bell hooks essay love as the practice of freedom

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Love as the Practice of Freedom

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“Love is as love does. Love is an act of will-namely both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.” An essay from Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations.

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Open-Access Scholarship on Love in Popular Culture

Review: Romance Fiction and American Culture: Love as the Practice of Freedom? , edited by William A. Gleason and Eric Murphy Selinger

Review by Victoria Kennedy

Gleason, William A., and Eric Murphy Selinger, editors. Romance Fiction and American Culture: Love as the Practice of Freedom? Pp. xvi, 437. New York: Routledge, 2016. US $50.95 (paper). ISBN: 9781472431530.

William A. Gleason and Eric Murphy Selinger’s collection Romance Fiction and American Culture: Love as the Practice of Freedom ? came out of a 2009 conference at Princeton. The title of the collection (and of the conference) comes from bell hooks’ “Love as the Practice of Freedom” (1994). In her essay, hooks argues that “the moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others” (298). Romance Fiction and American Culture takes up this argument to interrogate whether and how this freedom through love can be seen in the creation and consumption of romance narratives in American culture. The collection consists of twenty essays and is divided into four parts: (i) Popular Romance and American History, (ii) Romance and Race, (iii) Art and Commerce, and (iv) Happy Endings. The book promises to consider romance narratives in a specifically American cultural context from the late eighteenth century to the early twenty-first century. While I question the extent to which the collection achieves its goal of situating romance criticism in an American context, the essays Gleason and Selinger have selected are diverse in a way that is both refreshing and invigorating in romance studies. Topics explored include: transatlantic romance reading; lesbian romance fiction; black romances; romance in the context of HIV/AIDS; erotica; Orientalism; romance cover art; Christian and Evangelical romance; BDSM; queer romance; and polyamory. The editors stake the originality of the collection on three areas: its national focus on romance and American cultural history, its consideration “at length” (3) of race and romance in six out of the twenty essays, and its exploration of the often overlooked topic of “business” in romance—both as a theme of romance novels and as the business of selling romance novels.

Noting the ways in which critics like Pamela Regis and Catherine Roach have defined the genre in terms of essential components—the foremost of which is the happy ending–Gleason and Selinger open their collection by observing that “there is nothing eternal, universal, or inevitable about the idea that the ‘romance novel’ is or should be a distinct, readily definable genre” (8). While Regis’ Natural History of the Romance (2003) proposes defining the romance novel so rigidly that Rebecca (du Maurier, 1938) and Gone with the [End Page 1] Wind (Mitchell, 1936) could not be called romance novels (Regis 48), Gleason and Selinger point to the fact that the British Romantic Novelists Association takes a wider view of the romance novel, considering Mills & Boon novels alongside Russian classics like Anna Karenina (Gleason and Selinger 8)—which, notably, does not adhere to the Happily Ever After (HEA) rule that Regis argues is essential to the definition of the romance novel. Gleason and Selinger’s ruminations on how to define the romance novel, however, are anything but pedantic. By challenging existing critical frameworks for classifying and defining romance fiction, they pave the way to consider romance narratives that have previously not been given much attention within the critical discourse surrounding the romance novel. By adhering to strict definitions of the genre—literally checking off whether the “essential” components are present—critics like Regis and Roach have, perhaps unwittingly, excluded many queer and all polyamorous romance narratives from their considerations of the romance genre. By opening up their definition of romance, Gleason and Selinger thus make space for previously excluded texts. Romance Fiction and American Culture is also acutely aware that genres evolve and that consequently “the romance novel” cannot always be defined and classified according to rigid criteria because of the way genres change and blend with one another (think, for instance, of Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander (1991), which blends romance with historical drama and time-travel fantasy—and breaks many of the “rules” of the traditional romance novel).

The collection is positioned as spearheading a “third wave of romance criticism” (10). Gleason and Selinger characterize the previous waves as being concerned first with “texts, readers, and publishing trends with little attention to romance novelists as theorists of, or deliberate artists within, their chosen genre” (11) and secondly as novelists “writing back” (13). The third wave that Romance Fiction and American Culture works towards is characterized by a blurring of roles, bringing together critics, authors, editors, professors, and publishers—many of whom occupy several positions within literary culture, like contributor Len Barot: novelist, editor, reviewer, publisher, and theorist. By recognizing the fluidity of positions writers take up with regard to romance narratives, Gleason and Selinger propose to propel the discourse forward into new territory. One area not thoroughly covered by the collection but signalled in the introduction as a topic for future investigation is the romance blog/review site where academic and non-academic discourses surrounding romance novels often intermingle.

The essays that make up this collection are welcome not only for their thematic range but also for their self-reflexive considerations of romance publishing and romance scholarship. In “Postbellum, Pre-Harlequin: American Romance Publishing in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century,” William Gleason discusses the way digital archives have a crucial role in making available sources that allow us a fuller picture of late nineteenth-century literary culture in America. He calls for such digital archives to include sources often discounted, such as dime novels and romance weeklies. Near the end of the collection, Len Barot’s “Queer Romance in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century America: Snapshots of a Revolution” points out the importance of queer publishers to the availability of queer texts, demonstrating that queer visibility in literature first requires social visibility and freedom for queer people. The Internet, in particular, is considered as key to the availability of queer texts, since online book retailers have “made it possible for readers worldwide to access queer titles” (398). Moreover, in the collection’s final chapter, Ann Herendeen, the author of Phyllida and the Brotherhood of Philander , discusses the context in [End Page 2] which she wrote the ‘bisexual Regency romance’ in 2004, her desire to create “a revolutionary work of (genre) fiction, and the reactions to the novel. In addition to extending Barot’s emphasis on the difficulty getting queer texts published by traditional, mainstream presses, Herendeen’s essay invites consideration of the divide between books that are shelved as “literature” and books that are shelved as “romance” within bookstores.

