Tag Archives: gender

RIP bell hooks (1952 – 2021)

bell hooks was an American author and social activist, working in the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender.

bell hooks interviewed by Charlie Rose in 1995

She is perhaps best known for Ain’t I a Woman?(1981).

I first came into contact with her work by way of Angry Women (1991), a book in the RE/Search series.

She also wrote on Paris Is Burning (1990) in a vocabulary typical of her corpus:

“Within white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy the experience of men dressing as women, appearing in drag, has always been regarded by the dominant heterosexist cultural gaze as a sign that one is symbolically crossing over from a realm of power into a realm of powerlessness.”

bell hooks on Paris is Burning in a piece published in Black Hooks (1992)

Each of these words, white, supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal, hetero-sexist sounds as meaningful and portentous as vacuous and meaningless. It is a description of a state of affairs that betrays a desire for change. The form of this change, however, is not spelled out. Would bell hooks prefer communism instead of capitalism?

Nevertheless, looking at old interviews on Charlie Rose, bell hooks comes across as a gentle, well-read and smart woman.

Madonna vs Thatcher

Reginald D. Hunter stand-up routine:

Reginald: “Of all the female icons women are encouraged to reach for almost none of them reach for Thatcher.”

“I mean hell, they almost all reach for Madonna before they reach for Thatcher,”

Woman: “Well, absolutely. Madonna broke that glass ceiling that had been oppressing women for decades. Madonna showed women they could be sexy, healthy and vital well into their forties and fifties, she showed women that they could and should be smart business people.”

Reginald: “Some of that’s true, but how about this? Thatcher reached all the way to the top in the most male-dominated profession in the world and she didn’t shake her ass one time. She didn’t shake her ass, she didn’t undo her cleavage before she went into a meeting with the boys and she didn’t suck a dick to jump the queue, she was true to game.”