AIR#16. The legacy of bell hooks

To close the celebration of the Black History Month, and advancing that March as the Women's History Month is coming, Archives In Rainbow takes a look at the life, work and legacy of bell hooks, one of the most important voices in the study of pedagogy, race, feminism and class and decolonial srtuggles over the past fifty years.

bell hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, into a working-class family. After studying in Stanford and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she earned her doctorate in English from the Universtiy of California, Santa Cruz, with a dissertation on the work of Toni Morrison in 1983, ten years before Morrison was awarded with the Nobel Prize in Literature. The young Gloria first used her pen name, bell hooks, in 1978 when she published a short collection of poems titled And There We Wept. The pen name was a tribute to her grand-mother, Bell Hooks, but with the name in lowercase to focus attention not on herself but on her work, as many women inside the second-wave feminism in the 1960s and 70s did.

During her nearly fifty-year career, bell hooks became one of the most recognized and influential authors in critical studies. She created a coherent and rich body of work throughout her academic discourse and publications centering the margins as the focus of discussion. She also succeeded in communicating her ideas to the public in an accessible and understandable way.

hooks defined herself as queer-pas-gay as follows:

As the essence of queer, I think on Tim Dean's work on being queer, and queer not as being about who you are having sex with -that can be a dimension of it-, but queer as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it, and it has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live [...].

The legacy of bell hooks remains strong five years after she passed away. This has been possible thanks to initiatives as the bell hooks Digital Archive (bhDA). hooks legated her papers to Berea College in Kentucky, where she ended her academic career. The same hooks created the bell hooks Institute, now bell hooks center (bhc), in 2015. The inaugural event featured trans actress and activist Laverne Cox, credited with adding "cis" and "heteronormative" to hooks' call to dismantle "imperialist-white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy". Now the bhc defines itself as a welcoming space where underrepresented students can come to be as they are, outside of the social scripts that circumscribe their livings.

The bhDA project allows people to access many of digitized hook's papers, specially images, as well as the archival inventories and finding aid. You can also know more on bell hook's life and work at her Wikipedia's entry and at the National Museum of African American History & Culture's website.