Visionary Feminist Revisited: bell hooks
Envisioning ‘feminist masculinity’ long before anyone was ready to listen.
Gloria Jean Watkins (1952–2021) lived through a chaotic time in American cultural history. Author, scholar, social critic, her work focused on efforts to end cultural domination, to bring about peace and justice, and to do so within the shelter of spiritual practice. Best known for her work on feminism, race and class, she was one of the first to set her inquiry squarely within the intersections of these social issues.
Adopting her pen name from her maternal great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks (stylized in lower case as bell hooks), and completing her doctoral dissertation in 1983 at the University of California, Santa Cruz, hooks went on to teach at several major universities and to author more than thirty books. Many of her published works are non-scholarly and aim to inspire a wide community of readers.
Her influences included Toni Morrison, Sojourner Truth, Brazilian educator Paulo Freire, Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez, psychologist Erich Fromm, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hạnh, and African American writer and activist James Baldwin. It was her study of community love and love ethic that would lead her to the teachings of Thich Nhat Hanh.
hooks’ career spanned the ups and downs of Second and Third Wave Feminism and she wrote extensively on the subject. But unlike many of her peers, her interpretation of the movement’s potential never excluded men. No where is this more prominent than in her 2004 book, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love.
hooks’ tendency to view issues in terms of their intersectionality I believe led her to investigate patriarchy with regard to it’s impact on men. She refers to a list of attributes that by the 1990s was already codified as a men’s identity exercise called the “man box.” Patriarchal masculinity is characterized by: emotional numbness (except for anger), physical violence, no fear or weakness, homophobia, avoiding any feminine traits, self-reliance, projecting aggression-dominance, and viewing women as objects or property.
It is hook’s view that patriarchy is responsible for the “box” that keeps men in their place and keeps them performing in an anti-feminist manner. Those fortunate to slip by this set of patriarchal male attributes, or emerge unscathed into adulthood, enter what she describes as “feminist masculinity.”
“Feminist thinking teaches us all, males especially, how to love justice and freedom in ways that foster and affirm life. Clearly we need new strategies, new theories, guides that will show us how to create a world where feminist masculinity thrives.” [1]
This raises two questions. First, what does hooks mean by “feminist masculinity?” And second, how do we accomplish the transformation she is suggesting? The first is a partnership model of gender relations:
“The core of feminist masculinity is a commitment to gender equality and mutuality as crucial to interbeing and partnership in the creating and sustaining of life.” [1]
hooks’ spirituality was an amalgam of Christianity and Buddhism, or Buddhist-Christian, and it is from Buddhism that she references the concept of “interbeing.” She was a follower of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh who coined the term to mean the interconnectedness of all things living and nonliving. More accurately, followers understand the term and related contemplative practices to mean the interdependence of all elements of existence. One’s meditations are thought to influence all other beings and indeed all of existence.
Referencing Olga Silverstein’s The Courage to Raise Good Men, hooks lays out the transformation as she sees it:
“What the world needs now is liberated men who [are] ‘empathic and strong, autonomous and connected, responsible to self, to family and friends, and to society, and capable of understanding how those responsibilities are, ultimately, inseparable.’” [1]
This notion of “liberated men” — men liberated from the patriarchy by feminist thinking — is the transformation.
The core difference between patriarchal masculinity and feminist masculinity is this act of liberation for men. And the key lies in connection both within the partner relationship and with the greater community:
“Patriarchal masculinity insists that real men must prove their manhood by idealizing aloneness and disconnection. Feminist masculinity tells men that they become more real through the act of connecting with others, through building community.” [1]
This is where the book’s title comes into play. “The will to change” and hooks’ discussion of feminist masculinity generally suggest that this is an effort of will for selected or individual men. There is little discussion of systemic patriarchy as applies to men, a curious omission for a scholar so focused on intersectionality.
“Feminism as a movement to end sexist domination and oppression offers us all the way out of patriarchal culture. The men who are awakening to this truth are generally younger men…” [1]
It becomes obvious from reading this book, and others of her works, that hooks is arguing along a very fine line, on the one hand applauding manhood and on the other showing how it is largely confined and restricted by the system of patriarchy. Her solution, at least in theory, is to nurture mutuality.
“Feminist masculinity offers men a way to connect with selfhood, uncovering the essential goodness of maleness and allowing everyone, male and female, to find glory in loving manhood.” [1]
Certainly demanding that men give up their patriarchal privileges, manhood or maleness with nothing visibly attractive to replace it — will not work. It would seem very unlikely that men so invested in patriarchal culture are prepared to notice, no less understand, the feminist variant of masculinity as something worthy.
