The election of 1948 was telling. Strom Thurmond, States’ Rights Democratic Party presidential candidate, echoed his party’s slogan of “Segregation Forever” for the entire country to hear. Thurmond carried four Southern states (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina), and received over one million votes and thirty-nine electoral votes from those in favor of continuing racial apartheid. In addition to his segregationist activities, Strom Thurmond also filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1957 (he spoke for a still unbroken Senate record of 24 hours and 18 minutes), he voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and he voted against confirming Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court. It wasn’t until after Thurmond’s death in 2003 that his estate publicly acknowledged the existence of his biracial daughter, Essie May Washington-Williams, whom he fathered with sixteen-year-old Carrie Butler (a servant in his family’s home) when he was twenty-two. Thurmond met his daughter when she was a teen, and though he did not publicly acknowledge Mrs. Washington-Williams during his lifetime, he did provide for her education and regularly communicated with her in private.1 Thurmond’s commitment to his daughter’s well-being begs the question: how could a man like Strom Thurmond, so full of public disdain for black people, a man who built a political career out of denying the equal rights of black people, care for the black body of his daughter Essie May Washington-Williams? This question becomes more relevant in light of the Thurmond family’s response to Ms. Washington-Williams’s press conference in which she revealed perhaps the worst kept secret in South Carolina political history. While most of us would wonder why she remained silent for so long, it is worth noting that some members of Strom Thurmond’s family carried on as if Mrs. Washington-Williams had done something wrong in breaking her near sixty-year silence. Jeffrey Gettleman, in his article “Thurmond Family Struggles with a Difficult Truth,” cites several members of the Thurmond family as fighting to come to terms with the revelation of Thurmond’s interracial intimacy. One family member, Ms. Mary T. Thompkins Freeman, who is Thurmond’s niece, went so far as to say that this (read: black illegitimate daughter) was a “blight on the family.”2
It is this paradox of hatred and desire that lies at the heart of understanding bell hooks’s notion of the commodification of otherness. On the one hand, Thurmond’s actions mirror the way that the black female body was sexually exploited during slavery, and his white niece’s “blame the victim” (ignorant) response is similar to that of ante-bellum white women who blamed enslaved black women for the abuse they received from white men. In both cases, it is as if the wrong were for her (the black female) to speak and not for what he (the white male) had done. On the other hand, Thurmond, and his relatives by extension, desired and benefited from this exploitation of the black female body: politically, financially, and socially. Through her notion of the commodification of otherness, hooks examines how white supremacist, patriarchal society has both denigrated and desired the black female body. The black female body is the paradox of a body that is desired while at the same time she is abhorred; she is both useful and expendable, she is sacred and she is taboo.
It is my contention that we can gain insight into hooks’s understanding of radical black subjectivity through her notion of the commodification of otherness. This is especially important for the feminist movement inasmuch as it can advance the discussion of the black female body from the issue of objectification to subjectivity and agency. hooks reminds us of the importance of this shift, when she observes that, “As long as white Americans are more willing to extend concern and care to black folks who have a ‘victim-focused black identity,’ a shift in paradigms will not take place.”3 To develop this paradigm shift in hooks’s work, my chapter explores the following questions: First, how does bell hooks understand the commodification of otherness? Second, how might this notion elucidate the imperiling paradox of a black body that is at the same time a subordinated other and a coveted commodity? Finally, how might this account of the commodification of the black female body provide resources for the development of radical black subjectivity? Whereas the commodification of otherness complicates one’s ability to self-identify and works to nullify one’s being, I will show that hooks’s notion of radical black subjectivity seeks to create spaces where multiple, affirming black subjectivities may occur by giving voice and power to black women with the intention of encouraging them to speak their own sacred names in a way that bears witness to the importance of race, class, and gender and their impact on the lives of black women .
