REI FEMINISM: hooks

bell hooks => has been described, as 'the hardest working woman in academia'

hooks => is a useful exemplar of feminisms attending to race/ethnicity/imperialism (REI)

because her work has ranged over time from a Modernist Differences focus on Identity
towards more Postmodern-influenced concerns with diversity/multiplicity.

LATER WORK

Hook's later works in the 1990s and 2000s on black representations and audiences in film and
on black (African-American) masculinity in many ways continues the early concentration
upon privileging or giving voice to a 'marginalised race' identity (hooks, 1992, 2003c).

These later works still focus on the political project of unting black men and women in the
overthrowing oppression.

Moreover, she retains an optimistic unambigious certainty regarding her political mission
which may be said to be characteristic of a Modern perspective.

The author assumes that she knows the truth path to political change on the basis of her
oppressed political identity. In a 1999 debate with Professor Nira Yuval-Davis and in the
article in 2003 she continues to refer to „white“ supremacist culture in ways that can be
viewed as generalising from her own experience.

As Yuval-Davis notes, hooks' framework seems to give little spaceto the diverse forms of
racism in that racism is not always 'white' versus 'black'. It reveals a tendecy to assume a
global authority for her analysis of domestic American concerns. Like Heidi Safia Mirza,
hooks is inclines to employ terms like 'white' and 'black' in quite inclusive ways, in ways that
appear to operate 'across national and cultural boundaries'. Mirza's usage of black to refer to
non-white others is consciously intended to highlight connections between 'The Third World'
and British nonwhites related to issues of migration.

This inclination towards large claims and political certainity is also evident in her assessment
of Feminism's direction.

In 1993, in a exchange with Naomi Wolf she declares unambiguosly against bourgeois
feminists and asserts that Feminism is a revolutionary 'Left wing' struggle which is not a
'women's movement' alone.

She also remains certain about the 'true path' to political change as not only a
radical/subsatntive political change orientation but as asingular movement.

Women may be different that is race/class differentiated and all people may be included in
Feminism, but for her there is only one struggle: 'advancing the notion of many “feminisms“
has served ...political interests of women seeking status and privileged class power.

Certainly her 1990 piece on'Postmodern blackness' points out what she sees as the dangers of
Postmodern perspectives (hooks 1990c).
She sees in Postmodernism a different motivation or logic which displays a studied
indifferences to blackness and threatens to dismantle an oppositional voice to the realities of
racism.

However, alongside the firmly Modern support for identity politics in hooks' writings, there
are other themes. In her 1984 book, Feminist Theory: from Margin to Centre she calls on
white feminists to break Feminism's white framing, but also says that those at the margins
(which means black people) are not immune from self-examination and must examine their
exclusionary practices.

She notes that she has experienced these practices herself. In Black Looks(1992) and We
Real Cool (2003) she discusses dangers of a women-oppressive masculinity, dangers to both
men and women.