bell hooks, Feminism, and Philosophy
My most important encounter with the work of bell hooks came at the beginning of my graduate school career. I started graduate school with excitement and enthusiasm enough to last me through my graduate school career—or so I thought. By the end of my first two semesters, the dawning of an ever-present gloom and anxiety hovered around me like the cartoon character’s Pigpen’s dust cloud. I was no stranger to gloom and anxiety; however, this felt like a fight for my life in which my enemy was unknown to me. Me, as my own worst enemy, I understood, but this sense of fighting for my life appeared to me to be more than just me, yet the enemy did not seem be a particular other as far as I could tell. It was then that I read Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (1989). It had been a gift; a book I hadn’t read yet and one I did not suspect would be important to my graduate education in philosophy.1 Needless to say, hooks articulated the pain and strength of my past as well as the pain and victories I was yet to face.
In the introduction to Talking Back, hooks revealed that the writing of this particular book presented a challenge at almost every turn: “Always something would get in the way—relationships ending, exile, loneliness, some recently discovered pain—and I had to hurt again, hurt myself all the way away from writing, re-writing, putting the book together.”2 Reflecting on why the writing was so difficult, hooks realized that her commitment “to doing things differently,” to reveal “personal stuff,” to disclose Gloria Jean had much to do with the difficulty of writing. Revealing the personal in speech and in writing is always an opportunity of risk. However, hooks describes with much clarity the punishment that black women face in revealing the personal. From childhood friends—“do we have to go that deep?”—to graduate school and a first publication formed and informed by white authority—“do we want to hear what you are saying?”—that reveal the personal risks and the punishment of not being heard, of loss, and of isolation.3 It was, however, the writing of the personal rather than the academic, which proved most painful and the most radical.
hooks’s foray into the personal as the radical and revolutionary, as what is necessary for those who have been and are oppressed and silenced, for those intellectuals marginalized in the academic world, provides a philosophical method upon which black women and feminist philosophers can approach their work. Philosophy is the domain from which the personal is supposedly removed. Thus, much of the work of feminist philosophers and the work of men who write on race often appear as separate structural or analytic analyses of each of these systems of domination. For black women philosophers concerned with their experience as both raced and gendered, and sometimes classed, the pain, loss, alienation experienced within academic institutions and rooted in their experience, subjectivity, and identity often serves to limit the potential for resistance in their writing. This chapter attempts to argue that the work of hooks, her style of writing, her integration of the personal and public, as well as her healthy understanding of its separation, can be thought of as a philosophical position and method. As hooks states, “We make the revolutionary history, telling the past as we have learned it mouth-to-mouth, telling the present as we see, know, and feel it in our hearts and with our words…in thinking feminist, thinking black.”4
To be more specific, I argue that hooks’s corpus can be and should be considered a phenomenology of a black feminist consciousness. Phenomenology as it has been institutionalized through the discipline of philosophy remains the domain of men such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Phenomenology as a philosophical method can be simply defined as “the analysis of the a priori and necessary structures of any possible consciousness.”5 Two women can be noted as attempting a work of phenomenology, Simone de Beauvoir and Sandra Bartky, both of whom used phenomenology to articulate the particular consciousness of women. To be sure, these women are not frequently taught in any standard phenomenology class. What makes these women’s work different from standard, institutionalized phenomenology is that they take seriously the ways that sexism in philosophy and in our social reality shape the consciousness of women. In effect, they understand that consciousness is already embodied, historical, and located. Phenomenology’s ruse of a pure consciousness coming to consciousness of self and other becomes, in the work of de Beauvoir and Bartky, particularized and most importantly entails explicit accounts of transformation. It is in this context, a context dominated by white men, where embodiment figures as any (abstract) body, where “the historical” figures as the West, where locatedness figures as Europe that I bring bell hooks to the table. And it is in the spirit of existential phenomenology best represented by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir that I find hooks’s work to be best understood. I make this claim with some reservation because Sartre is often taught in the United States as a raging individualist, an extremist of individual freedom who espoused a moral voluntaristic relativism: “I can do what I want to do; I can be whatever I want to be…today, tomorrow, anytime.” Instead of the purely transcendental ego which informs this position, I emphasize the tension between transcendence and facticity that underscores existential phenomenology’s apprehension of any particular consciousness.
