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Bell Hooks

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Famous Bell Hooks Quotes

“When we see love as the will to nurture one's own or another's spiritual growth, revealed through acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming responsibility, the foundation of all love in our life is the same. There is no special love exclusively reserved for romantic partners. Genuine love is the foundation of our engagement with ourselves, with family, with friends, with partners, with everyone we choose to love.”

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Author:Bell Hooks
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“Most men and women born in the fifties or earlier were socialized to believe that marriages and/or committed romantic bonds of any kind should take precedence over all other relationships. Had I been evaluating my relationships from a standpoint that emphasized growth rather than duty and obligation, I would have understood that abuse irreparably undermines bonds. All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.... Women who would no more tolerate a friendship in which they were emotionally and physically abused stay in romantic relationships where these violations occur regularly. Had they brought to these bonds the same standards they bring to friendship they would not accept victimization.”

LoveLove QuotesFeminismRespectAbuseFeministBell HooksFriendships And Love
Book:All About Love: New Visions
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“What the world needs now is liberated men who have the qualities Silverstein cites, men who are 'empathetic and strong, autonomous and connected, responsible to self, to family and friends, to society, and capable of understanding how those responsibilities are, ultimately, inseparable.' Men need feminist thinking. It it the theory that supports their spiritual evolution and their shift away from the patriarchal model. Patriarchy is destroying the well-being of men, taking their lives daily.”

MenFeminismFeministManSpiritual GrowthGood ManPatriarchyManhoodMasculinityFeminist QuotesMaleBell HooksMaleness
Book:The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
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“There seems to be a fear that if men are raised to be people of integrity, people who can love, they will be unable to be forceful and act violently if needed.... We see that females that are raised with the traits any person of integrity embodies can act with tenderness, with assertiveness, and with aggression if and when aggression is needed.”

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Book:The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
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“Whether they regard themselves as pro- or antifeminist, most women want men to do more of the emotional work in relationships. And most men, even those who wholeheartedly support gender equality in the workforce, still believe that emotional work is female labor. Most men continue to uphold the sexist decree that emotions have no place in the work world and that emotional labor at home should be done by females.”

MenFeelingsWorkFeminismEmotionsFeministGenderWorking TogetherSexismWork EthicMasculinityFemininityGender EqualityGender RolesSexistGender StereotypesGender Differences
Author:Bell Hooks
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“The confusion boys experience about their identity is heightened during adolescence. In many ways the fact that today's boy often has a wider range of emotional expression in early childhood, but if forced to suppress emotional awareness later on makes adolescence all the more stressful for boys. Tragically, were it not for the extreme violence that has erupted among teenage boys throughout our nation, the emotional life of boys would still be ignored. Although therapists tell us that mass media images of male violence and domination teach boys that violence is alluring and satisfying, when individual boys are violent, especially when they murder randomly, pundits tend to behave as though it were a mystery why boys are so violent.”

MenViolenceFeminismMen And WomenMurderFeministMental IllnessTeensAdolescenceMasculinityTeenagersBell HooksTeengerThe Will To Change
Author:Bell Hooks
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“If you go door to door in our nation and talk to citizens about domestic violence, almost everyone will insist that they do not support male violence against women, that they believe it to be morally and ethically wrong. However, if you then explain that we cannot end male violence against women by challenging patriarchy, and that means no longer accepting the notion that men should have more rights and privileges than women because of biological difference or that men should have the power to rule over women, that is when the agreement stops. There is a gap between the values they claim to hold and their willingness to do the work of connecting thought and action, theory and practice to realize these values and thus create a more just society.”

ValuesPracticeSocietyFeminismFeministMoralsPatriarchyTheory And PracticeBell HooksMorality Without Religion
Book:All About Love: New Visions
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“In the Mars-and-Venus-gendered universe, men want power and women want emotional attachment and connection. On this planet nobody really has the opportunity to know love since it is power and not love that is the order of the day. The privilege of power is at the heart of patriarchal thinking. Girls and boys, men and women who have been taught this way almost always believe love is not important, or if it is, it is never as important as being powerful, dominant, in control, on top-being right. Women who give seemingly selfless adoration and care to the men in their lives appear to be obsessed with 'love,' but in actuality their actions are often a covert way to hold power. Like their male counterparts, they enter relationships speaking the words of love even as their actions indicate that maintaining power and control is their primary agenda.”