Much of the work currently done by black feminist scholars, in one way or another, attempts to decipher black women’s status as commodified other. For example, Ann duCille in “The Occult of True Black Womanhood” asks:
Why are black women always already Other? I wonder. To myself, of course, I am not Other; to me it is the white women and men so intent on theorizing my difference who are the Other. Why are they so interested in me and people who look like me (metaphorically speaking)? Why have we—black women—become the subjected subjects of so much contemporary scholarly investigation?4
For duCille, to be a commodified other means that you, your body, is reduced to an object which can be, and for many women often is, brutalized by the forces of capitalism, patriarchy, and racism. Yet, the problem is how to make this exploitation visible beyond visceral feelings and unarticulated fears of disenfranchisement. In her canonical text Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins writes that “Intersecting oppressions of race, class, gender, and sexuality could not continue without powerful ideological justification for their existence.”5 hooks, like duCille and Collins, seeks to make visible the “ideological justifications” that exclude and at the same time commodify black women.
Because she is most interested in opening up a space for self-definition for women of color, hooks points out the limitation of mainstream gender critiques from the likes of Betty Friedan whose analysis she argues was limited to a “select group of college-educated, middle-and upper-class, married white women—housewives bored with leisure, with the home, with children, with buying products who wanted more out of life.”6 hooks seeks to expand the feminist movement by way of rendering visible other women—those commodified others “who are daily beaten down, mentally, physically, and spiritually—women who are powerless to change their condition in life.” “They are” she continues “a silent majority. A mark of their victimization is that they accept their lot in life without visible question, without organized protest, without collective anger or rage.”7
The silence of these women, women like Ms. Washington-Williams, is indicative of their historical commodification and silence. According to Trudier Harris, black women commodified as other are:
Called Matriarch, Emasculator, and Hot Momma. Sometimes Sister, Pretty Baby, Auntie, Mammy and Girl. Called Unwed Mother, Welfare Recipient, and Inner City Consumer. The Black American Woman has had to admit that while nobody knew the troubles she saw, everybody, his brother and his dog, felt qualified to explain her, even to herself.8
It is a silence of near resignation to their status as commodity that began with enslavement and still continues today for many black women. Since for hooks the lives of these women matter, hooks’s analysis of the commodification of otherness seeks to describe the multiple ways in which blackness is exploited by the insatiability of the white appetite. In so doing, hooks highlights the point that “cultural, ethnic, and racial differences will be continually commodified and offered up as new dishes to enhance the white palate—the Other will be eaten, consumed, and forgotten.”9 In order to give voice to the lives of black women, then, we must challenge the white cannibalism through which the commodification of otherness occurs. We can do this first by making the white consumption of the black female body visible.
In this section I will explicate the foundational principle of commodified otherness in hooks’s thought. I begin with commodified otherness because I believe that hooks uses it as a point of contrast against her radical black subject.
In her well-known essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Hortense Spillers, like Trudier Harris above, speaks of the black female image in the white imagination, and in doing so, makes visible the implications of commodified otherness. Spillers observes:
Let’s face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. “Peaches” and “Brown Sugar,” “Sapphire” and “Earth Mother,” “Aunty,” “Granny,” God’s “Holy Fool,” a “Miss Ebony First,” or “Black Woman at the Podium”: I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.10
Here we see that black female existence “describe(s) a locus of confounded identities” in the white imagination—the black female body is both invisible and hypervisible. Many of these negative identities have been exploited by white society for its own economic, political, emotional, and sexual gain. Spillers goes on to express that the “markers” mentioned above “…demonstrate a sort of telegraphic coding; they are markers so loaded with mythical prepossession that there is no easy way for the agents buried beneath them to come clean.” Like Spillers, hooks encourages us to question these markers which are “so loaded with mythical prepossession.”
