Mourning someone you’ve never met, but whom you’ve read for years and years, is surprising and strange and sad all at once.
In this culture, we’re hardly prepared to navigate grief and the loss of anyone, let alone those we hold most dear.
But no one ever even told me what it’s like when one of your teachers dies.
There are the people who influence you. And then there are those who shape, hold, and make you.
I never met bell hooks, but when I first encountered her books she was alive. With some of my other favorite writers, that’s not always the case — I’ve moved through the world accompanied by plenty of intellectual and spiritual heroes and role models by virtue of their presence being only on pages. Nietzsche, for example, has long felt like a dear but long-distance friend, from 100 years away.
Writing is writing, right? Yes, and no. At least, not in terms of how we can relate.
There’s a different sense of connectedness when you know the person who wrote the words that fill you still has their breath. It’s not like reading a stranger’s lost diaries or archived memories of someone passed, a retrospective into the life and mind of those who once lived.
It’s like getting a check in from a close friend, the one who always seems to know the exact right thing to say.
They have the wisdom of elders. It’s clear they’ve already gone through and processed whatever currently confounds you.
They make you feel more human, but they’ll never know how well known they make you feel by them.
There’s a latent sense of comfort, too, in knowing they’re somewhere, still around. You can assume they are reading, writing, and reacting to the same world as you, and that provides just the slightest bit of reassurance. Deep down, you know your privilege is that they will be able to look ahead and still teach you more lessons.
As you continue learning how to practice identifying the interlocking mechanisms of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, they give you the language to develop that understanding.
Meanwhile, they are powerfully creating better alternatives simply by choosing how they live each day, doing what’s good, and making meaning through their very way of being.
They know more than we do, because they seem to have a fuller sense about what liberation means, like how it’s possible to break down these systems, especially as they exist within us.
They show us the way.
As with the impact of their talents and gifts, when they’re suddenly gone, the world shifts. A void opens up and their words that have been labored onto pages in tangible ways are imbued with a more profound sense of sanctuary.
It’s suddenly on us to assume responsibility and take everything we’ve been learning very seriously. We have to be the ones who continue the movement and make it real.
Their insights will preserve their place among our most beloved teachers. But we realize we have to be the ones that keep going.
bell hooks is the first person I never took a class from who taught me about teaching. Her writing spoke to the nerd in me who always loved to learn and, as a young child, felt great affection towards, and love and support from, my teachers.
The first book of hers I read was Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. I cannot overstate how that book planted seeds in me that would eventually shape my attitudes about theory and practice and, thus, shape my entire career in philosophy and beyond. In the summer of 2007, I read the chapter, “Theory as Liberatory Practice,” which starts:
“I came to theory because I was hurting — the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend — to grasp what what happing around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.”
This is making sense of the world and our experiences. This is what I mean when I say, “thinking in transformative ways.”
hooks goes on to say, “Living in childhood without a sense of home, I found a place of sanctuary. I found a place where I could imagine possible futures, a place where life could be lived differently. This “lived” experience of critical thinking, of reflection and analysis, [became] a place where I worked at explaining the hurt and making it go away. Fundamentally, I learned from this experience that theory could be a healing place.”
This is the basis for my conception of positive philosophy.
In the very next paragraph, hooks writes, “When our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice. Indeed, what such experience makes more evident is the bond between the two — that ultimately reciprocal process wherein one enables the other.”
This is the foundation for my philifesophy.
And in the paragraph right after that, she states, “Theory is not inherently healing, liberatory, or revolutionary. It fulfills this function only when we ask that it do so and direct our theorizing toward this end.”
This is why I am a feminist philosopher and I do feminist theory.
All of that from just a series of paragraphs — imagine reading several of her books in entirety! Talk about a life changing magnitude of impact.
Perhaps it makes sense for echoes of those who introduce us to the rest of our lives to continue being heavy influencers in everything we do. As I read more of her work over the years, hooks became a key figure in my dissertation regarding how oppression affects our physiological health, and she helped me understand critical dynamics among women that informed my project of feminist friendship. And when I was finally introduced to her book, All About Love, I felt like, suddenly, I could align all of my efforts in a way that made so much sense.