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Book:All About Love: New Visions
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“No matter that information abounds that lets the public know that gay males come from two-parent homes and can be macho and women-hating, misguided assumptions about what makes a male gay still flourish. Every day boys who express feelings are psychologically terrorized, and in extreme cases brutally beaten, by parents who fear that a man of feeling must be homosexual. Gay men share with straight men the same notions about acceptable masculinity.”

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Book:The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
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“Men come to sex hoping that it will provide them with all of the emotional satisfaction that would have come from love. Most men think that sex will provide them with a sense of being alive, connected, that sex will offer closeness, intimacy, pleasure. And more often than not sex simply does not deliver the goods. This fact does not lead men to cease obsessing about sex; it intensifies their lust and their longing.”

LoveSexFeminismFeministSexualityLustMasculinityFeminist QuotesPornBell Hooks
Book:The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love
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“Somehow, as we made our entrance into the realm of young womanhood, we began to lose power. Fascinating research on girlhood is happening these days. It confirms that young girls often feel strong, courageous, highly creative, and powerful until they begin to receive undermining sexist messages that encourage them to conform to conventional notions of femininity. To conform they have to give up power.”

PowerFeminismFeministConformityWomen EmpowermentFemininityWomen S StrengthGirlhoodFeminine PowerFeminist Literature
Book:Communion: The Female Search for Love
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“When we understand love as the will to nurture our own and another's spiritual growth, it becomes clear that we cannot claim to love if we are hurtful and abusive. Love and abusive cannot coexist. Abuse and neglect are, by definition, the opposites of nurturance and care.... An overwhelming majority of us come from dysfunctional families in which we were taught that we were not okay, where we were shamed, verbally and/or physically abused, and emotionally neglected even as we were also taught to believe that we were loved. For most folks it is just too threatening to embrace a definition of love that would no longer enable us to see love as present in our families. Too many of us need to cling to a notion of love that either makes abuse acceptable or at least makes it seem that whatever happened was not that bad.”

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Book:All About Love: New Visions
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“Like many liberal men in the age of feminism, he believed women should have equal access to jobs and be given equal pay, but when it came to matters of home and heart he still believed caregiving was the female role. Like many men, he wanted a woman to be 'just like his mama' so that he did not have to do the work of growing up.”

FeminismFeministManhoodEmotional IntelligenceMasculinityLiberalMan Child
Book:All About Love: New Visions
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“Revolutionary feminism embraces men who are able to change, who are capable of responding mutually in a subject-to-subject encounter where desire and fulfillment are in no way linked to coercive subjugation. This feminist vision of the sexual imaginary is the space few men seem able to enter.”

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Book:Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations
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“Radical militant feminist believes that women of color and Black women in particular have written the cutting edge theory and really were the individuals who exploded feminist theory into the directions that has made it more powerful. So I see us as the leaders not just of Black people and Black women in terms of feminism but in terms of the movement as a whole.”

PeopleBelieveMadeWholeIndividualBlackTermPowerfulLeaderCuttingWrittenFeminismMovementParticularColorTheoryEdgesFeministMade ItRadicalBlack PeopleBlack WomenMilitantCutting EdgeFeminist Theory
Author:Bell Hooks
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“If we are ever to construct a feminist movement that is not based on the premise that men and women are always at war with one another, then we must be willing to acknowledge the appropriateness of complex critical responses to writing by men even if it is sexist. Clearly women can learn from writers whose work is sexist, even be inspired by it, because sexism may be simply one dimension of that work. Concurrently fiercely critiquing the sexism does not mean that one does not value the work.”

IfsMenWritingMayMeanDoeWarValuesFeminismMovementWillingMen And WomenCriticismResponseComplexesInspiredFeministCriticalAcknowledgeDimensionsSexismConstructsPremisesSexistBe InspiredLiterary CriticismFeminist MovementAppropriateness
Book:Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics
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“A central tenet of modern feminist thought has been the assertion that "all women are oppressed." This assertion implies that women share a common lot, that factors like class, race, religion, sexual preference, etc. do not create a diversity of experience that determines the extent to which sexism will be an oppressive force in the lives of individual women.”