This chapter cannot and does not offer an overarching analysis of the whole of hooks’s corpus. Additionally, this chapter does not highlight the number or variety of philosophers, philosophical discourse and its discursive practices which hooks utilizes in her writing. As an obviously prolific reader and writer, the link between hooks and philosophy remains far beyond the many philosophers’ names and insights that grace her texts. Instead, this chapter’s starting point is the theme of coming to voice, self-recovery, and critical feminist consciousness articulated in Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. hooks reminds us that while the ideas of coming to voice or finding one’s voice appear clichéd due to assumptions of a common women’s voice or critiqued for its primacy of speech, coming to voice remains relevant to women in exploited and oppressed groups.6
To understand hooks’s work in the context of the subdiscipline of phenomenology in the Continental tradition of academic philosophy is important to a larger project of discovering the philosophical relevance of black women feminist writers who have struggled, negotiated, and found liberation as a response to their awareness of the woman problem and race problem, both of which are problems that present fundamental challenges to “mainstream” philosophy’s representation of itself as well as its discussion of its content. Black women and their writings have traditionally been left out of the diversity of philosophical voices, which litter and contaminate the myth of the unified philosophical canon, what George Yancy named as the “philosophical oracle voice.”7 The philosophical oracle voice suggests the metaphorical and real space inhabited by the “insider” of philosophy. As Yancy argues, the philosophical oracle, the insiders, are those:
who regulate and police both physical and discursive spaces, are those who see themselves as protecting the “purity” of philosophical borders, those who protect, through imperial superimposition, a certain conception of philosophy, those who sustain and reinforce familiar ways of understanding philosophical problems, defining philosophical problems, and approaching and addressing them…. The oracle voice is godlike, supposedly surveying the world from the aspect of eternity. Th e oracle voice is presumed self-grounded and unconditioned; it speaks from nowhere, because it is deemed outside the flux of history, context, multiplicity, and heteroglossia.8
The philosophical oracle “resists seeing itself as different and particularistic,” as Yancy points out. In addition, however, the philosophical oracle apprehends voices at its margins and the questions and problems which arise from the living in those margins to be so particular as to bear no important consequence on how one does, makes, and understands philosophy.9 Thus, while black women’s writings, even those of bell hooks, may be used for some “insight” into black women’s lives or experience (sparingly and only if one is lucky in a feminist philosophy class), these writings are not taken to create, follow, inhabit, or influence philosophical method and structure.
I suspect it is no coincidence that hooks titled a book of essays, Talking Back, in which she admits self-disclosure and constructs analyses of feminism, intimacy, education, pedagogy, and political commitment to name a few. The very notion of “talking back” implicitly signifies the relation between the authorized and unauthorized. One knows not talk back to one’s parent; one knows not to talk back to the police (especially if you are black or poor); one struggles to talk back to one’s (predominantly white male) professors and colleagues. Talking back suggests rebelliousness and resistance on the part of the unauthorized. Just as importantly, talking back can mark the act of transformation of the unauthorized in the discovery of their authority, their coming to voice. “Talking back” then reveals the authority of the unauthorized and signifies that one has one’s own mind, thoughts, and perspectives.
