Writer and activist bell hooks, whose lowercase pseudonym belied her towering achievements as an architect of what came to be known as intersectional feminism, died today at age sixty-nine at her home in Berea, Kentucky. The news was announced by her niece, Ebony Motley. hooks, whose work addressed the systems of oppression spawned by the overlapping of race, class, sexuality, and gender, gained wide acclaim for Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981), which explored the impact of racism and sexism on Black women in relation to the feminist and civil rights movements that had recently reshaped American society. Just nineteen when she began work on the volume, she went on to become one of the country’s most influential feminist thinkers, publishing more than thirty books.
hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952 to a father who worked as a janitor and a mother who worked as a maid. She grew up in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and as a child attended segregated schools. Encouraged by her great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks, she frequently gave poetry readings in church. Following a rocky transition to the predominantly white Hopkinsville High School, an experience that would prove transformative, Watkins attended Stanford University on a full scholarship and went on to obtain her MA in English in 1976 from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She received her doctorate from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1983, after completing her dissertation on the...
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