Has BeensIndividualForceCommonRaceClassShareModernDiversityDetermineFeministFactorsOppressionEtcSexismOppressedPreferenceAssertion
Book:Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center
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“When the feminist movement was at its zenith in the late 60's and early 70's, there was a lot of moving away from the idea of the person. It was: let's talk about the ideas behind the work, and the people matter less. It was kind of a gimmicky thing, but lots of feminist women were doing it. Many of us took the names of our female ancestors - bell hooks is my maternal great grandmother - to honor them and debunk the notion that we were these unique, exceptional women. We wanted to say, actually, we were the products of the women who'd gone before us.”

PeopleKindPersonsIdeasMatterWantedMovingNamesBehindsGoneMovementProductsHonorLateUniqueFemaleNotionFeministGrandmotherAncestorBellsHookExceptionalMoving AwayFeminist MovementZenithGreat Grandmother
Author:Bell Hooks
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“Feminist education — the feminist classroom — is and should be a place where there is a sense of struggle, where there is visible acknowledgment of the union of theory and practice, where we work together as teachers and students to overcome the estrangement and alienation that have become so much the norm in the contemporary university.”

ShouldTogetherPracticeStruggleTeacherStudentsTheoryOvercomingUnionsUniversityFeministContemporaryVisibleWorking TogetherClassroomNormAlienationAcknowledgmentTeacher And StudentEstrangementTheory And PracticeFeminist Theory
Book:Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black
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“As all advocates of feminist politics know most people do not understand sexism or if they do they think it is not a problem. Masses of people think that feminism is always and only about women seeking to be equal to men. And a huge majority of these folks think feminism is anti-male. Their misunderstanding of feminist politics reflects the reality that most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media.”

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Author:Bell Hooks
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“It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term “feminism,” to focus on the fact that to be “feminist” in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression.”

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Author:Bell Hooks
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“The process begins with the individual woman’s acceptance that American women, without exception, are socialized to be racist, classist and sexist, in varying degrees, and that labeling ourselves feminists does not change the fact that we must consciously work to rid ourselves of the legacy of negative socialization.”

DoeFactsIndividualProcessFeminismAcceptanceDegreesNegativeFeministLegacyExceptionRacistBad AssSexistAmerican WomanLabelingSocialization
Book:Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism
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“Feminist effort to end patriarchal domination should be of primary concern precisely because it insists on the eradication of exploitation and oppression in the family context and in all other intimate relationships. It is that political movement which most radically addresses the person – the personal – citing the need for the transformation of self, of relationships, so that we might be better able to act in a revolutionary manner, challenging and resisting domination, transforming the world outside the self.”

WorldNeedsShouldPersonsEndsSelfMightAblePoliticalChallengesEffortMovementConcernTransformationFeministOppressionPrimariesRevolutionaryIntimateAddressesExploitationDominationTransformingResistingCitingIntimate RelationshipsPolitical MovementsTransforming The World
Book:Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black
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“All efforts at self-transformation challenge us to engage in on-going, critical self-examination and reflection about feminist practice, and about how we live in the world. This individual commitment, when coupled with engagement in collective discussion, provides a space for critical feedback which strengthens our efforts to change and make ourselves anew.”

WorldSelfIndividualChallengesSpaceEffortPracticeReflectionCommitmentTransformationFeministCriticalDiscussionCollectivesEngagementFeedbackExaminationSelf TransformationSelf-examination
Author:Bell Hooks
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“Feminist pedagogy can only be liberatory if it is truly revolutionary because the mechanisms of appropriation within white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy are able to co-opt with tremendous ease that which merely appears radical or subversive”

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Book:Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black
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“Given the way universities work to reinforce and perpetuate the status quo, the way knowledge is offered as commodity, Women's Studies can easily become the place where revolutionary feminist thought and feminist activism are submerged or made secondary to the goals of academic careerism”

WayMadeGivenGoalStudyUniversityFeministActivismRevolutionaryAcademicCommodityStatus QuoSubmerged
Book:Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black
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