hooks describes “talking back” in her early childhood life in a world where children were meant to be seen and not heard as “speaking as an equal to an authority figure…daring to disagree and sometimes…just…having an opinion.”10 Talking back as a female child in this world did not mean that women were silent. It is, in fact, the speaking of the women in the home sphere “giving orders, making threats, fussing” where the men appear absent or silent and the language spoken by the women seemed “so rich, so poetic that it felt…like being shut off from life, smothered to death if one were not allowed to participate.”11 hooks distinguishes the silence of the “sexist right speech of womanhood” which white feminists often link to women’s submission to white male patriarchy from the “right speech of womanhood” that constrained black women’s speech.12 In this world, the world of black women, women speak but their voices were nonetheless “often the soliloquy, the talking into thin air, the talking to ears that do not hear…the talk that is simply not listened to.”13 Thus, the speech of mothers, aunts, grandmothers, and their friends, while not silenced, remained a kind of “background noise,” even as it asserted itself in the giving of orders or the making of threats. Talking back in this context could be said to be a loud but powerless speech silenced in its insignificance despite its burden of keeping structure within various private spheres. For hooks, her clearest perception of dialogue in which speech is shared and recognized in its intimacy, intensity, joyfulness, loudness, tenderness, and wit, and thus filled with the power of discourse, occurred among the black women in her life and was unlike the speech which occurred between mother and child or between mother and male authority.14
By understanding the varied ways in which black women’s speech is confined to background noise, we can understand once again the differences which many though not all black women face in moving from the talking back of their mothers and the transformative talking back of a feminist consciousness. Indeed, hooks articulates the “talking back that falls silent” which black women may face not only in the domestic sphere but in the sphere of feminist thinking, in the public sphere of black feminist thinking, writing, or activism.
Sandra Bartky identifies two structural features of current social reality, though while not sufficient for the conditions for the emergence of feminist consciousness are nonetheless necessary for its emergence: the existence of contradictions in social reality and “the presence, due to these same contradictions, of concrete circumstances which would permit a significant alteration in the status of women.”15 hooks’s description of black women’s speech in her home life exemplifies the contradictions with which many black women struggle. For many black women the option of submission to be silent is not an option. We are often exposed to the need to speak up in the daily context of the home and public spheres. In When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost, Joan Morgan insightfully points to the stereotypical behavior of the “strongblackwoman” that many young black women assume. Not uncomfortable with speaking out, the “strongblackwoman” nonetheless is merely an angry, impotent voice, forged in the slave history of black women’s need to restrain vulnerability in a world in which the right to speak on behalf of her self and family is nothing more than the sounds of a mule. But one need only discover the incredible and long history of black women’s speeches and writings which have remained unread and unknown to even avowed feminists to understand that the impact of black women’s speech is reduced to background noise for white feminists. Used and confined in terms of strengthening of white feminism’s understanding of the intersections of race, class, and gender, and male race theorists comprehension of gender, the subtleties and insights of black women’s critical speech have remained the talking back that falls silent. Indeed the contradiction of black women’s speech is that it is perceived as loud, angry, and unreasonably demanding and quite simply a torrent of noise with untenable content.
hooks explains that despite never being taught absolute silence, she was nonetheless taught that “it was important to speak but to talk a talk that was itself a silence.”16 She describes speech which is intended to leave the lips without critical force and without the audacity to speak its desires, pain, and confusion. Speech which questioned authority, brought issues of pain and vulnerability to the fore, which aimed to expose the contradictions of one’s reality was identified as “crazy” speech and just as importantly speech which betrayed the privacy and primacy of the home sphere. As hooks describes, her spirit needed to be broken and she paid for the right to defiant speech with the sacrifice of safety and sanity only to be hounded by deep-seated fears and anxieties.17 Again though hooks describes the suppression of speech which characterized her home life, she argues that we must understand acts of suppression of speech, the breakdown of spirit, and persecution as these occur in the public sphere as well, especially to those who are made or deemed voiceless by systems of oppression. Describing her experience after publishing Ain’t I a Woman? hooks explains the toll black women pay to speak and write:
