Reading Experience, renewing Theory: bell hooks’ Feminism

Abstract

This article analyzes the work of feminist theorist and cultural critic bell hooks, paying special attention to the place of individual and collective experience in her intellectual project. In this project, the production of knowledge attends to the experiences of the author and the black communities in which she grew up, which in turn are re-signified in the light of the theories developed by hooks and other exponents of black feminism. For hooks, attending to experience is also a powerful pedagogical strategy for the development of critical and transformative thinking. This article analyzes hooks’ essays, especially the texts that highlight the links between experience and theorizing. The trajectory and intellectual production of hooks is read in the context of radical black feminism that takes shape in the 1960s and 1970s.