For hooks, the notion of the commodification of otherness refers to a system whereby the subject status of black people is denied, and black people are exploited for the gain of white supremacist patriarchal society. For hooks, the bodies of black people become a site of pleasure, and a place where whites encounter difference in the conspicuous act of consumption. Turning to the media to provide proof for her claim, hooks writes that “within current debates about race and difference, mass culture is the contemporary location that both publicly declares and perpetuates the idea that there is pleasure to be found in the acknowledgment and enjoyment of racial difference” and she goes on to say that “the commodification of otherness has been so successful because it is offered as new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling.”11 Since white culture suffers from boredom, other races and ethnicities provide “spice” to what is normally a bland, white existence. Turning to Michel Foucault, hooks goes on to add that:
Though speaking from the standpoint of his individual experience, Foucault voices a dilemma felt by many in the west. It is precisely that longing for the pleasure that has lead the white west to sustain a romantic fantasy of the “primitive” and the concrete search for a real primitive paradise, whether that location be a country or a body, a dark continent or a dark flesh, perceived as the perfect embodiment of that possibility.12
As a result of whiteness’ longing for a primitive and dark continent—an unknown—white supremacist patriarchal society eroticizes the black body. This is historical, and the bodies of Harriet Jacobs, Sojourner Truth, or the young Carrie Butler, mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, all bear witness to the eroticization and commodification of the black female body. So, for example, joined to the commodification of the young body of Harriet Jacobs, in terms of the amount of work that “it” could provide the Flints and the amount of money “it” could be sold for, is her sexual availability. Sojourner Truth’s body was commodified in the same way, and we can read her evocative speech “Ain’t I a Woman?” as a challenge vis-à-vis her status both as commodity and as other. Finally, young Carrie Butler’s position followed the same pattern as those of Jacobs and Truth. Her commodifica-tion as a worker for the Thurmond family is tied to her sexual availability for Strom Thurmond. This linkage between the commodification and sexual availability of black and other nonwhite women continues today, as evidenced by hooks’s own description of an encounter with a group of Ivy League white boys while she walked through downtown New Haven.13
Ignoring her older, black female body, she overhears them talking about which nonwhite girls they planned on trying to “fuck.”14 hooks shows how those white boys methodically “ran it down. Black girls were high on the list, Native American girls hard to find, Asian girls (all lumped into one category) deemed easier to entice, were considered ‘prime targets.’”15 “To these young males,” she concludes, “and their buddies, fucking was a way to confront the Other.… Getting a bit of the Other, in this case engaging in sexual encounters with non-white females, was considered a ritual of transcendence, a movement out into a world of difference that would transform, an acceptable rite of passage.”16 In this instance (and countless others), hooks argues that the inferiority of blackness and the female body is tied to the eroticization of the black female body. Although whiteness might regard its sexual contact with black bodies as a show of revolutionary liberation and as an acceptance of multiculturalism, in fact what is actually taking place is the recurrence of the traditional understanding of black bodies as commodities available for white consumption. “From the standpoint of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” hooks observes, “the hope is that desire for the “primitive” or fantasies about the Other can be continually exploited, and that such exploitation will occur in a manner that reinscribes and maintains the status quo.”17 The commodification of otherness reveals what hooks calls an “imperialistic nostalgia.”18 Even though whites regard the physical contact with black bodies to be nonviolent, nonracialized, and nonracist, hooks regards this as an act of bad faith which only perpetuates the status quo.19 It is important to note that hooks detects this as bad faith on the side of blacks as well. Just as the eroticization of the black female body may be falsely interpreted as an act of tolerance, it can also be falsely interpreted by black females as an act of acceptance. This theoretical move is important since marginalizing attention from white society can be misconstrued as “…marginalized groups, deemed Other, who have been ignored, rendered invisible, can be seduced by the emphasis on Otherness, by its commodification, because it offers the promise of recognition and reconciliation.”20 What this means is that marginalized groups may be seduced into believing that the attention given to them by white patriarchal society is an affirmation of their subjectivity. However, hooks is clear that this attention does nothing more than reify the black body as a commodity and a marginalized other. If the above analysis is correct, then the central question concerns whether blacks have any power to resist white commodification. How, in other words, does hooks empower the marginalized other to resist whiteness and to emerge as a radical black subject?
In response to this question, hooks cautions us against several temptations in thinking about the status of black women. One temptation would be to embrace the claim, while false and deeply problematic that since white supremacist patriarchal society desires the bodies of black women, black women would thereby gain an acceptable subjectivity. To understand black women solely as objects of desire, hooks reminds us, only further entrenches their marginal status. Another temptation would be to promote the status of black women through a separation from white, patriarchal society. Against this temptation, hooks cautions that separatist calls to break from white supremacist patriarchal society are misguided at best, and at worst, a denial of the history and real experiences of black people.21 With respect to the realization of black nationalism, hooks registers a good deal of skepticism as she writes that the “Resurgence of black nationalism as an expression of black people’s desire to guard against white cultural appropriation indicates the extent to which the commodification of blackness…has been reinscribed and marketed.… Given this cultural context, black nationalism is more a gesture of powerlessness than a sign of critical resistance.”22 Instead of either simply acquiescing to a marginalized status or turning away from white society and history altogether, hooks emphasizes the key role of discourse in transforming black subjectivity.