While I had expected a climate of critical dialogue, I was not expecting a critical avalanche that had the power in its intensity to crush the spirit, to push one into silence. Since that time, I have heard stories about black women, about women of color, who write and publish having nervous breakdowns, being made mad because they cannot bear the harsh responses of family, friends, and unknown critics, or becoming silent, unproductive. Surely, the absence of a humane critical response has tremendous impact on the writer from any oppressed, colonized group who endeavors to speak. For us, true speaking is not solely an expression of creative power; it is an act of resistance, a political gesture that challenges politics of domination that would render us nameless and voiceless. As such, it is a courageous act—as such it represents a threat.18
Within a more general context of discussing feminist consciousness, Bartky argues that feminist consciousness is a consciousness of victimization.19 It is a consciousness which apprehends itself as embedded in a system which aims to exploit and oppress it. In other words, feminist consciousness now becomes aware of itself as a victim, the injured, the diminished.20
To apprehend myself as victim in a sexist society is to know that there are few places where I can hide, that I can be attacked almost anywhere, at anytime, by virtually anyone. Innocent chatter, the currency of ordinary social life, or a compliment, well-intentioned advice of psychologists, the news item, the joke, the cosmetic advertisement—none of these is what it is or what it was. Each reveals itself, depending on the circumstances in which it appears, as a threat, an insult, an affront, as a reminder, however, subtle, that I belong to an inferior caste. In short, these are revealed as instruments of oppression or as articulations of a sexist institution.21
However, as both Bartky and hooks insist, the apprehension of one’s victimization is also the apprehension of one’s strength. At the time that one becomes aware of the contradictions in one’s social reality, one also gains awareness of what that reality could be and should be. Indeed for Bartky, as much as feminist consciousness is afflicted with alienation, ethical ambiguity, category confusion, it is also a consciousness of resistance, personal growth, and insights into possibilities for liberatory collective action.22
What bell hooks brings to a discussion of feminist consciousness is the particular alienation, paranoia, anxiety, struggle, resistance, and strength of a black woman feminist consciousness which must come to voice in a landscape in which intersecting matrices of domination offer black women little or no privilege to speak meaningful knowledge about our existence(s) and the ways in which the struggles, questions, and conflicts, failures and progress of black women’s lives as we negotiate the larger social sphere, reflect and disclose the pernicious racism, sexism, and classism in our society. Often characterized as angry, difficult, limited in their knowledge, black women, and especially black women intellectuals, face a tremendous battle to speak and to write in the hopes of being heard and in the hopes of speaking to their black and white sisters precisely as black women concerned with the experiences and knowledge of black women.
In the tradition of so many black women throughout the American landscape, hooks moves the experiences and knowledge of black women to the center of knowledge systems which continue to make reductive black women’s speech and thus our resistance and struggle, when not completely neglectful of their presence and voice. I, myself, for the first time reading and teaching Beverly Guy-Sheftall’s Words of Fire, could not believe the courage and boldness that the diverse speakers and writers claimed as they forged a way to make black women’s existence an existence of value, agency, and a corporeal symbol marked by and telling of the domination of American racism, sexism, and classism. Completely absent from all of my years of education and hindered by my own internal racism and ignorance, I could not have ever imagined prior to reading this text as well as texts by hooks that black women had over close to 200 years of written work demanding that what they experienced, saw, and knew be heard. In the midst of being incredulous at their brilliance and passion and at how their words spoke to my experience, I was jarred by the consistent discomfort of some of my students. The very act of placing black women’s writing in the center of a philosophy class all semester long resulting in any affirmation of black women speaking to black women in safe spaces was seen as separatist and exclusionary. White students familiar with women studies and philosophy courses insisted on the critique of identity as black women’s compliance and complicity with the social structure merely because the writers spoke of having a particular view of domination from where they stood. Indeed, when their very privilege of being knowledgeable and objective interlocutors of all texts seemed threatened, they resorted to complaining about whether the classroom adhered to supposedly lofty standards of college philosophy classes. Black students, on the other hand, seemed to be confused at the presence of these voices critical of white supremacy, racism, and class domination now being thrust into the center of a classroom of mixed company. They unwittingly allowed the white students to control the classroom discussion. Uncertain of their capacity and ability to speak in the classroom setting at all, I had to explicitly tell them that this class was for them. Consciously or unconsciously, the black students did not appear to want to make any direct comments about white people in general. A few white students, however, complained of their discomfort at any hint that their white privilege could be a barrier to their connection to the experiences of black women.
