage in feminist thinking, we must empower them to read and write,
but I really don’t see any large group of committed feminists making
that a central agenda.”
Audio Interview