The reality as closely observed after years of men’s positivity workshops and discussion groups is that most men come to these groups following negative experiences with patriarchal systems. Divorce, financial ruin, parent-child disputes, depression, loss of employment or other major difficulties.
hooks acknowledges as much from the perspective of mainstream feminism:
“Failure [by radical feminists] to examine the victimization of men keeps us from understanding maleness, from uncovering the space of connection that might lead more men to seek feminist transformation. It has been terribly difficult for advocates of feminism to create new ways of thinking about maleness, feminist paradigms for the reconstruction of masculinity.” [1]
This and other references in the book illustrate that hooks was either not aware of what she described as “feminist men’s movements” or perhaps chose not to acknowledge them. We should not be surprised, and this is not in any way meant as a criticism, because at the time the men’s positivity groups led by Paul Kivel, Tony Porter, Mark Greene and others were at best fringe movements and none called itself “feminist.”
Further complicating hooks' position and focus on masculinity were some of her contemporaries in feminist movement. hooks describes these “antimale feminist critiques of masculinity" as:
“[An absence] of any affirmation of that which is positive and potentially positive in male being. When individuals, including myself, wrote about the necessity of affirming men and identifying them as comrades in struggle, we were often labeled male-identified. The women who attacked us did not understand that it was possible to critique patriarchy without hating men.” [1]
hooks acknowledges that there is “a crisis in the hearts of men” and proposes a reintegration of hearts and minds:
“The quest for integrity is the heroic journey that can heal the masculinity crisis and prepare the hearts of men to give and receive love.” [1]
hooks makes clear that the disintegration of men begins in childhood, with the psychological damage inflicted on boys by patriarchy.
“It is a form of abuse that this culture continues to deny. Boys socialized to become patriarchs are being abused. As victims of child abuse via socialization in the direction of the patriarchal ideal, boys learn that they are unlovable.” [1]
As a result of the abuse, boys' relationships become increasingly focused on power, control, fear, shame, and isolation, “denying them their right to be whole, to have integrity.” Most young men suffer from especially low self-esteem, as they are constantly forced into lying and dissimulating “in order to perform the sexist male role.”
As adult men, these individuals have learned that their manhood is affirmed by a lack of interest in personal growth and an inability to experience grief, love or emotions other than anger, resulting in internalized denial, depression and rage. Instead of personal growth, men are systematically socialized to convey an unreasonable degree of control of self and others.
One reviewer of The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love described the work as deconstructing a predominant cultural ethic:
“Hooks meticulously deconstructs the process by which men are conditioned towards violence and instilled with flawed perceptions of masculinity rather than merely highlighting the injustices of patriarchy. For the first time, I encountered the concept that men are both harmed by patriarchy and advantaged by it.” [2]
Yet at the same time hooks opens the door to men’s work, whether one wishes to define it as “feminist,” “positive” or “integrated.” Just as feminism amounts to working to overcome patriarchal restrictions placed on women, men’s positivity work amounts to overcoming patriarchal restrictions placed on men.
“Responsible men are capable of self-criticism. If more men were doing the work of self-critique, then they would not be wounded, hurt or chagrined when critiqued by others, especially women with whom they are intimate.” [1]
The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (2004) shares many similarities with hook’s other main text on men and masculinity. We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity was published in 2003, just prior to The Will to Change, and covers public and private perceptions of Black masculinity and its stereotypes. Black men suffer, in hooks’ view, from what she terms “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” Applying the further intersectional dimension of race, hooks addresses many issues arising from Blacks’ marginalization in American history and culture.
Perhaps hooks’ most central innovation was to champion a new type of feminism in which “liberation from oppression altogether” became the goal, and that liberation was possible without demonizing and creating enemies. Within this framework of “dominator culture,” the liberation of men was just as significant as the liberation of women.
Following several scholarly books on feminist theory, hooks went on to publish a general audience review of the topic. Feminism for Everybody: Passionate Politics (2000) was intended to inform and uplift the uninitiated, and pointed to the many victories of feminism [4]. In her words: “It has changed how we see work, how we work, how we love.”
And yet hooks acknowledges that such broad cultural changes require a long process and much dedicated effort:
“We know from Buddhism that if we look for an end, we will despair and not sustain our efforts. But if we see it as a continual process of awakening, we can go forward.” [4]
Throughout her life, hooks maintained her spiritual affiliation with Buddhism, and particularly the work of Thich Nhat Hanh whose teachings on engaged Buddhist practice “offered a spiritual vision of the universe that promoted working for peace and justice.” [4] She understood that the dominator culture produced tremendous suffering for all parties, and that engaged Buddhism addressed this suffering directly.
Without a doubt today’s men’s movement is a continuing process of liberation. Although much expanded during the last twenty years, men’s work leaders continue to strive to liberate men from oppressive cultural norms, to dispense with the patriarchal attributes that have caused so much suffering, and in the process lead the way to a more integrated, positive, and yes, feminist masculinity.
Vic Caldarola is the founder and lead facilitator of the Shine a Light Men’s Project which leads men’s mindfulness discussion groups. He holds a PhD in Communication Studies.