After Ain’t I a Woman? was published, hooks states that white women often told her they didn’t feel that her book spoke to them.23 What they could not know was that hooks’s struggle to write a book on black women and feminism involved the very difficult task of confronting an audience:
When I began writing my first book, Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism, the initial competed manuscript was excessively long and very repetitious. Reading it critically, I saw that I was trying not only to address each different potential audience—black men, white women, white men, etc.,—but that my words were written to explain, to placate, to appease. They contained the fear of speaking that often characterizes the way those in a lower position within a hierarchy address those in a higher position of authority.… When I thought about audience—the way in which the language we choose to use declares who it is we place at the center of our discourse—I confronted my fear of placing myself and other black women at the speaking center. Writing this book was for me a radical gesture.24
hooks recognized that when she thought of her audience as black women, her voice became her own. She wrote with a frankness that many white women interpreted as hostile and exclusionary:
White women readers would often say to me, “I don’t feel this book is really talking to me.” Often these readers would interpret the direct, blunt speech as signifying anger and I would have to speak against this interpretation… . At a discussion once where a question about audience was raised, I responded by saying that while I would like readers to be diverse, the audience I most wanted to address was black, that I wanted to place us at the center. I was asked by a white woman, “How can you do that in a cultural context where black women are not primary book buyers and white women are the principle buyers of feminist book?”… It had never occurred to me that white women would not buy a book if they did not see themselves at the center…. My placement of black women at the center was not an action to exclude others but rather an invitation, a challenge to those who would hear us speak, to shift paradigms rather than appropriate, to have all readers listen to the voice of a black woman speaking as a subject and not as underprivileged other.… I wrote…not to inform white women about black women but rather as an expression of my longing to know more and think deeply about our experiences.25
These types of “anecdotes” are often the foundations for black women’s writing and coming to consciousness and voice around their absence from knowledge systems and the validation of those systems.
I have often said that it was in the philosophical classroom that I found my voice. However, the space of philosophy can offer a deceptive illusion of freedom. One finds that one’s very presence as a black woman philosopher disturbs, that one’s voice and demeanor (in my case, working class and punctuated with a hint of mid-Atlantic black speak) in dialogue with texts appears to taint the purity of philosophy. If the speaking and writing of white feminist philosophers creates the space for self-transformation and the transformation of philosophy and has yet to fully invade the purity of philosophy, black feminist consciousness disturbs and challenges that purity even more. And yet, the act of speaking and writing from this consciousness remains the risk of liberating the (my) voice and resisting domination of the philosophical oracle voice spoken in the tenor of upper class white men. Fraught with the difficulties of fear, anxiety, and self-doubt over being heard when one puts oneself as a black woman into the center, black feminist consciousness attempts to recover and transform a self within the context of conditions which alienate, isolate, and are cause for despair. Black feminist consciousness must not only name its pain, a radical gesture in and of itself, but it must uncover the strategies for resistance and liberation with little or no protection or armor to aid in its longing for transformation.