Although she does not state it expressly, hooks’s work is implicitly aligned with discourse analysis,23 construed broadly. In Language as Symbolic Action, Kenneth Burke famously states that “Man is a symbol-using animal,”24 and according to Burke, we use symbols to nonverbally communicate meaning.25 Burke importantly calls our attention to the potentiality of language and symbols to name, define, and destroy the object of verbal and nonverbal speech. Similarly, throughout her work, hooks argues that the superiority of whiteness is inscribed through verbal and nonverbal discourse such that, “If we compare the relative progress African Americans have made in education and employment to the struggle to gain control over how we are represented, particularly in the mass media, we see that there has been little change in the area of representation.”26 The role of discourse analysis here is to deconstruct misconceptions of blackness and the relegation of black people to the status of the marginalized other. Discourse analysis asks that we see those “…institutional conditions and power-structures that serve to make given statements accepted as authoritative or true.…”27 Hooks’s analysis of the media images of black women in particular challenges us to confront the images that reinforce the nonbeing of black women as “true.” For example, she uses the obsession with black women’s butts28 (think Josephine Baker), the wildness of Tina Turner,29 the exotic images of Iman and Naomi Campbell30 as tropes used to communicate (verbally and nonverbally) the availability of black women as objects of sex and sexual desire. Additionally, discourse analysis asks that we “…understand the function of a particular discourse, the way they position their subjects in relations to contempt and respect, of domination and subordination or of opposition and resistance, we pass quickly and ineluctably from conceptual critique to social critique.”31 White supremacist patriarchal society establishes a false dichotomy that positions whites as subjects and black people in general and black women in particular as subordinated and marginalized others. While hooks provides an intellectual critique of such oppressive discourses, this critique alone is not enough. She asks that we move beyond the critique of power, domination, and subjugation to a praxis of liberation which challenges the status quo. One such challenge comes in the form of her radical black subjectivity which, like discourse analysis, “…is not only a reflexive process; it is also a productive process or a process that brings change.”32
It is obvious from our discussion that hooks rejects all forms of commodified otherness. In doing so, hooks creates a space whereby she can begin to examine a meaningful and positive black identity; both of which she posits in her radical black subject.
While hooks’s overall corpus is for the most part strikingly clear, her conception of radical black subjectivity remains elusive. Like a painting which evokes but does not give its meaning, hooks’s use of this concept fascinates but evades the reader. hooks is clearest about what it is not. Radical black subjectivity is not an offshoot of shared victimization, nor is it merely about rejecting external constitution in favor of a self-inflicted negative constitution much like what occurred during the black power movement. Readers of hooks’s work are familiar with her criticism of the black power movement, especially her critique of its insistence on obtaining the rights to and the privilege of patriarchy.33 hooks is equally critical of black national struggles to receive societal benefits on a par with white society. hooks asserts that:
Retrospective examination of black liberation struggle in the United States indicates the extent to which ideas about “freedom” were informed by efforts to imitate the behavior, lifestyles, and most importantly the values and consciousness of white colonizers. Much civil rights reform reinforced the idea that black liberation should be defined by the degree to which black people gained equal access to the material opportunities and privileges available to whites.34
As shown by hooks, movements like the Black Nationalist Revolt are more reactionary then revolutionary; they are more about black men getting a “piece of the proverbial pie” then about true equality built on a positive and revolutionary subjectivity. So, while clearly telling the reader what radical black subjectivity is not, hooks asks the reader to imagine what radical black subjectivity might be through the anecdotes that she shares.