The consideration of romance in the context of racial social politics is a highlight of the collection, even if the racial contexts examined are somewhat limited. Several essays consider how romance narratives about African Americans have to contend with “the stereotype of the oversexed black woman” (178). For instance, Consuela Francis’s “Flipping the Script: Romancing Zane’s Urban Erotica” argues that mononymous author Zane’s Addicted (1998) contains a plot “rarely seen before in contemporary African American literary fiction”—“the story of a black woman’s successful search for an emotionally satisfying sexual relationship” (169; emphasis mine). Similarly, Julie E. Moody-Freeman’s “Scripting Black Love in the 1990s: Pleasure, Respectability, and Responsibility in an Era of HIV/AIDS” reads Brenda Jackson’s Tonight and Forever (1995) as a didactic project, teaching safe sex to her readers and offering a counter-image to the “stereotypes of blacks as hypersexual, irresponsible, and deviant” (112). Perhaps the most striking consideration of race in American romance is Catherine Roach’s analysis of Beverly Jenkins’ Indigo (1996) in her essay “Love as the Practice of Bondage.” Here, Roach puts romance, African American history, and the question of freedom centre stage, since Indigo is the story of a man “literally giving himself into slavery in order to be with the woman he loves” (370). In a different racial context, Hsu-Ming Teo, who has published extensively about Orientalism, contributes a chapter in which she argues that Orientalist romance narratives of the 1980s and 1990s contributed to the discourse of America’s “War on Terror.”

Still, despite many strengths, the collection also features some essays that fall somewhat short of the promises made by the collection’s introduction. For instance, Sarah Frantz Lyons and Eric Murphy Selinger’s “Strange Stirrings, Strange Yearnings: The Flame and the Flower , Sweet Savage Love , and the Lost Diversities of Blockbuster Historical Romance” aims to exemplify the collection’s “third wave” critical stance, blurring the distinctions between author, critic, and theorist. Opening with a reading of The Flame and the Flower that notes linguistic echoes of The Feminine Mystique , the authors argue that “it is long past time for scholars of popular romance fiction, and of American culture more generally, to take seriously the work of Kathleen Woodiwiss and Rosemary Rogers and the other original “Avon Ladies” … and to read their novels as situated within and responding to the same historical moment as foundational feminist thinkers” like Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, and others. Yet, this methodology is not carried throughout the chapter. The bulk of the chapter considers the way The Flame and the Flower and Sweet Savage Love represent rape, but with little reference to the “foundational feminist thinkers” previously mentioned. It would have been interesting to put the consideration of rape in these female-authored romances against, say, Kate Millett’s analysis of coitus and sexual violence in male-authored novels in the opening section of Sexual Politics . There are also a few essays that seem out of place in a collection almost exclusively focused on romance fiction , such as Rebecca Peabody’s “Kara Walker: American Romance in Black and White,” which considers Walker’s silhouette art installation, and Amelia Serafine’s “‘He Filled My Heart with Doubt’: The Southern Belle’s Love and Duty in the Civil War” which examines the diaries, journals, and letters of Southern women who lived during the Civil War. [End Page 3]

If there is a flaw in the collection, it is that America and American culture seem to be afterthoughts in at least a quarter of the essays. Instead, they present reflections that could just as easily be about romance narratives in any national context. Most curiously, some of the essays are explicitly about other nations’ publishing industries. Jayashree Kamblé’s “Branding a Genre: A Brief Transatlantic History of Romance Novel Cover Art” focuses on the merger of Mills & Boon (a British company) and Harlequin (a Canadian company). The essay is positioned as being about American romances because Harlequin “sold its reprints across the United States in increasing volume, and its influence on American romance fiction is immense, which even now leads to the impression that Harlequin is an American company” (251). I find this claim that Harlequin may as well be American to be strangely superficial, ignoring socio-political and ideological differences that exist between the United States and Canada when it comes to the subjects of romance and sexuality. In a similar vein to Kamblé’s essay, Jessica Taylor’s “Love the Market: Discourses of Passion and Professionalism in Romance Writing Communities” features a section titled “Romance Writing in Canada” where she draws on “a larger project on the romance writing and publishing community in a major Canadian city” (277). One wonders at the inclusion of such essays in a collection that aims to rectify the absence of “detailed coverage of the American tradition” (3). Thus, as a collection of essays on romance narratives and social politics in general, this collection is a most welcome addition. However, in terms of considering romance narratives in the national context of the Land of the Free, much more theoretical and critical work is still needed.

Works Cited

hooks, bell. “Love as the Practice of Freedom.” Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations . New York: Routledge, 1994. 289-98.

Regis, Pamela. A Natural History of the Romance Novel . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. [End Page 4]

Published in Book Reviews and Volume 7

This resource is suggested reading to accompany MLP’s Fall 2020 Anti-Racism Curriculum.

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"Love as the Practice of Freedom" - bell hooks

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Vincentians in Action Reflection Toolkit

“love as the practice of freedom” excerpts.

By bell hooks

In this society, there is no powerful discourse on love emerging either from politically progressive radicals or from the Left. The absence of a sustained focus on love in progressive circles arises from a collective failure to acknowledge the needs of the spirit and an overdetermined emphasis on material concerns. Without love, our efforts to liberate ourselves and our world community from oppression and exploitation are doomed. As long as we refuse to address fully the place of love in struggles for liberation we will not be able to create a culture of conversion where there is a mass turning away from an ethic of domination.

