The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

hooks was born in Kentucky in 1952 as Gloria Jean Watkins. Profoundly influenced by the women in her lineage, she adopted the pen name “bell hooks” to honor her great-grandmother. She intentionally chose to keep her name lowercase to emphasize the importance of her works rather than her persona. In The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, hooks describes her own experiences with patriarchal culture and the ways that both her mother and her father acted out patriarchal structures that justified violence and aggression.

As a member of a rural working-class Black family with six children, hooks’s philosophies were shaped by her experiences with racism and classism. She attended a segregated school, and her family struggled financially; she recalled experiences such as hunting with her grandmother for worms and churning butter. hooks earned a BA in English in 1973 from Stanford University and an MA in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1976. In 1983, she obtained a doctorate in English from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She taught at several distinguished universities and received a plethora of awards, including the American Book Award in 1991 for Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics and the award from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 2001 for Happy to Be Nappy. hooks, who passed away in 2021, felt that her work as a teacher was her most rewarding and influential.

From an early age, hooks was an avid reader. She described herself as synonymous with her work—that is, the work of reading and thinking critically. In her book Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom, hooks explained:

I am passionate about everything in my life--first and foremost, passionate about ideas. And that’s a dangerous person to be in this society, not just because I’m a woman, but because it’s such a fundamentally anti-intellectual, anti-critical thinking society.

Much of her work emphasizes the power and necessity of love to dismantle patriarchal structures. She argued that love was the only thing that could save a society that turned this experience into something taboo. hooks identified as queer and as Buddhist-Christian. She saw love as transformative and described the civil rights movement as activism founded on love. hooks saw it as her mission in life to help people feel more connected through love.

hooks published more than 40 texts, including essays, poetry, and children’s books. Her work focuses on the intersection of feminist theory and race. Her first major book, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, reveals the oppression and devaluing of Black women throughout American history. In this work, hooks argues that the sexual exploitation of women during American slavery was never righted and continues in contemporary American patriarchal society. hooks expanded second-wave feminism beyond its white, middle-class roots to include people of color and lower-class women; she saw that the experience of womanhood is different for everyone but is always shaped by a culture of patriarchy and racism. hooks is considered one of the most prolific and influential feminist writers in history.