In Black Looks: Race and Representation, hooks relates an instance where she and other black women were planning a conference on black feminism. During the planning process, the women revealed stories about growing up in segregated black communities and the pain that they endured at the hands of the community.35 Speaking against what she saw as a monolithic rendering of black female being and experience, hooks tells a glorious story of being loved, cherished, and strengthened in her all black community explaining that, “It gave me the grounding in a positive experience of ‘blackness’ that sustained me when I left that community to enter racially integrated settings, where racism informed most social interactions.”36 To her surprise, hooks was castigated for “erasing” the experiences of other women, while her own story “was reduced to a competing narrative, one that was seen as trying to divert attention from the ‘true’ telling of black female experience.”37 Where, she wonders, was the “narrative of resistance”38 to be found in all this “shared pain and victimization?”39
From this negative encounter with people who look like her and who supposedly share the same goals, it is no small wonder that hooks’s radical black subject specifically seeks to address Paulo Freire’s edict that, “We cannot enter the debate as objects only to become subjects.”40 By struggling with this edict, hooks’s notion of subjectivity is neither predicated on the rhetoric of victimization nor is it a bestowal of subjectivity onto blacks by white society. By pointing out the dilemmas of associating one’s self with the problematic position of being an “object” and then struggling to become a “subject,” hooks, I believe, shows us that if language is a power grab, then it is best from the beginning to be on the side of the positively empowered. This is especially true since blacks have never willingly given up their subject status nor their place in the sun. hooks certainly acknowledges that enslavement, false media portrayals, and whiteness have complicated black subjectivity, but these negative encounters are not the basis of her notion of subjectivity. She focuses rather on the fact that such negative depictions and encounters have never successfully erased black subjectivity. The difference between black subjectivity and radical black subjectivity is that the former is a binary concept, established through its opposition to whiteness. Radical black subjectivity is not limited to a binary relation, whereas black subjectivity sees its mission solely in terms of rejecting the external constitution and “dehumanization”41 imposed by whiteness. In developing a radical black subjectivity, hooks asks that we look beyond the negative and externally imposed multiplicity of the commodified other.
One way in which we look beyond the multiple negative meanings embedded in the marginalized other is to see marginalized otherness as a site of resistance against commodification. In her article “The Politics of Radical Black Subjectivity,” hooks turns marginalization on its head by looking to the margins as a site of resistance. “Perhaps the most fascinating constructions of black subjectivity and critical thinking about the same,” she writes, “emerge from writers, cultural critics, and artists who are poised on the margins of various endeavors.”42 For hooks, being a “marginalized other” (if one is empowered), means being able to speak and act freely. It also means being able to theorize the potentiality of radical struggles. Since those on the margins who are empowered tend to:
…share a commitment to left politics…recognize the primacy of identity politics as an important stage in [the] liberation process. We quote Audre Lorde, who said “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” to claim the ground on which we are constructing “homeplace” (and we are not talking about ghettos or shantytowns).43
hooks outlines some of the characteristics of those “writers, cultural critics, and artists who are poised on the margins of various endeavors” and who, for hooks, exhibit the consciousness and fluidity that marks her radical black subject. Of this “avant-garde” group of people she writes that they “…eschew essentialist notions of identity, and fashion selves that emerge from the meeting of diverse epistemologies, habits of being, concrete class locations, and radical political commitment.” Subsequently, her radical black subjectivity is defined by an “oppositional worldview, a consciousness, and identity, a standpoint that exists not only as that struggle which also opposes dehumanization but as that movement which enables creative, expansive self-actualization.”44 She goes on to add that: “Opposition is not enough. In that vacant space after one has resisted there is still the necessity to become—to make oneself anew.”45 Radical black subjectivity thereby disrupts the commodification of the black female body. Instead of occupying the position of an object, the black female body becomes a source of transformative action. hooks writes that, “Even the most subjected person has moments of rage and resentment so intense that they respond, they act against.”46 These moments of rage, if coupled with an understanding of the “space within oneself where resistance remains” and eventually develops into “critical thinking and critical consciousness,” empower one to access the creative sources by which one can self-define.
It is in moving away from the static black subject who, hooks argues, marked progress by the “degree to which black people gained equal access to material opportunity and privileges available to whites” or alternately marked progress by the degree to which black males gained access to power, authority, and patriarchy; that radical subjectivity emerges to counter the work of commodification.47 It is, according to hooks, the responsibility of thinkers to supply alternate ways of being-black-in-the-world that do not reinscribe the negative understanding of blackness or look to “that Other for recognition.”48 These thinkers are not afraid, because their desires are not market driven but driven by liberatory discourse to posit various positive understandings of blackness that transcend commodification by embracing otherness as a position of power. In naming otherness or marginality as she calls it as a “site of transformation”49 hooks creates a space “where liberatory black subjectivity can fully emerge, emphasizing that is a definite distinction between marginality which is imposed by oppressive structures and that marginality one chooses as site of resistance, as location of radical openness and possibility.”50
1. Essie-Mae Washington, interview by Dan Rather, “Strom’s Daughter: A Burden Lifted,” 60 Minutes, December 16, 2003, http://www.CBSNews.com (accessed October 16, 2008).