Without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspirations, we are often seduced, in one way or the other, into continued allegiance to systems of domination imperialism, sexism, racism, classism. It has always puzzled me that women and men who spend a lifetime working to resist and oppose one form of domination can be systematically supporting another. I have been puzzled by powerful visionary black male leaders who can speak and act passionately in resistance to racial domination and accept and embrace sexist domination of women, by feminist white women who work daily to eradicate sexism but who have major blind spots when it comes to acknowledging and resisting racism and white supremacist domination of the planet. Critically examining these blind spots, I conclude that many of us are motivated to move against domination solely when we feel our self-interest directly threatened. Often, then, the longing is not for a collective transformation of society, an end to politics of dominations, but rather simply for an end to what we feel is hurting us. This is why we desperately need an ethic of love to intervene in our self-centered longing for change. Fundamentally, if we are only committed to an improvement in that politic of domination that we feel leads directly to our individual exploitation or oppression, we not only remain attached to the status quo but act in complicity with it, nurturing and maintaining those very systems of domination. Until we are all able to accept the interlocking, interdependent nature of systems of domination and recognize specific ways each system is maintained, we will continue to act in ways that undermine our individual quest for freedom and collective liberation struggle.

The ability to acknowledge blind spots can emerge only as we expand our concern about politics of domination and our capacity to care about the oppression and exploitation of others. A love ethic makes this expansion possible. The civil rights movement transformed society in the United States because it was fundamentally rooted in a love ethic. No leader has emphasized this ethic more than Martin Luther King, Jr. He had the prophetic insight to recognize that a revolution built on any other foundation would fail. Again and again, King testified that he had “decided to love” because he believed deeply that if we are “seeking the highest good” we “find it through love” because this is “the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality.” And the point of being in touch with a transcendent reality is that we struggle for justice, all the while realizing that we are always more than our race, class, or sex. When I look back at the civil rights movement which was in many ways limited because it was a reformist effort, I see that it had the power to move masses of people to act in the interest of racial justice—and because it was profoundly rooted in a love ethic…

…A culture of domination is anti-love. It requires violence to sustain itself. To choose love is to go against the prevailing values of the culture. Many people feel unable to love either themselves or others because they do not know what love is. Contemporary songs like Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got To Do With It” advocate a system of exchange around desire, mirroring the economics of capitalism: the idea that love is important is mocked. In his essay “Love and Need: Is Love a Package or a Message?” Thomas Merton argues that we are taught within the framework of competitive consumer capitalism to see love as a business deal: “This concept of love assumes that the machinery of buying and selling of needs is what makes everything run. It regards life as a market and love as a variation on free enterprise.” Though many folks recognize and critique the commercialization of love, they see no alternative. Not knowing how to love or even what love is, many people feel emotionally lost; others search for definitions, for ways to sustain a love ethic in a culture that negates human value and valorizes materialism…

…Choosing love we also choose to live in community, and that means that we do not have to change by ourselves. We can count on critical affirmation and dialogue with comrades walking a similar path. African American theologian Howard Thurman believed that we best learn love as the practice of freedom in the context of community. Commenting on this aspect of his work in the essay “Spirituality out on The Deep,” Luther Smith reminds us that Thurman felt the United States was given to diverse groups of people by the universal life force as a location for the building of community. Paraphrasing Thurman, he writes: “Truth becomes true in community. The social order hungers for a center (i.e. spirit, soul) that gives it identity, power, and purpose. America, and all cultural entities, are in search of a soul.” Working within community, whether it be sharing a project with another person, or with a larger group, we are able to experience joy in struggle. That joy needs to be documented. For if we only focus on the pain, the difficulties which are surely real in any process of transformation, we only show a partial picture…

…The civil rights movement had the power to transform society because the individuals who struggle alone and in community for freedom and justice wanted these gifts to be for all, not just the suffering and the oppressed. Visionary black leaders such as Septima Clark, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Howard Thurman warned against isolationism. They encouraged black people to look beyond our own circumstances and assume responsibility for the planet. This call for communion with a world beyond the self, the tribe, the race, the nation, was a constant invitation for personal expansion and growth. When masses of black folks starting thinking solely in terms of “us and them,” internalizing the value system of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, blind spots developed, the capacity for empathy needed for the building of community was diminished. To heal our wounded body politic we must reaffirm our commitment to a vision of what King referred to in the essay “Facing the Challenge of a New Age” as a genuine commitment to “freedom and justice for all.” My heart is uplifted when I read King’s essay; I am reminded where true liberation leads us. It leads us beyond resistance to transformation. King tells us that “the end is reconciliation, the end is redemption, the end is the creation of the beloved community.” The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. That action is the testimony of love as the practice of freedom.

bell hooks was a social commentator, essayist, memoirist, poet and feminist theorist who spoke on contemporary issues of race, gender, and media representation in America.

Reflection Questions:

• What is a quote that you want to continue to reflect on after today?
• How have you seen a love ethic within your day-to-day life OR social change/liberation movements today? How have you seen an ethic of domination in your day to day OR social change/liberation movements today?
• Are we talking about love enough? Can we learn to practice loving if we don’t have the spaces to actually engage in conversations of what loving means/looks like? How can we engage conversations about loving more?

