Bell hooks
| bell hooks | |
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bell hooks in October 2014
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| Born |
Gloria Jean Watkins September 25, 1952 Hopkinsville, Kentucky |
| Education |
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| Occupation | Author, academic |
| Known for | Feminism, social activism |
| Notable work | |
| Parent(s) |
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| Website | bellhooksinstitute |
Gloria Jean Watkins (born September 25, 1952), better known by her pen name bell hooks, is an American author, feminist, and social activist. The name "bell hooks" is derived from that of her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks.
The focus of hooks's writing has been the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she describes as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She has published over 30 books and numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. Primarily through a postmodern perspective, she has addressed race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism.
In 2014, she founded the bell hooks Institute at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky.
hooks was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky to a working-class family. Her father, Veodis Watkins, was a custodian and her mother, Rosa Bell Watkins, was a homemaker. She had five sisters and one brother. An avid reader, she was educated in racially segregated public schools, and wrote of great adversities when making the transition to an integrated school, where teachers and students were predominantly white.
She graduated from Hopkinsville High School in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. She obtained her B.A. in English from Stanford University in 1973, and her M.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1976. In 1983, after several years of teaching and writing, she completed her doctorate in literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, with a dissertation on author Toni Morrison.
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