How bell hooks Taught us to Talk Back: A Love Letter

Abstract

Dearest Prof. hooks, Once upon a time, our stories were hushed and hidden, just whispers in the dark. Too soft to be heroic, too dusky to be pure, too queer and too unnerving, too shabby and too poor. You told our stories in the light – the stories of women complicating conceptions of Blackness, Black folk complicating conceptions of the feminine, gay folk, poor folk, rural folk, complication. Interwoven in the great American tale, you told a story of complexity, of multitudinous hurt, and of multiple resiliencies, stories of dominance, subjugation, rebellion, and resistance. You told us there were things we had to say. You taught us to Talk Back. You helped us transcend the White middle-class feminist gaze and demanded introduction of the Black working-class woman. From margin to center, you said, and the light bulb flickered in our minds. Finally, acknowledgement of Black feminine devaluation put to page; our perspectives foregrounded. Drawing the historical line from the transatlantic slave trade to present day, your dedication to exploring the ways in which our various social locations impact our everyday experience was, and has been, imperative to our liberation. You inspired Black women to feel comfortable reclaiming the term “feminist” after long being intentionally excluded in the movement. Your boldness stimulated so many of us to find comfort, home, and community within your writing, and, importantly, you taught us to Talk Back. Does Lauren come to mind when someone says “scholar”? I was once an undergraduate college dropout, subsisting as a bartender for the greater part of my twenties. I have been arrested, twice. I am Black. I am Queer. I am a Woman. These experiences have profoundly shaped the evolution of my identity as a scholar. I complicate. In 2016, when I entered my criminal justice master’s program, situated in a rural Ohio farm town, I soon realized that I was not like my peers or my professors—not like the cisgender heterosexual White men majority. I knew at this point that I moved through the world and academia in a way that was dissimilar to that of my colleagues. The feeling of being siloed within my institution stimulated my motivation to find testimony of lived experience that matched my own. It was a feminist theory class outside of my department that exposed me to Black feminist thought, with you among the brilliant scholars I read. Ain’t I a woman? (1981) was my first introduction to you. Article