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1 hr 20 min

81. Love as the Practice of Freedom (discussion) - #ReadingRevolution - Left POCket Project Podcast LeftPOC

In this episode - a Reading Revolution installment - we discuss the essay "Love as the Practice of Freedom" by bell hooks and how it can apply to our contemporary leftist formations and debates on revolution. --- Readings & Resources bell hooks - "Love as the Practice of Freedom" (essay) https://uucsj.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/bell-hooks-Love-as-the-Practice-of-Freedom.pdf "Love as the Practice of Freedom" (audio) https://soundcloud.com/leftpoc/77-love-as-the-practice-of-freedom-readingrevolution-left-pocket-project-podcast Remembering bell hooks & Her Critique of "Imperialist White Supremacist Heteropatriarchy" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkJKJZU7xXU&t=532s bell hooks on Freire https://t.co/vIrwItLrO4 The Revolutionary Writing of bell hooks https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/the-revolutionary-writing-of-bell-hooks Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism https://www.routledge.com/Aint-I-a-Woman-Black-Women-and-Feminism/hooks/p/book/9781138821514 ---- Music: "My Life as a Video Game" by Michael Salamone --- Learn more about the Left POCket Project via: Twitter: twitter.com/LeftPOC Facebook: facebook.com/leftpoc Media Revolt: mediarevolt.org/leftpoc Reddit: reddit.com/user/leftpoc/ Subscribe: Soundcloud: soundcloud [dot] com/leftpoc Spreaker: spreaker.com/user/leftpoc Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/13trBKujjjBnmWHeDZcC5Z or search "LeftPOC" iTunes: itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/leftp…d1329313097?mt=2 or search "LeftPOC" in podcasts Youtube: www.youtube.com/channel/UCT60v3qYO7Bj0R1XbUZct5Q Support: patreon.com/leftpoc

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the practice of freedom: a tribute to bell hooks

Upon the one-year anniversary of her passing on December 15, 2021, we celebrate hooks’ tremendous contributions to domains of transformative pedagogy, intersectional feminisms, racial justice and the Black intellectual tradition. “the practice of freedom: a tribute to bell hooks” is a community poster project featuring striking quotations from a variety of hooks' many books and essays. Created by The Mind's Eye, the poster project aims to underscore the enduring power of hooks' words. 

Posters will be displayed in a variety of locations across MCLA's campus and in the windows of 49 Main St., North Adams, for the month of December 2022. This project was created by Dr. Victoria Papa, Assistant Professor of English (MCLA) and Director of The Mind's Eye, with student interns, Salimatu Bah and Dalena Soun. 

Bibliography

Quotations featured on the posters are from the following sources:

"There are times when I hunger for those days: the days when I thought of art only as the expressive creativity of a soul struggling to self-actualize. Art has no race or gender. Art, and most especially painting, was for me a realm where every imposed boundary could be transgressed."(p. xi, Art on My Mind: Visual Politics , The New Press, 1995)

“Communion with life begins with the earth…” (p.16 Where We Stand: Class Matters . Routledge, 2000)

"I celebrate teaching that enables transgressions—a movement against and beyond boundaries. It is that movement which makes education the practice of freedom." (p. 12, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994)

“The heart of justice is truth telling…  More than ever before we, as a society, need to renew a commitment to truth telling.” (p. 33, All About Love: New Visions. HarperCollins, 2001)

"Love is a combination of care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect and trust." (p. 131, Communion: The Female Search for Love . HarperCollins, 2002)

"Patriarchy has no gender.” (p. 170, Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom. Taylor and Francis, 2009)

"The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy."(p. 12 Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994)

"Feminism is neither a lifestyle nor a ready-made identity or role one can step into […] it is necessarily a struggle to eradicate the ideology of domination that permeates Western culture [...]" (p. 24 & 26, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center . South End Press, 1984) 

Love and Freedom

Part 1 of 2, go here for Part 2.

|Photo by LadyDragonflyCC|http://www.flickr.com/photos/19646481@N06/4332176853/|

Love as the practice of freedom has been on my mind these days.  My good friend Cyndi Suarez, who is the co-director of Northeast Action , recently shared a bell hooks essay by the same title – I appreciated Cyndi’s e-mail:

“I was thinking today on just how much social change movements reflect the dominant culture.  I just finished rereading an old-time favorite essay by bell hooks and had to share it with you. I feel it is as pertinent now as when I first read it 15 years ago.  I wonder what would change if at least some of us focused on building love rather power.”

In her essay, hooks points out that:

“Often [people] are too trapped by paralyzing despair to be able to engage effectively in any movement for social change.  However, if the leaders of such movements refuse to address the anguish and pain of their lives, they will never be motivated to consider personal and political recovery.  Any political movement that can effectively address these needs of the spirit in the context of liberation struggle will succeed .”

But hooks also points out that:  “In [many] progressive circles, to speak of love is to guarantee that one will be dismissed or considered naïve”.

Judging from any quick glance a bookstore’s top sellers, and looking at the pop-Guru status of people like Oprah Winfrey and Deepak Chopra, it is clear to us that people are looking for something – happiness, meaning – a way out of fear.  Focusing on questions of power keeps us in a relatively measurable world, it allows us to gauge wins and losses, it helps us to understand struggles for control and domination.  But entering the question of love takes us into spaces that are immeasurable and make a direct demand on our own personal transformation.

We do not want to ignore the question of power, bell hooks certainly doesn’t.  I recently wrote a series of blog posts that included the lens of power, equity and inclusion as one of three keys for collaboration.  However, the same series of posts also included the lens of love as another one of these keys.  I am interested in the type of social change that will succeed, that will help to redefine how we are with one another in ways that reverberate through society at-large.  I am interested in freedom, and I’m looking for ways to place love at the center of this quest.

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10 Comments

Gibran, I thought of you when I read this quote in Jon Haidt’s book The Happiness Hypothesis (great read if you have not already looked at it). In his chapter on “Love and Attachments” he writes, “An ideology of extreme personal freedom can be dangerous because it encourages people to leave homes, jobs, cities, and marriages (relationships) in search of personal and professional fulfillment, thereby breaking the relationships that were probably their best hope for such fulfillment.” Seems to me that when we lead with freedom (which many of us do in this country), we lose sight of the bigger goals (connection, meaning). Love and attachment are psychologically proven to be the gateways to greater fulfillment, and to a kind of psychic freedom we cannot understand until we are more deeply connected.

