Gloria Jean Watkins, known by her pen name bell hooks (all lowercase), is a feminist, social activist and author of more than 30 books. Her work explores issues of race, gender and class, and how these social structures intersect to create and perpetuate forms of oppression. She has taught at many colleges and universities across the United States, and is currently a professor at Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, the same state where she was born in 1952. The name bell hooks is an homage to Watkins's maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. Her first major book, Ain't I a Woman? (1981), a reference to Sojourner Truth's famous speech, analyzed issues faced by black women that were often ignored by the larger feminist movement and showed how black women became an underclass American society. Ain't I a Woman? is often used in gender studies and philosophy courses.
In All About Love: New Visions (2000), hooks drew on the sometimes tumultuous relationships with her last two long-term boyfriends to write about modern love from a feminist perspective. She wrote it after searching for, and failing to find, a book that would explain to men the corrosive effects of sexist gender roles inside romantic relationships. All About Love does explore patriarchal pathologies, but it also delves into the very meaning of the word love, of how the concept has been watered down by society and lost a necessary definition. Hooks supplies that definition, among other insights, by saying that love does, or should, consist of affection, respect, recognition, commitment and trust, rather than what usually occurs--gender stereotypes, domination, control, ego and aggression. All About Love was released in paperback in 2001 (Morrow, $14.99, 9780060959470). --Tobias Mutter
