Professor at the University of Berea (Kentucky), she had published in 1981, “Am I not a woman? Black and feminism women”, a founding book that paved the way for intersectional thinking. Prolific writer, she died on December 15 at the age of 69.
by
The African-American Aurer and theoretician Bell Hooks, one of the voices that will have summarized with the most force among the feminist movements of the last decades, died on December 15, in Berea (Kentucky). She was 69 years old.
Gloria Jean Watkins was born on September 25, 1952 in Hopkinsville, in Kentucky, rural and poor, where the segregation then applied, binding the young woman to start his schooling in an establishment reserved for blacks. She was 16 when Martin Luther King (1929-1968) was murdered. Between the ultramodernity of California, where she started studies of literature, and the rurality of Wisconsin, where she spent her master’s degree, then from Ohio, where she taught, Bell Hooks seemed to have refused to choose. Since 2004, she had laid her suitcases in Kentucky and taught at the University of Berea.
It is with his first collection of poetry, and there we cried “, 1978, not translated), that she wrought her pseudonym Bell Hooks – she wanted to write Without capital letters, as if to fade behind his texts. While she finishes her doctorate, devoted to the African-American novelist Toni Morrison (1931-2019), she publishes a trial, ain’t i a woman? Black Women and Feminism (1981). It will be necessary to wait until 2015 for the text to reach us in French, under the title am I not a woman? Black and feminism women (Cambigakis).
This monumental work, whose writing has spread over seven years, is described by its lattice of “love letter from my part to black women”. She traces the history of these women since slavery until the early 1980s, while the feminism of his time tended to relegate them to the background. Am I not a woman? is a combative book by its criticism of white feminisms as well as black movements of liberation. Founder of what is now called the “Black FemaMism”, he paved the way for intersectional thinking, at the intersection of the discrimination of racism and sexism.
A modern vision of the story of The intimate
In the extension of this text, from the margin at the center: feminist theory (1984, Cambubakis, 2017) calls for a revision of the objectives of feminist movements, with the aim of integrating all women – and not only those of the upper white and educated middle class. Historicized, social, racial and sexual categories appear what they are: political constructions, a political work can therefore make it possible to modify.
You have 44.61% of this article to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.