bell hooks

Gloria Jean Watkins — bell hooks, deliberately lowercase — was one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century, a scholar whose work on race, gender, class, and love transformed academic discourse and made critical theory accessible to millions of ordinary readers. Her 1981 book Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism challenged mainstream feminism's exclusion of Black women, and her subsequent works — Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, All About Love, and over 30 other books — made her one of the most widely read intellectuals in the world.

Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1952, hooks grew up in a segregated community and attended Stanford University, where she began writing Ain't I a Woman as an undergraduate. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and held teaching positions at Yale, Oberlin, and the City College of New York before founding the bell hooks Institute at Berea College in Kentucky.

hooks wrote in a style that was simultaneously scholarly and deeply personal — she believed that academic writing should be accessible to everyone, not just people with advanced degrees. Her work on love, particularly All About Love: New Visions (2000), found a new audience in the 2010s and 2020s through social media, introducing her ideas to a generation that hadn't encountered her in college. She joined the ancestors on December 15, 2021, at 69.