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P E R S O N A L E S S AY
The Impact of bell hooks
The late bell hooks passed away on December 15 in Kentucky.
BY NICHOLAS BOSTON
On December 15, just as
Gay City News was going
to press, the announcement
reached our team that
bell hooks (née Gloria Jean Watkins),
groundbreaking Black feminist scholar,
poet, and cultural critic, was dead.
She was 69 and the cause of death
was renal failure. She died at her home
in Berea, Kentucky, the state of her
birth, where, since 2004, she was the
distinguished professor-in-residence in
Appalachian Studies at Berea College.
Exceptionally prolifi c, hooks authored
close to 40 books across the course
of a career as an academic and public
intellectual that spanned over four
decades, during which she held professorships
at Oberlin, Stanford, Yale,
and the City University of New York.
Committed to resisting, through both
her prose and practice, what she famously
called “white-supremacist-capitalist
patriarchy,” hooks introduced a
style of writing and, in her words, critical
apparatus, that widely infl uenced
or engaged successive generations of
scholars, writers, artists and activists.
In the following personal essay, Gay
City News contributor Nicholas Boston,
a professor of media studies at the
City University of New York, refl ects on
the legacy of bell hooks.
When I learned of the passing of
bell hooks, I felt an immediate pull to
the persons, places, and spaces that
I was getting to know at the time that
I was arriving at her work. I searched
BELL HOOKS’ FAMILY VIA REUTERS
my playlists for music from that time
— Brand New Heavies, Digable Planets,
Young Disciples — tunes I hadn’t
heard in years. This reaction wasn’t
nostalgia, it was mourning — so
much of that period was infused and
enmeshed with bell hooks.
I found my on-ramp to the then superhighway,
now classic grand boulevard,
that is hooks’ oeuvre on February
6, 1992. On that evening, she gave
a talk at Simon Fraser University, in
Vancouver, Canada. Then a professor
at Oberlin College, she had already
published fi ve books, including “Ain’t
I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism,”
and “Talking Back: Thinking
Feminist, Thinking Black.” Listening
to that talk now, hooks’ prescience is
astounding to hear. The internationally
televised hearing of law professor
Anita Hill’s accusation of sexual
harassment against Supreme Court
nominee Clarence Thomas had recently
transpired and in the preamble
to her talk hooks commented on
it. “On one hand, we had this Black
woman who will go down in history
in many ways as the most visible, the
most represented, Black woman,” she
said. “At the same time, … I heard
so many white women, particularly,
saying, ‘She was me!’”
From there, hooks proceeded to the
point. “I have a new book coming out
called “Black Looks: Race and Representation”
that the talk I’m going to use
tonight comes out of,” she said. When
she spoke the title of the talk, “Madonna:
Plantation Mistress or Soul Sister,”
now the hotly debated Chapter 10 of
that book, the audience roared.
Now, here’s the truly relevant and
remarkable part of my recollection:
I was not physically present for this
talk. But its social and cultural aftershocks
were so lasting, so transformative,
they met me months afterwards.
For on that occasion, when bell hooks
looked out at the packed auditorium
anxiously awaiting her talk, she was
dismayed at the sight. There were people
standing or unable to enter due to
fi re regulations. She told the organizers
to announce that any white person
seated should get up and give their
place to the nearest person of color
who was standing or couldn’t get in at
all. If those present were truly familiar
with her writing and teachings on
such topics as access, accountability,
appropriation, privilege and patriarchy,
they would not think twice. But,
of course, people did think twice, and
many more times, and they were still
thinking and talking about having
their politics wrenched from theory
and plonked into practice when persons
who’d been in that auditorium,
faced with that request as either sitters
or standers, became my friends,
lovers, collaborators, co-authors, and,
yes, even nemeses.
I might have encountered bell hooks’
work a couple years prior to this, during
my fi rst, aborted attempt at an
undergraduate career at Dartmouth
College, in New Hampshire. But, so
distracted a student was I that all I
can recall now, vaguely, is her name in
a line on a syllabus. My passions were
music, fashion, fi lm, mass media, club
culture, and bodies — my own and
other guys’ — which commanded my
full attention. I dropped out of college
and soon landed in Vancouver, where
I knew nothing and nobody and my
life could feel more like an immersion
than an intermission.
The spring came. I was on my way
back from an excursion to the cruisy
trails at Wreck Beach, having scambled
up a perilous escarpment attemptable
only by the under-30 set.
Hopefully, the queer-positive Vancouver
City Council has since put in
stairs — I would break my neck on
that 90-degree slope today. Anyway,
there I was, standing at a bus stop
with nothing to do but look around,
these being the days before cellphones.
A fl yer adhered to a pole caught my
eye. It might have been for a concert or
performance or who knows what, but
➤ HOOKS, continued on p.11
December 30, 2021 - January 12, 2 10 022 | GayCityNews.com
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