Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Bell Hooks

Quote by Bell Hooks

“More than ever before, women talk about the difficulties of being powerful ina a world that has changed a lot but that still remains patriarchal. Hence we have enormous freedom in a world that is not yet fully accepting of our freedom”

Quote by Bell Hooks

Work

Communion: The Female Search for Love

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Bell Hooks
Bell Hooks

Bell Hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins, is an American author, scholar, and activist. Her work primarily focuses on issues of race, gender, and social justice, particularly on feminist and black feminist thought. Hooks' works include novels, poetry, academic writings, and autobiographies, and her writing style is beloved by readers for its profound social insight and desire for change. more

You May Also Like

“Self-proclaimed feminist thinkers have colluded with the patriarchal pornographic imagination's use of mass media to represent the sexual resubordination of women by men as cute, playful, and harmless ... we are bombarded with images suggesting that male sexual domination of women in no way threatens female autonomy or independence. In actuality, male domination of females in the sexual arena ... is a constant reminder that females are not free, that we have not attained full equal rights or equity.”

“If feminists had continued to talk about love, then we would have needed to speak about the extreme lovelessness that is at the heart of domination. ... patriarchy, like any colonizing system, does not create the context for men and women to love each other ... genuine love between females and males could only emerge in a context where the sexes would come together to challenge and change patriarchal thought.”

“Under the guise that their predilections were about something biological - a misplaced female mind in a male body rather than sexual excitement - they have represented themselves as an oppressed minority akin to homosexuals. This has enabled them to infiltrate their fantasies and priorities into policy making at local and national levels, health policy, sports policy, education policy, prison policy.”

“Women and girls need single sex toilets to avoid men's sexual harassment and aggression. In the UK in 2018, it was reported that just under 90% of complaints regarding changing room sexual assaults, voyeurism and harassment were about incidents in unisex facilities, and two thirds of all sexual harassment in leisure centres and public swimming pools were in unisex changing rooms.”

“Transgender rights activists campaign to downgrade the importance of biology in support of the claim that men can really be women. This has had particularly widespread consequences for women's status. For a feminist movement to exist, women have to be thinkable, to conceptualise themselves as an oppressed group based upon a common characteristic. If the word 'woman' ceases to have any meaning, or the meaning is downgraded, then feminism cannot exist because 'women' have become unthinkable. This erasure of women is the ultimate triumph of transvestism at this time in history.”

“Transvestites are seeking to empty the word 'woman' of meaning and are forming language about female biology to suit their own sexual excitements and to prevent any challenge to their ideology. They have created their own language to downgrade women's status such as the word 'ciswoman' which they use to distinguish adult human females from 'transwomen'. In this way they demote those born female to just one variety of the category of women and provide an object lesson in how men have labelled and defined women to suit their purposes over the centuries of male domination.”

“Men who practice transvestism as an expression of the male sex right have been turned into a rights-bearing category, an oppressed minority whose excitements have precedents over the dignity, safety, and civil and political freedoms of women, and even the existence of women as a social and biological category. This achievement has depending upon obscuring their sexual motivations in favour of the idea that they are somehow essentially female in their heads.”