bell hooks: Homeplace - A Site of Resistance

bell hooks: homeplace - a site of resistance by TigersEye99

bell hooks on the Home-place as a Site of Politics

Historically, African-American people believed that the construction of a home-place, however fragile and tenuous (the slave hut, the wooden shack), had a radical dimension, one’s homeplace was the one site where one could freely construct the issue of humanization, where one could resist. Black women resisted by making homes where all black people could strive to be subjects, not objects, where we could be affirmed in our minds and hearts despite poverty, hardship, and deprivation, where we could restore to ourselves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public world (cited in Roberta Feldman & Susan Stall, The Dignity of Resistance, 2004, pp. 9-10).

bell hooks: All About Love

bell hooks - All About Love by Che Brandes-Tuka

Feminist Praxis and the Politics of Literacy: A Conversation with bell hooks

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.”