Who is bell hooks?

Well, Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name as bell hooks, is an
American author, feminist, social activist and a fearless cultural critic. She
was born in 1952 and she grew up in a working-class family with five sisters
and one brother. This fact of being more girls at home than men it is very
interesting in order to understand what she has became. She was an avid
reader and she got influenced by people such us Sojourner Truth (whose
speech Aint I a Woman inspired her first major work), Pablo Freire, Malcolm
X or Martin Luther King among others.
Growing up in the south also instilled in her a fear of doing or saying the
wrong thing. These early fears almost discouraged her from pursuing her
love of writing. She received almost no support from her family, who felt
that women were better suited for a more traditional role. The social
atmosphere of the then-segregated south added to their discouragement.
hooks chose to rebel against this by adopting the pseudonym of her greatgrandmother and creating another self that was linked to her female
ancestors who were defiant in their need to achieve speech. By creating this
other self, hooks empowered herself to fight back against the opposition
that surrounded her.

Why is she so important?

So coming from what I just said now comes the following question, why is
she so important? Bell hooks is one of the very first women who mainly
focused her writing on race and gender in order to explain to the world how
mass media and the popular culture invade us every day with sexism and
we dont even notice it because we are already used to it. And that is her
role in life to make people aware of what is happening around us, telling
them what is feminism, black feminism, sexism, racism, and basically social
consciousness. As she said in her book I want to have in my hand a little
book so that I can say, read this book and it will tell you what feminism is
about.
She has been trying for many years to teach everybody but especially men
what feminism is. For years, she has courageously taken to the front line
and, with her lets call it academic sword, deconstructed everyday
occurrences as evidence of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

Bell hooks today

So to conclude we have learned that bell hooks has been a courageously
and fair feminist fighter for over 50 years. Today bell hooks is still working
on her mission of having a global consciousness about many things but

mainly about feminism which is what we are interested in. She is promoting
new ways of education for critical consciousness because educating our
children from the very beginning could make them aware of what we are not
able to see today. Remember a few lessons ago when we talk about toys
and we saw some images of girls playing with guns? This could be pretty
normal for the future generations if we are able to spread bell hooks word
enough.