hooks’s description of talking back and coming to voice offers a phenomenology of black women’s feminist consciousness which allows us to understand the risk of punishment many black women face. This consciousness traverses the structures of transcendence and facticity and challenges the philosopher’s stance of unthreatened transcendence and objectivity in depicting the relationship between self and the world and the questions and concerns are derived therefrom. As Carla Peterson argues, in her attempt to understand the literary production of black women writers of the North, in order to enter the arena of public civic debate, nineteenth century black women had to achieve an “additional oppression by consciously adopting a self-marginalization that became superimposed upon the already ascribed oppressions of race and that paradoxically allowed empowerment.”26 In negotiating and traversing the limits of the public and private spheres in which black women’s bodies and voices threatened homogeneity of the discourses of racial uplift as well as women’s rights, nineteenth century black women “entered a state of liminality… in which an individual, separated from society comes to be ‘betwixt and between the position assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremonial’.”27 Peterson shows that these women who entered the liminal space did so at great risk even as these spaces provided possibilities for self-expression and communitas. Traveling amidst the marginalized realms of religious evangelical activities or female antislavery societies, these women often entered the communitas of liminal spaces alone and could remain isolated at a time in which the black women’s bodies were conceptualized as both oversexualized and masculine. Unprotected by common conceptions of femininity afforded white women and made vulnerable by speaking in the public realm afforded only to men, these women left home, employment, and communities to hold an ambiguous insider/outsider status in relation to the very communities they hoped to benefit.
What we find by looking at the writings of these black women, according to Peterson, are writings which may suggest racial insecurity but are more frequently pervaded by portraits of a sick and debilitated body:
Indeed, almost all these women were plagued throughout their lives by illnesses that often remained undiagnosed but whose symptoms were headaches, fevers, coughs, chills, cramps, or simply extreme fatigue. In such instances illness may quite possibly have occurred as a consequence of the bodily degradation to which these women were subjected or as a psychosomatic strategy for negotiating such degradation. In either case the black female body might well have functioned as what Elaine Scarry has called the body in pain, whereby the powerless become bodies subject to pain and dominated by the bodiless voices of those in power.28
Black women negotiated the public gaze of the liminal space as both a body empowered and a body made vulnerable and disordered. Peterson argues that this negotiation of the public gaze and the interpretations of black women’s bodies and voices by diverse audiences meant that “from their dislocated and liminal positions these black women ultimately turned to the literary representation of self-marginalization—to the writing of self, spirituality, and travel, the reprinting of public lectures, and the creation of fictional worlds—in an attempt to veil the body while continuing racial uplift activities in the public sphere.”29 Writing and speaking, then for these women are examples of “talking back” as they reacted to their exclusion from organized institutions designed for racial uplift or women’s empowerment. Indeed, as Peterson points out, nineteenth century black women utilized a diversity of modes of literary representation in order to address an epistemological issue: how to represent the relationship of the self to the self and the other.30
As black women continue to recover past voices as well as write themselves anew amidst the public gaze; as we continue to place black women’s voices at the center, we continue to reveal and locate the coming to power, coming to voice, and liberatory transformation of consciousness painfully won historically by black women. More importantly, we can come to comprehend the risks taken by black women to speak and be heard. By doing so, we may increase the possibilities and spaces for further phenomenological analyses of the oppressed, hidden, neglected experiences attempting to transform the society and world around black women.
1. For this most important gift, I would like to thank Jeffrey Reiman, American University. Though he could never have known the depth of my need for the singular, courageous voice of bell hooks (as I did not as well), he understood something about what it might mean for me to have the model of a black woman’s voice which could enable my own courageous acts of speaking and writing.
2. hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1989), 1.
3. Ibid., 2.
4. Ibid., 3.
5. Sandra Lee Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge 1990), ix.
6. hooks, Talking Back, 12.
7. See George Yancy, “Introduction: No Philosophical Oracle Voices,” in Philosophy in Multiple Voices (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2007).
8. Ibid., 7–8.
9. Ibid., 10.
10. hooks, Talking Back, 5.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 6.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid.
15. Sandra Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of Oppression (New York: Routledge, 1990), 12.
16. hooks, Talking Back, 7.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid., 8.
19. Bartky, Femininity and Domination, 15.
20. Ibid., 16.
21. Ibid., 17.
22. Ibid., 21.
23. hooks, Talking Back, 15.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid., 16.
26. Carla L. Peterson, “Doers of the Word”: African-American Speakers and Writers of the North (1830–1880), (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1995), 17.
27. Peterson, “Doers of the Word,” 17.
28. Ibid., 21.
29. Ibid., 22.
30. Ibid., 23.