2. Jeffrey Gettleman, “Thurmond Family Struggles with Difficult Truth,” The New York Times, December 20, 2003, http://www.nytimes.com
3. hooks, Killing Rage, Ending Racism (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 58.
4. Ann duCille, “The Occult of True Black Womanhood: Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies,” in Female Subjects in Black and White: Race, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, ed. Elizabeth Abel, Barbara Christian, and Helene Moglen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 21–56.
5. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, (New York: Routledge, 2000).
6. hooks, Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2000 ), 1.
7. Ibid.
8. Trudier Harris, From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1982).
9. hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 39.
10. Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in The Black Feminist Reader, ed. Joy James and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000), 57–87.
11. hooks, Black Looks, 21.
12. Ibid., 27.
13. In her discussion hooks points out that downtown New Haven was seen as a battleground, of sorts, “where racist domination of blacks by whites was contested on the sidewalks, as white people, usually male, often jocks, used their bodies to force black people off the sidewalk, to push our bodies aside, without ever looking at us or acknowledging our presence.” Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press), 23.
14. hooks, Black Looks, 23.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid., 23–24.
17. Ibid., 22.
18. Ibid., 25.
19. Lewis Gordon and Robert Birt have both argued that whiteness is an act of bad faith. In his essay, “The Bad Faith of Whiteness,” Robert E. Birt provides a compelling argument for construing whiteness as bad faith when he writes that “Whiteness is the bad faith identity of the racially dominant. The bad faith of whiteness is the self-deception of the privileged, the inauthenticity of dominant people within a racialized social hierarchy.” Robert E. Birt, “The Bad Faith of Whiteness” in What White Looks Like: African-American Philosophers on the Whiteness Question, ed. George Yancy (New York: Routledge, 2004), 58.
20. hooks, Black Looks, 26.
21. Ibid., 32.
22. Ibid., 33.
23. For a through discussion of discourse analysis see Laetitia Zeeman, Marie Poggenpoel, C. P. H. Myburgh, and N. Van Der Linde, “An Introduction to a Post Modern Approach to Educational Research: Discourse Analysis,” Education 123 (2002): 96–102.
24. Kenneth Burke, Language as Symbolic Action (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 3.
25. Burke goes on to say that: “Language referring to the realm of the nonverbal is necessarily talk about things in terms of what they are not—and in this sense we start out beset with a paradox. Such language is but a set of labels, signs for helping us find our way about. Indeed they can even be so useful that they help us to invent ingenious ways of threatening to destroy ourselves. But even accuracy of this powerful sort does not get around the fact that such terms are sheer emptiness, as compared with the substance of the things they name.” Language as Symbolic Action, 6.
26. hooks, Black Looks, 1.
27. M. H. Abrams. A Glossary of Literary Terms (Fort Worth, TX: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1993), 66.
28. hooks, Black Looks, 63.
29. Ibid., 66–69.
30. Ibid., 72–73.
31. Ian Parker. Discourse Dynamics: Critical Analysis for Social and Individual Psychology (London: Routledge, 1992), 37.
32. Zeeman et al., “An Introduction to a Postmodern Approach to Educational Research,” 96–102.
33. Responding to Kathleen Cleaver’s statement that “She was destroyed by the movement,” hooks writes that “Insistence on patriarchal values, on equating black liberation with black men gaining access to male privilege that would enable them to assert power over black women, was one of the most significant forces undermining radical struggle.” See hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press), 16.
34. hooks, Yearning, 15.
35. hooks, Black Looks, 44.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid.
39. Ibid., 45.
40. hooks, Yearning, 15.
41. Ibid.
42. Ibid., 19.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., 15.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., 15.
47. Commodification of blackness as other refers to the limiting of blackness to something that can be sold to white society, regardless of whether it is produced by blacks. To illustrate this, she uses Spike Lee’s She Gotta Have It and School Daze and August Wilson’s Fences as examples; see hooks, Yearnings, 18.
48. hooks, Yearning, 22.
49. Ibid.
50. Ibid..