bell hooks: Love as The Practice of Freedom

June 07, 2020

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June 7, 2020

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To be loving we willingly hear each other's truth and, most important, we affirm the value of truth telling.

- bell hooks -

bell hooks: Love as The Practice of Freedom

Social commentator, essayist, memoirist, and poet bell hooks is a feminist theorist who speaks on contemporary issues of race, gender, and media representation in America.In Black Looks (1994), she writes, "It struck me that for black people, the pain of learning that we cannot control our images, how we see ourselves (if our vision is not decolonized), or how we are seen is so intense that it rends us. It rips and tears at the seams of our efforts to construct self and identify." In Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (1994), hooks advocates a "progressive cultural revolution" by means of repudiating all forms of domination in a "holistic manner." In order to decolonize our minds, suggests hooks, we must begin to,"surrender participation in whatever sphere of coercive hierarchical domination we enjoy individual and group privilege." In the essay that follows from that book, hooks proposes an "ethic of love" as the means by which we might be guided to turn away from an ethic of domination. { read more }