Importantly, I read Teaching to Transgress during the summer of 2007 in preparation for my experience at PIKSI (Philosophy in an Inclusive Key Summer Institute) at Penn State, at the very same time when I met and first read work from people like Shannon Sullivan, Charles Mills, Ladelle McWhorter, and Linda Alcoff.
Although I never met hooks in person, she was such a powerful figure to encounter at the start of my journey in philosophy because she provided language that articulated how I could relate to the work of others who would quickly come to feel like my personal teachers, advisors, guides, role models, and friends. She basically said, “Yes, this is not only appropriate — it is a better way to engage with any form of theory.”
The intentionality hooks articulates that exists behind all kinds of good theory is also very likely why I resonate so deeply with thinkers and writers like María Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman. Because I was geared to seek out and stay with theory that felt palpable and healing, I ecstatically embraced every work of Audre Lorde and Gloria Anzaldúa that echoed so loudly. And this helped me identify with Simone de Beauvoir’s Ethics of Ambiguity and quickly adopt an existentialist ethic of freedom, to direct the movement of our transcendence towards opening up more freedom for others.
This is why I understand everything I do in the name of intimacy and relationships to be a project of queerness.
Eventually, as bell hooks would help me see, it became clear that queerness and exercising our freedom for the sake of more freedom and an ethic of love are all basically the same thing.
There are several more passages in the chapter, “Theory as Liberatory Practice,” that carry deep significance for me. The more I revisit this chapter, the more evident it becomes that this piece, in particular, set the stage for my commitments to publicly engaged philosophy, as well as my willingness to remain critical of the academy for its elitism while always defending the political importance of working from a strong theoretical foundation.
As a writer, hooks noted that “any theory that cannot be shared in everyday conversation cannot be used to educate the public” and “that we needed new theories rooted in an attempt to understand both the nature of our contemporary predicament and the means by which we might collectively engage in resistance that would transform our current reality.” This is so important in a culture that seeks to devalue intellectual projects with “contempt and disregard for theory” that “undermines collective struggle to resist oppression and exploitation.”
And yet, hooks also acknowledges how work that unites theory and practice by reflecting on personal experiences is often not valued by academic standards. It is deemed not scholarly enough. Indeed, it is considered not theoretical.
Back in 2007, I probably should have registered these pages for their predictive insight, foretelling challenges I would navigate in graduate school and then walking a career path that has never been fully integrated into any space. As a feminist philosopher, both in and of — and most recently, now outside — the academy, I find solace in her clarity:
“Personal testimony, personal experience, is such fertile ground for the production of liberatory feminist theory because it usually forms the base of our theory making. While we work to resolve those issues that are most pressing in daily life,…we engage in a critical process of theorizing that enables and empowers. I continue to be amazed that there is so much feminist writing produced and yet so little feminist theory that strives to speak to women, men and children about ways we might transform our lives via a conversion to feminist practice. Where can we find a body of feminist theory that is directed toward helping individuals integrate feminist thinking and practice into daily life?”
When people wonder what I’m doing these days, I recognize that I’m still doing all the same things I’ve been doing, because this is what bell hooks taught me from the very beginning. It’s with a lifetime of gratitude for her work that I’ll continue living and learning.
There is hardly a more appropriate way to express the depth of gratitude and respect I have for bell hooks and all she gave us through her writing and her life’s work than to end with a note about love.
As much as she shaped my beginnings in philosophy, the character of my reflections over the past few years have been most dramatically transformed after I read All About Love in 2018.
Although that feels like such a long time to live before learning foundational lessons about love, because of this book, who I am always becoming is, without a doubt, very different from who I could have been.
My understanding of, and relationship to, love is the ultimate project of embodying an everyday commitment to liberation.
bell hooks taught me what I know about love, and with that, I’ve been able to develop my own practices and beliefs.
I understand love as deeply as I do because bell hooks gave me a definition of love that made sense and was concrete.
I now know love to be demonstrated as the will to extend oneself for one’s own or another’s healing, growth, transformation, and liberation.
I now know the will to love is the will to learn and the will to change, which compels me to expand and experiment in my loving practices.
In this way, I now know love to be the ultimate practice of freedom.
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