Curtis – I appreciate this continuous push back on my “freedom” frame (see comments to blog post “Don’t get yourself isolated”). I intend to lead with love, but even in doing so it is for the purpose of freedom – the lived experience of liberation, a rupture with the conditions of captivity.

I understand the potential misconceptions of the word, but the fact that some might hear freedom and enter the mindset of an adolescent who seeks to please themselves in a life free of responsibility is not itself enough to keep me from leading with freedom. When you come from the experience of colonization, and stand in solidarity with those who have known slavery and other forms of servitude, the freedom to be an agent in one’s own destiny takes on a certain level of primacy. Liberation is both possible and attainable, it might first come in glimpses, then as specific experiences, later on as states of being and finally a more steadily held stage of development.

I appreciate the tension reflected above between freedom and community. It is easier to recognize the impact of the freedom of other’s than the impact of our own acts of freedom on others. I feel we don’t have words for engaging each other around this, lest we end up in a battle of personal perspective. This is where we are stuck.

Thanks for this reflection folks. I agree that it’s hard to find the words that will allow us to avoid a polarizing discourse. I often wonder about freedom-as an end, as a means, and often muse about “freedom from” vs. “freedom to.” I commented on Marianne’s blog the other day about freedom being about the ability to choose the constraints, values, obligations within which one will live, vs. thinking of freedom as the asbence of constraints. I want to say yes to it all–freedom from oppression and want, freedom to determine one’s own desitiny, freedom to create meaningful relationships and community, freedom of conscience, speech and assembly, freedom to pursue one’s highest purpose…. and, I also want to make a case for balancing all of this with the freedoms of others.

Thanks so much for the engagement. I’m intrigued by the nature of your comments. This post is part 1, the next post will be on Love and Freedom in Community. But I want to be explicit about the kind of freedom I’m talking about. I’m talking about Mandela’s freedom, not just the freedom from Apartheid but the freedom that was his through 30 years in prison. Clearly this is not the freedom to do as you please, it is the sort of freedom no one can take from you, this is the freedom that makes any form of political freedom possible at all, and it is a freedom that I believe we can find within the essence of radical love.

Really appreciate the conversation taking place here as a practice for getting unstuck! And I hear you Gibran. I don’t doubt your intentions, I am mainly recognizing how we abuse freedom in this country as a means of gaining power of others and in the long run shackling ourselves to misery. Looking forward to Part 2!

I with you about the essence of freedom being about not being crushed or molded into submission, regardless of the external pressures and dehumanizing forces all around.

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The Palgrave Handbook of Educational Thinkers pp 1–12 Cite as

bell hooks: Exploring Intersectionality, Black Feminist Thinking & Radical Love

• Courtney BrieAnn Morris-Coker 2  
• Living reference work entry
• First Online: 31 March 2023

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bell hooks contributed greatly to literature and scholarship related to feminism. bell hooks’ scholarship supports the critical thinking centered in the intersectionality of race, gender, and class. Through hooks’ literary contribution, readers have been able to view social intersectionality through the lens of community, Black womanhood, activism, and feminism. bell hooks’ writings call for a feministic practice that centers the experiences of Black women and their experiences. The challenge proposed by bell hooks asked readers to consider how they make sense of their identities when thinking of their experiences of race in addition to gender and class.

This article examines bell hooks’ early life motivations and influences that fueled her critical perspectives of activism, feminist, and many other topics centered in socioeconomic class, intersectionality, and the experiences in which Black women interact with society. This article acknowledges key contributions, developing and new insights as well as rising scholars and how they find connection to bell hooks’ work through their individual practice.

• Intersectionality
• Hip-hop feminism
• Black womanhood

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Biana, H. T. (2020). Extending bell hooks’ feminist theory. Journal of International Women’s Studies, 21 (1), 13–29.

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Cottom, T. M. M. (2019). Thick and other essays . The New Press.

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hooks, b. (1992). The oppositional gaze: Black female spectators in Black American Cinema . Routledge.

hooks, b. (1993). Sisters of the yam: Black women and self-recovery . South End Press.

hooks, b. (1994a). Teaching to transgress . Routledge.

hooks, b. (1994b). Yearning: Race, gender, and cultural politics . Routledge.

hooks, b. (1996). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Journal of Leisure Research, 28 (4), 316.

hooks, b. (1999). All about love: New visions . William Morrow.

hooks, b. (2000). Where we stand: Class matters . Psychology Press.

hooks, b. (2006). Killing rage: Ending racism . Henry Holt and Company.

Kendall, M. (2020). Hood feminism: Notes from the women that a movement forgot . Viking.

Levantovskaya, M. (2019, January 30). Why me?: On Tressie McMillan Cottom’s “Thick and other essays” . Los Angeles review of books. Retrieved January 20, 2022, from https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/why-me-on-tressie-mcmillan-cottoms-thick-and-other-essays/

Love, B. (2012). Hip hop’s li’l sistas speak: Negotiating hip hop identities and politics in the New South . Peter Lang.

Love, B. (2020). We want to do more than survive: Abolitionist teaching and the pursuit of educational freedom . Beacon.

Morgan, J. (1999). When chickenheads come home to roost: A hip-hop feminist breaks it down . Simon & Schuster Paperbacks.

Morgan, J. (2018). She begat this . Atria Books.

