Trans-Scripts 5 (2015)

Conjuring Ain’t I a Woman: an Interview with bell hooks

bell hooks∗
Meredith Lee∗

This year’s special issue of Trans-Scripts was driven by an affective force; today we
mourn the death (or what bell hooks terms as the “disappeared”) of so many Black
women during police encounters: Tanisha Anderson, Ivette Smith, Miriam Carey,
Shelley Frey, Darnisha Harris, Malissa Williams, Alesia Thomas, Shantel Davis,
Tarika Wilson, Aiyana Jones, and this elegiac list goes on and on. We take, as our
point of orientation, the Black flesh of these women as the “meeting ground of
investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth” (Spillers,
203). Indeed, the investment in violating (destroying) black flesh has shaped the
rhetorics of Modernity. Black feminist thought has always and already thoroughly
analyzed and theorized this “treasury of rhetorical wealth,” which has in turn
unsettled the race/gender distinction that was sedimented within our American
grammar during chattel racial slavery and later re-formulated by the performative
turn of white feminism. bell hooks is a pioneer of Black feminist thought and has
worked tirelessly throughout her career at dismantling the impasse that continues to
foster the distinction of race and gender for Black women. We introduce this special
issue of Trans-Scripts with a brief interview with bell hooks.

Meredith: The title of our journal this year is “Race/Gender Revisited.” Our CFP
states, “Decades of work in Black and Women of Color feminisms have insisted on
the necessity of a theory and practice of racialized gender. In this special issue, we
want to return to the relation between race/gender and re-imagine the analytic
distinction that continues to separate these terms.” When thinking about the
relationship between race and gender, one cannot begin without looking to your
early work in the field. In Ain’t I a Woman, you argue that the assumption that we can

                                                                                                               
∗
bell hooks is Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies at Berea College.
She has published more than 30 books and the bell hooks Institute has recently opened its
doors at Berea College.

∗
Meredith Lee is a PhD student in Culture and Theory at the University of California, Irvine
as well as the editor-in-chief of this issue of Trans-Scripts.
 bell hooks

disconnect race from sex has obscured the thinking of American writers.1 How does
this assumption still shape writing today?

bell: I think people are divided today between those of us who work in Women's and
Feminist Studies and view race as additive and those of us whose work is informed
by an understanding of intersectionality that comes from the racial perspective.
Mainstream work is not informed by intersectionality and the separation continues to
exist—the sense that you deal with one or other (you do race or you do gender) and
not that there is a meeting place at an intersection of race and gender. I feel strongly
that people are backing away from the reality of intersectionality.

Meredith: In what way?

bell: I think because in a lot of feminist circles, white supremacy is trumping

feminism. When people of color feel under attack in some way by white supremacy
there is a greater tendency to be hostile towards feminism and gender analysis. We
see that for example in the black lives matter movement. I find a lot of
feminists/women saying “yeah, but the subtext is really black male lives matter”—
that the killing of black women never seems to be relegated to that equal place of the
killing of black men and the fact is black women are being killed everyday in all kinds
of ways. Especially that the traffic of girls is first and foremost the traffic of black
girls. Many black people don't take that seriously as an issue of racial assault and
gendered assault. People are not even thinking about it as genocidal, but I think of it
as a kind of genocide. Any black man's life has so much more value than a black
female life. We see that in a movie like Twelve Years a Slave. How Patsey's life has no
value and Solomon Northup can draw on her strength and then absolutely utterly
leave her behind and never mention Patsy again. He goes back to the females of his
class and Patsy's a forgotten person in the mix--a disappeared person. And I suppose
that's what happens: black women are always being disappeared.

Meredith: In Writing Beyond Race, you use the notion of “racialized sexism” to discuss
the antagonistic relationship between black and white women. You also discussed
                                                                                                               
1 In Ain’t I a Woman, hooks writes, “Although the women’s movement motivated hundreds
of women to write on the woman question, it failed to generate in depth critical analyses of
the black female experience. Most feminists assumed that problems black women faced were
caused by racism—not sexism. The assumption that we can divorce the issue of race from
sex, or sex from race, has so clouded the vision of American thinkers and writers on the
"woman” question that most discussions of sexism, sexist oppression, or woman’s place in
society are distorted, biased, and inaccurate. We cannot form an accurate picture of woman’s
status by simply calling attention to the role assigned females under patriarchy. More
specifically, we cannot form an accurate picture of the status of black women by simply
focusing on racial hierarchies” (12).
 

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 bell hooks

this during your keynote at NWSA in November, which I had the pleasure of
attending. In your keynote, you discussed how race becomes the dissonant
antagonism within feminism, and even Gender Studies. Could you expand on this
idea? How does this notion of “racialized sexism” continue to play out in the
feminist movement, both inside and outside the academy?

bell: We cannot talk about feminism outside the academy because I don't think we
have much of a feminist movement outside the academy. But inside the academy, it’s
really a question of power and how power is organized. And because the academy, as
a corporate structure, is so deeply organized around a hierarchy and domination, can
we be surprised that within Women's Studies and Feminist studies, relations between
women don't represent a difference from dominant power structures but instead play
out in similar ways to power relations within the structure as a whole? For example,
here [at Berea College] we are trying to develop a Women's Studies program. We
have a white woman who has been here for many, many years, which is often the
case for Women's Studies, and who is really not interested in sharing her power. She
sees it primarily as her domain. Many white women still think of Women's Studies as
a white domain. This year NWSA was multicultural, multiethnic, and multiracial, but
I think for some white people that is a call for limitation and not a call for
celebration. Many of us women of color were truly amazed at the levels of diversity
but I think there were equally as many white women who felt that power is being
taken away from them by the increase in diversity. It’s really troubling as we try to
make our way within existing structures that are rooted in hierarchical domination
and it's not like Women's Studies gets to escape that. The questions I think we need
to answer for the future are: how can we actually build, within the existing structure,
radical spaces and how can we infuse Women's and Gender Studies with a level of
radicalization that is consistently interrogating power?

