“. . . dissidents are anchored to revolutionary possibilities that demand both intellectual discipline and irrepressible courage to speak the unspeakable, to stand alone if necessary, and to accept the material and emotional consequences of tramping over hegemony’s “holy” ground.”
Antonia Darder, 2011
“Moving from silence into speech is for the oppressed, the colonized, the exploited. . . a gesture of defiance that heals, that makes new life and new growth possible. It is that act of speech, of “talking back,” that is no mere gesture of empty words, that is the expression of our movement from object to subject—the liberated voice.”
bell hooks, Talking Back, Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, 1989
I am reminded while reading Antonia Darder’s riveting anthology A Dissident Voice: Essays in Culture, Pedagogy and Power of teachers, scholars, activists, feminists, colleagues, and dissidents who emerged from marginalized/racialized communities in the U.S. and impacted my intellectual life in significant ways—none more so than bell hooks, with whom I shared a forty-year friendship. It is important to embrace the dissident women among us so often maligned and misunderstood. For four decades, bell hooks’s dissenting voice, in her writing and teaching, has been loud and unrelenting, beginning with the publication of her first book, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, followed by, to name a few: Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, and Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. One of the most prolific and radical contemporary Black feminist scholars/critics, bell hooks’s Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black provides a portrait of a dissident Black intellectual whose untimely death at 69 in December 2021 generated perhaps the most commentary that I recall ever having read when a Black woman writer departs. This is how she explains her choosing the name bell hooks and the legacy of her dissident great-grandmother:
I was a young girl buying bubble gum at the corner store when I first really heard the full name bell hooks. I had just “talked back” to a grown person. Even now I can recall the surprised look, the mocking tones that informed me I must be kin to bell hooks—a sharp-tongued woman, a woman who spoke her mind, a woman who was not afraid to talk back. I claimed this legacy of defiance, of will, of courage, affirming my link to female ancestors who were bold and daring in their speech. . . . bell hooks as I discovered, claimed, and invented her was my ally, my support. (hooks 1989, 9)
My friendship with Gloria Watkins (she was not yet bell hooks) began at the 1981 National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) conference in Storrs, Connecticut, during which Audre Lorde delivered a ground-breaking, hard-hitting keynote speech, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” in which she spoke about the racism of white women. It was the same year that the Women’s Research and Resource Center at Spelman College was founded. Gloria (bell hooks) was promoting her first book, Ain’t I A Woman. We shared a dormitory room, talked all night the first day we met—about the whiteness of the women’s liberation movement in the U.S. and NWSA—and continued to talk until her untimely death. I did not realize then why we spent all night that first night talking in my dorm room and why we would continue talking for the next four decades. Later I came to realize it was our memories of dissident women in our families and our passionate connection to feminist politics.
The first feminist I ever knew was my mother. Though she would not have used this term, her words and deeds were undeniably feminist. I have no explanation for this since Ernestine Varnado Guy was born in Canton, Mississippi, in 1919 to a stay-at-home mom and a traditional Baptist minister. Frustrated as a math teacher in the Memphis public schools, she chose to work in the male-dominated field of accounting in the business office of a Black college where her brother-in-law, Dr. Levi Watkins, Sr., was President. Her love of mathematics and work choices occurred long before the contemporary women’s liberation movement in the U.S. advocated for gender equity in the workplace or the need for girls to have greater access to STEM disciplines. When I was in the eighth grade, she left my father and moved with her three daughters around the corner to live with her parents. While she never fulfilled her professional goal of becoming a CPA—probably because of the demands of being a single mom—she always preached to her daughters the importance of pursuing one’s dreams even if they remain elusive.