Peoples, W. A. (2008). “Under construction”: Identifying foundations of hip-hop feminism and exploring bridges between black second-wave and hip-hop feminisms. Meridians, 8 (1), 19–52.

Taylor, U. Y. (2014). Making waves. The Black Scholar, 44 (3), 32–47.

Townes, S. A. (2000). Black woman warrior: A rhetorical biography of bell hooks . Ohio University.

Yancy, G., Crowley, K., James, J., Love, B. L., Powell, John A., Robbins, S. T., & Steinem, G. (2022). A tribute to bell hooks . Retrieved from https://dev.lareviewofbooks.org/article/a-tribute-to-bell-hooks/

Further Reading

Cottom, T. M. (2019). Thick and other essays . The New Press.

Dillard, C. B. (2021). The spirit of our work: Black women teachers (re)member . Beacon Press.

hooks, b. (2000). All about love: New visions . Harper Collins Publishers.

Kendall, M. (2020). Hood feminism: Notes from the women that a movement forget . Penguin Books.

Love, B. (2020). We want to do more than survive: Abolitionist teaching and the pursuit of educational freedom . Beacon Press.

Morrison, T. (2019). The source of self-regard: Selected essays, speeches, and meditations . Alfred A. Knopf.

hooks, h. (1989). From black is a woman’s color. Callaloo, 39 , 382–388.

hooks, h. (2000). Learning in the shadow of race and class. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 47 (12), B14–16.

hooks, h. (2015). Writing without labels. Appalachian Heritage, 43 (4), 8–21.

Brosi, G., & hooks, b. (2012). The beloved community: A conversation between bell hooks and George Brosi. Appalachian Hertiage, 40 (4), 76–86.

Specia, A., & Osman, A. A.(2015). Education as a practice of freedom: Reflections on bell hooks. Journal of Education and Practice, 6 (17), 195–199.

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Morris-Coker, C.B. (2023). bell hooks: Exploring Intersectionality, Black Feminist Thinking & Radical Love. In: Geier, B.A. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Educational Thinkers . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81037-5_155-1

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“Love as the Practice of Freedom ” bell hooks

Social commentator, essayist, memoirist, and poet bell hooks (née Gloria Jean Watkins) is a feminist theorist who speaks on contemporary issues of race, gender , and media representation in America. Her many books include Ain't I a Woman (1981), Talking Back (1989), Killing Rage: Ending Racism (1995), Outlaw Culture (1994), and Remembered Rapture (1999). In Black Looks (1994), she writes, "It struck me that for black people, the pain of learning that we cannot control our images, how we see ourselves (if our vision is not decolonized), or how we are seen is so intense that it rends us. It rips and tears at the seams of our efforts to construct self and identify." In Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (1994), hooks advocates a "progressive cultural revolution" by means of repudiating all forms of domination in a "holistic manner." In order to decolonize our minds, suggests hooks, we must begin to "surrender participation in whatever sphere of coercive hierarchical domination we enjoy individual and group privilege." In the essay that follows from that book, hooks proposes an "ethic of love" as the means by which we might be guided to turn away from an ethic of domination.

In this society , there is no powerful discourse on love emerging either from politically progressive radicals or from the Left. The absence of a sustained focus on love in progressive circles arises from a collective failure to acknowledge the needs of the spirit and an overdetermined emphasis on material concerns. Without love, our efforts to liberate ourselves and our world community from oppression and exploitation are doomed. As long as we refuse to address fully the place of love in struggles for liberation we will not be able to create a culture of conversion where there is a mass turning away from an ethic of domination. Without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspirations, we are often seduced, in one way or the other, into continued allegiance to systems of domination—imperialism, sexism , racism, classism. It has always puzzled me that women and men who spend a lifetime working to resist and oppose one form of domination can be systematically supporting another. I have been puzzled by powerful visionary black male leaders who can speak and act passionately in resistance to racial domination and accept and embrace sexist domination of women, by feminist white women who work daily to eradicate sexism but who have major blind spots when it comes to acknowledging and resisting racism and white supremacist domination of the planet. Critically examining these blind spots, I conclude that many of us are motivated to move against domination solely when we feel our self-interest directly threatened. Often, then, the longing is not for a collective transformation of society, an end to politics of dominations, but rather simply for an end to what we feel is hurting us. This is why we desperately need an ethic of love to intervene in our self- centered longing for change. Fundamentally, if we are only committed to an improvement in that politic of domination that we feel leads directly to our individual exploitation or oppression, we not only remain attached to the status quo but act in complicity with it, nurturing and maintaining those very systems of domination. Until we are all able to accept the interlocking, interdependent nature of systems of domination and recognize specific ways each system is maintained, we will continue to act in ways that undermine our individual quest for freedom and collective liberation struggle. The ability to acknowledge blind spots can emerge only as we expand our concern about politics of domination and our capacity to care about the oppression and exploitation of others. A love ethic makes this expansion possible. The civil rights movement transformed society in the United States because it was fundamentally rooted in a love ethic. No leader has emphasized this ethic more than Martin Luther King, jr. He had the prophetic insight to recognize that a revolution built on any other foundation would fail. Again and again, King testified that he had "decided to love" because he believed deeply that if we are "seeking the highest good " we "find it through love" because this is "the key that unlocks the door to the meaning of ultimate reality ." And the point of being in touch with a transcendent reality is that we struggle for justice , all the while realizing that we are always more than our race, class, or sex. When I look back at the civil rights movement which was in many ways limited because it was a reformist effort, I see that it had the power to move masses of people to act in the interest of racial justice—and because it was profoundly rooted in a love ethic. The sixties Black Power movement shifted away from that love ethic. The emphasis was now more on power. And it is not surprising that the sexism that had always undermined the black liberation struggle intensified, that a misogynist approach to women became central as the equation of freedom with patriarchal manhood became a norm among black political leaders, almost all of whom were male. Indeed, the new militancy of masculinist black power equated love with weakness, announcing that the quintessential expression of freedom would be the willingness to coerce, do violence, terrorize, indeed utilize the weapons of domination. This was the crudest embodiment of Malcolm X 's bold credo "by any means necessary." On the positive side, Black Power movement shifted the focus of black liberation struggle from reform to revolution. This was an important political development, bringing with it a stronger anti-imperialist, global perspective. However, masculinist sexist biases in leadership led to the suppression of the love ethic. Hence progress was made even as something valuable was lost. While King had focused on loving our enemies, Malcolm called us back to ourselves, acknowledging that taking care of blackness was our central responsibility. Even though King talked about the importance of black self-love, he talked more about loving our enemies. Ultimately, neither he nor Malcolm lived long enough to fully integrate the love ethic into a vision of political decolonization that would provide a blueprint for the eradication of black self-hatred. Black folks entering the realm of racially integrated, American life because of the success of civil rights and black power movement suddenly found we were grappling with an intensification of internalized racism. The deaths of these important leaders (as well as liberal white leaders who were major allies in the struggle for racial equality) ushered in tremendous feelings of hopelessness, powerlessness, and despair. Wounded in that space where we would know love, black people collectively experienced intense pain and anguish about our future. The absence of public spaces where that pain could be articulated, expressed, shared meant that it was held in—festering, suppressing the possibility that this collective grief would be reconciled in community even as ways to move beyond it and continue resistance struggle would be envisioned. Feeling as though "the world had really come to an end," in the sense that a hope had died that racial justice would become the norm, a life-threatening despair took hold in black life. We will never know to what extent the black masculinist focus on hardness and toughness served as a barrier preventing sustained public acknowledgment of the enormous grief and pain in black life. In World as Lover; World as Self, Joanna Macy emphasizes in her chapter on "Despair Work" that