Meredith: Turning to my own work now, which examines the medico-scientific

construction of transsexuality, how do you see Transgender Studies within the
race/gender question.

bell: I think the most exciting aspect of Transgender Studies is the way it is
problematizing, in a more holistic way, the very notions of how we think of male and
female, of identity and even problematizing our sense of what it means to be queer.
It represents a much more complex panorama of change and possibility because
what we really see is how people change, how people move, how people move in
identities. I mean I'm having a coke with my sister, who I have known throughout
my adult life as a lesbian who says she is not a lesbian anymore. What does that
mean? So much is fluid right now that peoples’ behavior has advanced far behind
our language capacity. If we are stuck in a language of binary and yet people's

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 bell hooks

behavior has moved into a non-static space of possibility and fluidity, how do we
name that? What is a person who has been a lesbian for 20 years, who may or may
not ever had a sexual engagement with a man, who is then saying she is no longer a
lesbian? How do we name that? I don't think we have the language. I think that the
one area we have not advanced enough is in our discussion of gender and sexuality.
We can no longer name things within the body. Like "you're eating my pussy, we
know I'm a lesbian." I think people are not relating to the body in the same way. The
body is not the litmus test. This is why transgender and transsexual issues have
become so important because it centers on your critical way of being in the world,
and not just your body and what you do with it.

Meredith: Turning to Ain’t I a Woman again, you discuss the use of analogy between
“women” and “blacks.”2 How can we talk about trans and race as not just analogous
or additive but in a way that illuminates the fact that they historically produce each
other? Here I'm also thinking about your notion of plantation culture.

bell: I think this goes back to the limitations of binary language. We are consistently
trying to work within our language system so that we are not acting like there is some
world of trans and then there is some world of race because both worlds are always
together. But again, binary language doesn't allow us a way to talk about the primacy
of blackness within trans thinking, within the trans community because we don't
acknowledge that people are relegating a race to certain terms. When most people
think trans, they don't think black, they think white. Even though there has been a
rise of people like Janet Mock and Laverne Cox within mainstream culture and then
before them Ru Paul, people still associate the notions of gayness and trans as white
categories. So the question becomes what type of theory will we create that will take
us back (or forward) to a more holistic reading? But it’s not just theory. I find that
one has to be constantly and critically vigilant about language. Like early on in Ain't I
a Woman, when I discussed the question of are you black or are you a woman. I think
we (black feminists) really began to problematize that, but people have just gone
back to using the model where all men are black and all women are white. I think
                                                                                                               
2 hooks states, “Like many people in our racist society, white feminists could feel perfectly
comfortable writing books or articles on the "woman question” in which they drew analogies
between "women” and "blacks.” Since analogies derive their power, their appeal, and their
very reason for being from the sense of two disparate phenomena having been brought
closer together, for white women to acknowledge the overlap between the terms "blacks”
and "women” (that is the existence of black women) would render this analogy unnecessary.
By continuously making this analogy, they unwittingly suggest that to them the term
"woman” is synonymous with "white women” and the term "blacks” synonymous with
"black men.” What this indicates is that there exists in the language of the very movement
that is supposedly concerned with eliminating sexist oppression, a sexist-racist attitude
toward black women” (8).
 

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 bell hooks

about how much we have discussed and analyzed representations and yet you see
books being published everyday by feminists and non-feminists alike where a single
white image dominates. We cannot move away from prioritizing the white self as the
universal self.

Meredith: For a final question, you have written many books on love and spirituality.
How does spirituality pose a threat to constructed notions of race and gender?

bell: I think spirituality poses a threat because deep spirituality not only allows for
transcendence of categories but it also says that compassion requires of us, like an act
of practice of love and kindness, that the old paradigm of enemy and oppressor gets
broken down and one has to again confront a more complex sense of things. For
example, we move from the sense of “is Obama good or bad?” to a more nuanced
fullness that shows that in some ways Obama has been a useful president for gender
and for race, and in a myriad of other ways he has not been. I get so discouraged by
the limitations of our language. The truth is that liberatory language uses more words
and takes longer to explain and understand and so we often slip back into these
simplistic categories like marriage. Yet I'm not interested in people and marriage, I'm
interested in the concept of mutuality as a liberatory force in the world. How many
people are able to bring mutuality as a practice to their relationship? But the big
discourse has been around gay marriage and marriage equality. And it isn't that
interesting because it is all false—because marriage in our society, as an institution,
has failed. We need optimal well-being access for everyone followed by a profound
critique of the heteronormative notions of marriage.

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 bell hooks

Works Cited

hooks, bell. Ain’t I a Woman: black women and feminism. Boston, MA: South End Press,
1981.

______. Writing Beyond Race: Living Theory and Practice. New York: Routledge, 2012.

Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” In

Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture. Chicago, IL: The
University of Chicago Press, 2003.

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