The most memorable example of my mom’s loud resistance to race and gender scripts, probably like bell hooks’s namesake, took place in 1958 when I was in the ninth grade and the Memphis public schools were controlled by white men. Bothered by conventional gender norms that positioned females as, first of all homemakers, she petitioned school authorities to waive their home economics requirements for girls and demanded that I take typing, which was reserved for juniors and seniors who were presumably headed for clerical jobs. Males were required to take auto mechanics and shop. This act of defiance on my mother’s part sent several clear messages to me: that learning to be a homemaker was not as important as preparing for a career; that the skills of a typist would be more useful to a college-bound student; and that Black women could resist white patriarchal authority, even in the Jim and Jane Crow South. Her petition was granted, so I may have been the first Memphis public school girl to escape obligatory homemaking classes. Following the example of my mother, I developed the habit of “talking back” which girls were discouraged from doing, as was the case with Gloria.
What I came to cherish about the embrace of a dissident, feminist identity I learned from reading and talking endlessly to Gloria/bell, which began that night at NWSA. Like another dissident scholar/activist Angela Davis and the architects of the Combahee River Collective statement, bell hooks emerges from a robust African American Left tradition which is anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and critical of patriarchy, wherever it rears its head. Near the beginning of Talking Back, bell acknowledges Davis’s impact on her as a young, evolving dissident:
[“When I was a young soldier for the revolution.”] Angela Davis spoke these words. They moved me. I say them here and hope to say them in many places. This is how deeply they touched me—evoking memories of innocence, of initial passionate commitment to political struggle (hooks 1989, 10.
Bell hooks’s transgressive writings would have a significant impact on my evolving scholarship. In her first monograph on Black women and feminism, she makes the surprising point that nineteenth-century white female reformers harbored more intense racist attitudes toward Black women than they did toward
Black men, which is ironic in light of the “bonds of womanhood” thesis which many other white feminist historians advanced in their attempts to explain alliances between Black and white women in various reform movements. Hooks argues that it was fear of contamination and sexual competition that caused white women to resist cooperation with Black women, including in women’s mobilizations during the so called “first wave” of the women’s movement:
. . . black men were more accepted in white reform circles than black women. Negative attitudes toward black women were the result of prevailing racist-sexist stereotypes that portrayed black women as morally impure. Many white women felt that their status as ladies would be undermined were they to associate with black women. No such moral stigma was attached to black men. Black male leaders like Frederick Douglass, James Forten. . .and others were occasionally welcome in white and social circles. . . . Given. . . the history of white male sexual lust for black females we cannot rule out the possibility that white women were reluctant to acknowledge black women socially for fear of sexual competition. . . . White women saw black women as a direct threat to their social standing—for how could they be idealized as virtuous, goddess-like creatures if they associated with black women who were seen by the white public as licentious and immoral? (hooks 1981, 130-131)
In her second book, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), now widely used in Women’s Studies classes, there is a hard-hitting analysis of the insensitivity of Women’s Studies programs in the early years to race, class, and ethnicity, and a biting critique of racist writings by white feminists: “White women who dominate feminist discourse, who for the most part make and articulate feminist theory, have little or no understanding of white supremacy as a racial politic, of the psychological impact of class, of their political status within a racist, sexist, capitalist state” (4).
If I could speak to Gloria/bell one more time, I would tell her what it meant to share a long friendship with a “dissident.” Observing her and reading her feminist books, as well as having the example of my mother and her great-grandmother, I found it easier to resist stifling gender norms in both my personal and professional lives as it related to appropriate behavior for “good,” “lady-like” women. I journeyed to distant and unfamiliar places, wore the clothes I wanted to wear, wrote the books I wanted to write, studied the transgressive Black women I wanted to be like (Lorraine, Alice, Angela, Audre), took unpopular stances, refused to be quiet in public, risked being misunderstood, chose the friendships and partnerships I desired, advocated loudly for my passions. Fears I might have harbored about being too aggressive, the stereotypical “angry Black woman,” or gender non-conforming had to be abandoned. I am fortunate to have lived the life I wanted to live. Like so many of us, I am grateful for her example.
hooks, bell. 1981. Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press.
_____. 1984. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press.
_____. 1989. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston: South End Press.