the refusal to feel takes a heavy toll. Not only is there an impoverishment of our emotional and sensory life . . . but this psychic numbing also impedes our capacity to process and respond to information . The energy expended in pushing down despair is diverted from more creative uses, depleting the resilience and imagination needed for fresh visions and strategies.

If black folks are to move forward in our struggle for liberation, we must confront the legacy of this unreconciled grief, for it has been the breeding ground for profound nihilistic despair. We must collectively return to a radical political vision of social change rooted in a love ethic and seek once again to convert masses of people, black and nonblack. A culture of domination is anti-love. It requires violence to sustain itself. To choose love is to go against the prevailing values of the culture. Many people feel unable to love either themselves or others because they do not know what love is. Contemporary songs like Tina Turner's "What's Love Got To Do With It" advocate a system of exchange around desire, mirroring the economics of capitalism : the idea that love is important is mocked. In his essay "Love and Need: Is Love a Package or a Message?" Thomas Merton argues that we are taught within the framework of competitive consumer capitalism to see love as a business deal: "This concept of love assumes that the machinery of buying and selling of needs is what makes everything run. It regards life as a market and love as a variation on free enterprise." Though many folks recognize and critique the commercialization of love, they see no alternative. Not knowing how to love or even what love is, many people feel emotionally lost; others search for definitions, for ways to sustain a love ethic in a culture that negates human value and valorizes materialism. The sales of books focusing on recovery, books that seek to teach folks ways to improve self-esteem, self-love, and our ability to be intimate in relationships, affirm that there is public awareness of a lack in most people's lives. M. Scott Peck's self-help book The Road Less Traveled is enormously popular because it addresses that lack. Peck offers a working definition for love that is useful for those of us who would like to make a love ethic the core of all human interaction. He defines love as "the will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth." Commenting on prevailing cultural attitudes about love, Peck writes:

Everyone in our culture desires to some extent to be loving, yet many are in fact not loving. I therefore conclude that the desire to love is not itself love. Love is as love does. Love is an act of will-namely both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.

His words echo Martin Luther King's declaration, "I have decided to love," which also emphasizes choice. King believed that love is "ultimately the only answer" to the problems facing this nation and the entire planet. I share that belief and the conviction that it is in choosing love, and beginning with love as the ethical foundation for politics, that we are best positioned to transform society in ways that enhance the collective good. It is truly amazing that King had the courage to speak as much as he did about the transformative power of love in a culture where such talk is often seen as merely sentimental. In progressive political circles, to speak of love is to guarantee that one will be dismissed or considered naive. But outside those circles there are many people who openly acknowledge that they are consumed by feelings of self-hatred, who feel worthless, who want a way out. Often they are too trapped by paralyzing despair to be able to engage effectively in any movement for social change. However, if the leaders of such movements refuse to address the anguish and pain of their lives, they will never be motivated to consider personal and political recovery. Any political movement that can effectively address these needs of the spirit in the context of liberation struggle will succeed. In the past, most folks both learned about and tended the needs of the spirit in the context of religious experience. The institutionalization and commercialization of the church has undermined the power of religious community to transform souls, to intervene politically. Commenting on the collective sense of spiritual loss in modern society, Cornel West asserts:

There is a pervasive impoverishment of the spirit in American society, and especially among Black people. Historically, there have been cultural forces and traditions, like the church, that held cold-heartedness and mean-spiritedness at bay. However, today's impoverishment of the spirit means that this coldness and meanness is becoming more and more pervasive. The church kept these forces at bay by promoting a sense of respect for others, a sense of solidarity, a sense of meaning and value which would usher in the strength to battle against evil .

