Black feminist, activist and author bell hooks — written in lower case — died on December 15, 2021, at her home in Kentucky, US. She was 69. The acclaimed intersectional feminist was an important voice in academic and cultural circles, and her writings shaped the perspectives on the intersectionality of race, capitalism and gender.
As much as her writings, the feminist’s chosen name has been a matter of fascination and intrigue. She was born in 1952 as Gloria Jean Watkins in the segregated town of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. She gave herself the pen name of bell hooks to honor her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. She spelled the words in lower case to establish her own identity. In a profile of the feminist from 1999 in The Washington Post, it appears that bell hooks chose this name as a way of erasing her younger self, “the girl who was always wrong, always punished”, referring to trauma from her childhood; hooks also believed that her name’s lower case was to express that what was important was “the substance of books, not who I am”.
At age 24, hooks was writing her book, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, which would go on to revolutionize feminist thought when it was published in 1981. It is currently* taught in colleges across the world and noted as one of the most influential women’s books. The book is titled after abolitionist Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” speech. The author bell hooks argued that the convergence of sexism and racism in slavery meant that black women had the lowest status and worst conditions of any group in American society. The feminist movement was therefore a largely white, middle- and upper-class affair and did not articulate the needs of poor and non-white women. She wrote, “It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term ‘feminism’, to focus on the fact that to be ‘feminist’ in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.”
*currently: nowadays, at present
Internet: indianexpress.com (adapted).
Based on the text above, judge the following item.
It can be inferred from the first paragraph that bell hooks’ way of approaching issues like race, capitalism, and gender was innovative
