Bell Hook Critique

The readings for this week consisted of the second half of Bell Hooks’ work. In this book, Hooks is giving the reader an insight into her experiences as a Black female feminist educator teaching about Black women’s issues. Although I myself am not Black, as a Mexican-American woman pursuing an academic career, I could relate to a vast amount of what Hooks stated throughout the book. The point that struck me the most was the discussion of critiques and the validation of experience in academia (Hooks, 1994).
In chapter 6, Hooks critiques Diana Fuss’s Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference. Hooks describes how Fuss’s writing critiques Black female authors for focusing too much on experience (p. 78-83). By citing this critique,
Hooks raises the important point of whose work is seen as valid, and who gets to decide the validity of others work and experiences.
Fuss is a white scholar, who faced very different issues than those being raised in the writings she critiques. Although we should all be able to criticize work by anyone if there is need for critique, why is it that the majority of critiquing is conducted by individuals in positions of power and authority, and why are these critiques aimed at marginalized groups? I have seen students criticize professors who are members of marginalized groups for assigning literature from said groups. Works by Latino/as, women and individuals with disabilities have been rejected as legitimate work because it did not fit into the personal narratives of the individuals rejecting said works. I have witnessed students call professors biased for assigning works by women and discussing women’s issues in a Women’s Studies class. This leads me to believe that these critiques are not necessarily critiques, but rather ways to shut down dialogues that address power
structures and the ways that these power structures maintain the domination of one group.
As Hooks states: “All students, not just those from marginalized groups, seem more eager to enter energetically into classroom discussion when they perceive it as relating directly to them” (p. 87). It is not that students dislike personal experience it classroom discussion, it is that when said experience forces them to address their own place in the power structure, it is much easier to disregard this experience as valid. In my final semester as an undergraduate student, I participated in a brown bag lunch that was meant to discuss the media’s portrayals of women. I found out there that the athletics department was requiring all athletes who were available at the time to attend any brown bag lunches involving discussions of gender. The whole time, I was stuck arguing with twenty large football players about how portrayals of women in the media could translate to sexism in real life experiences. Any claim that I made was deemed as anecdotal evidence, while any claim that was made by the players was greeted with a head nod and a “true” from the other players. There were women there who had similar backgrounds and had shared similar experiences as my own, but they were
promptly shut down as well. I refused to keep quiet and argued my point until the end of the lunch. Later during the day, I encountered some of the football players while waiting for my bus in front of the campus. They proceed to drive by while yelling and swearing at me, in an attempt to intimidate me. These individuals were so confident in their ultimate positions of power and their right to stop discourse they disagreed with, that they did not stop to question there might be consequences to their actions.
It is not necessarily that these football players were bad people, but because their experience had never been directly challenged, it made their dismissal of me valid in their eyes. By ignoring personal experiences in academia, we are perpetuating actions like the ones these players took as acceptable ways to respond to topics we do not like.