Life-sustaining political communities can provide a similar space for the renewal of the spirit. That can happen only if we address the needs of the spirit in progressive political theory and practice.

Often when Cornel West and I speak with large groups of black folks about the impoverishment of spirit in black life, the lovelessness, sharing that we can collectively recover ourselves in love, the response is overwhelming. Folks want to know how to begin the practice of loving. For me that is where education for critical consciousness has to enter. When I look at my life, searching it for a blueprint that aided me in the process of decolonization, of personal and political self-recovery, I know that it was learning the truth about how systems of domination operate that helped, learning to look both inward and outward with a critical eye. Awareness is central to the process of love as the practice of freedom. Whenever those of us who are members of exploited and oppressed groups dare to critically interrogate our locations, the identities and allegiances that inform how we live our lives, we begin the process of decolonization. If we discover in ourselves self-hatred, low self-esteem, or internalized white supremacist thinking and we face it, we can begin to heal. Acknowledging the truth of our reality, both individual and collective, is a necessary stage for personal and political growth. This is usually the most painful stage in the process of learning to love—the one many of us seek to avoid. Again, once we choose love, we instinctively possess the inner resources to confront that pain. Moving through the pain to the other side we find the joy, the freedom of spirit that a love ethic brings. Choosing love we also choose to live in community, and that means that we do not have to change by ourselves. We can count on critical affirmation and dialogue with comrades walking a similar path. African American theologian Howard Thurman believed that we best learn love as the practice of freedom in the context of community. Commenting on this aspect of his work in the essay "Spirituality out on The Deep," Luther Smith reminds us that Thurman felt the United States was given to diverse groups of people by the universal life force as a location for the building of community. Paraphrasing Thurman, he writes: "Truth becomes true in community. The social order hungers for a center (i.e. spirit, soul) that gives it identity, power, and purpose. America, and all cultural entities, are in search of a soul." Working within community, whether it be sharing a project with another person , or with a larger group, we are able to experience joy in struggle. That joy needs to be documented. For if we only focus on the pain, the difficulties which are surely real in any process of transformation, we only show a partial picture. A love ethic emphasizes the importance of service to others. Within the value system of the United States any task or job that is related to "service" is devalued. Service strengthens our capacity to know compassion and deepens our insight. To serve another I cannot see them as an object, I must see their subjecthood. Sharing the teaching of Shambala warriors, Buddhist Joanna Macy writes that we need weapons of compassion and insight.

You have to have compassion because it gives you the juice, the power, the passion to move. When you open to the pain of the world you move, you act. But that weapon is not enough. It can burn you out, so you need the other—you need insight into the radical interdependence of all phenomena. With that wisdom you know that it is not a battle between good guys and bad guys, but that the line between good and evil runs through the landscape of every human heart. With insight into our profound interrelatedness, you know that actions undertaken with pure intent have repercussions throughout the web of life, beyond what you can measure or discern.

Macy shares that compassion and insight can "sustain us as agents of wholesome change" for they are "gifts for us to claim now in the healing of our world." In part, we learn to love by giving service. This is again a dimension of what Peck means when he speaks of extending ourselves for another. The civil rights movement had the power to transform society because the individuals who struggle alone and in community for freedom and justice wanted these gifts to be for all, not just the suffering and the oppressed. Visionary black leaders such as Septima Clark, Fannie Lou Hamer, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Howard Thurman warned against isolationism. They encouraged black people to look beyond our own circumstances and assume responsibility for the planet. This call for communion with a world beyond the self, the tribe, the race, the nation, was a constant invitation for personal expansion and growth. When masses of black folks starting thinking solely in terms of "us and them," internalizing the value system of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy , blind spots developed, the capacity for empathy needed for the building of community was diminished. To heal our wounded body politic we must reaffirm our commitment to a vision of what King referred to in the essay "Facing the Challenge of a New Age" as a genuine commitment to "freedom and justice for all." My heart is uplifted when I read King's essay; I am reminded where true liberation leads us. It leads us beyond resistance to transformation. King tells us that "the end is reconciliation, the end is redemption, the end is the creation of the beloved community." The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. That action is the testimony of love as the practice of freedom.

Working with the Text

1. Why does progressive politics "desperately need an ethic of love," according to bell hooks? How does she explain its disappearance from contemporary political discourse? Why is it particularly important in the struggle for racial justice?

2. What is "love"? Where does the essay find a working definition of this famously elusive term? What sort of politics derives ideas from the literature of self-help? In other words, does the essay make claims—overt or implied—about where political theory should look for inspiration? What other nonpolitical disciplines furnish ideas to "Love as the Practice of Freedom"?

3. Why does the essay stress love as a "practice"? Consult a good dictionary (the Oxford English Dictionary, if you can) to see which meanings of the word "practice" may be relevant; then consider the relationships among the various definitions. According to bell hooks, what does the practice of love require people to do? And what does it do for them, both collectively and individually?

4. The essay features a number of exemplary characters, from Martin Luther King, who illustrates the vast political efficacy of love, to Tina Turner, whose 1984 hit "What's Love Got To Do With It" expresses a contrasting cynicism. Why do you suppose the author introduces these figures? What do they have in common, and where do they differ? Given the essay's topic and approach, did any of them surprise you?

5. Identify another ideal not normally associated with politics—possibly one from a completely different value system. You may wish to brainstorm with classmates or look up lists of unusual virtues , such as those embraced by crusaders or geisha. In a timed writing exercise (20 to 30 minutes), consider the possible benefits of your irregular ideal to the specific branch of politics that you know best. The branch need not be national; it can be extremely local-the politics of your college sorority, for example. Write for the allotted time without stopping to reflect or reread.