10.6092/issn.2611-2752/16469
Focusing on a historical and critical reading of bell hook’s work, the essay analyzes the feminist problem of the interconnection of sex, race and class in contemporary neoliberal society. hooks’ understanding of the ideological function of mass media highlights the link between representation and social reproduction, which is in turn critical for grasping the tension between the politicization and commodification of identities. On this analytical basis, the "margin” emerges as an epistemic and political stance, which allows us to both understand the polemical function of history and memory and to regard feminism as a politics of articulation.
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Speaking the Unspeakable. bell hooks’ Living Political Discourse
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Bringing the History Back In
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Paola Rudan
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history
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Speaking the Unspeakable. bell hooks’ Living Political Discourse
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https://doi.org/10.6092/issn.2611-2752/16469                                                            ISSN 2611-2752




                                 Speaking the Unspeakable.
                          bell hooks’ Living Political Discourse

                                                  Paola Rudan

                 Submitted: January 16, 2023 – Accepted: February 16, 2023 – Published: March 6, 2023



                                                      Abstract

       Focusing on a historical and critical reading of bell hook’s work, the essay analyzes the feminist
       problem of the interconnection of sex, race and class in contemporary neoliberal society. hooks’
       understanding of the ideological function of mass media highlights the link between representation
       and social reproduction, which is in turn critical for grasping the tension between the politicization
       and commodification of identities. On this analytical basis, the “margin” emerges as an epistemic
       and political stance, which allows us to both understand the polemical function of history and mem-
       ory and to regard feminism as a politics of articulation.
       Keywords: bell hooks; ideology; feminism; identity; history.




Paola Rudan: University of Bologna (Italy)
 https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5447-8945
 paola.rudan@unibo.it;  https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/paola.rudan
Paola Rudan is Associate professor in History of Political Thought at the Department of History, University of
Bologna. Her research focuses on the transatlantic dimension of Eighteenth and Nineteenth century political
thought, and in particular on the revolutions in North America and France, the South American wars of inde-
pendence and post-colonial constitutional process. Her research also addresses the history of women’s political
thought and feminist political theory. She is the author of monographs on Simón Bolívar’s and Jeremy Bentham’s
social and political thought, and of a book on the history of the concept of woman.



Copyright © 2023 Paola Rudan                                                                                         53
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons BY License.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Speaking the Unspeakable                                                                              USAbroad. Vol. 6 (2023)




1 Treacherous Celebrations
After her death, the mainstream media she stubbornly criticized throughout her career celebrated
bell hooks for her contribution to feminist political theory. These celebrations are justified by her
lifelong intellectual and political commitment to social movements for liberation, but also contain
some betrayals, more or less unintended. All obituaries explain that Gloria Jean Watkins had chosen
her nom de plume, spelled in lowercase, to highlight ideas and their collective production rather than the
person of the author. However, she is defined and represented as “an icon,” even listed among the most
influential women of the Twentieth century and gifted with an art cover by Time.1 Perhaps faced with
such a celebration she would have been critical, as she was when commenting Angela Davis’s militancy.
Hers was a rare case of female leadership in the Black power movement, but when Davis was raised to
iconic status by the media her experience became “exceptional,” thus discouraging young Black girls
from taking it as exemplary. And yet, bell hooks was also convinced that biographies of Black women
activists and radical thinkers are to be known for letting young girls learn that becoming a “radical
subject” is hard and contradictory, but always possible.2 This explains why she merged feminist theory,
history and biography, emphasizing the politics which lives in personal experience, while bridging
personal experience and history. The extremely dense phrase “white imperialist capitalist patriarchy,”
which in later writings became “transnational white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” was meant to
describe the historical process and the “global context” in which different experiences of oppression
and exploitation are interconnected, and complex relations of domination and power are deployed.3
     Few obituaries use that formula;4 one of them observes that today it appears “curiously baroque,”5
others speak of “economic inequalities” and insist on hook’s capacity to make feminism more “inclu-
sive,” listing “class” and “capitalism” with race and racism, gender and sexism as if all of these were
descriptive rather than polemical and political categories.6 However, as she explained in 1996 during
an “uncut” conversation with Stuart Hall, the phrase points to the necessity of sustaining “a critique of
capitalism,”7 which is what obituaries keep in silence, what remains unspeakable by the mainstream.
The celebration of bell hooks’ intellectual and political activism by the media risks segregating her
voice to the past, making of her “an item on the trophy shelves of corporate multiculturalism.”8 Thus,
while recognizing that hooks’ feminism spread from a specific historical conjuncture, we should also
ask ourselves what makes her critique of society a living political discourse which still questions our
present, allowing us to “speak the unspeakable.”9




1.   Time, December 15, 2021: https://time.com/6129096/bell-hooks-obituary-dream-hampton/

2.   bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation [1992] (New York: Routledge, 2015), 55–56.

3.   bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman. Black Women and Feminism (London and Winchester: Pluto Press, 1982), 27 and Where We Stand:
     Class Matters (New York and London: Routledge, 2000), 6. hooks speaks of this “global context” in an interview released
     to New York Times on December 10, 2015: https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/10/bell-
     hooks-buddhism-the-beats-and-loving-Blackness/

4.   See the articles published on December 15, 2021 in Washington Post, El Diario, and Rolling Stone. See also Il Foglio,
     December 16, 2021: https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2021/12/15/bell-hooks-dead/; https://www.eldiario.
     es/cultura/fallece-bell-hooks-autora-clave-feminismo-antirracista_1_8583043.html;        https://www.rollingstone.com/
     culture/culture-news/bell-hooks-obit-dead-1272204/;      https://www.ilfoglio.it/esteri/2021/12/16/news/bell-hooks-la-
     scrittrice-che-ha-reso-popolare-il-femminismo-radicale-e-intersezionale-3475351/

5.   Welt, December 16, 2021: https://www.welt.de/kultur/article235690764/Zum-Tod-von-bell-hooks-Die-Aktivistin.html

6.   New York Times; Zeit Online, December 15, 2021: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/15/books/bell-hooks-dead.html; https:
     //www.zeit.de/kultur/literatur/2021-12/bell-hooks-gestorben-us-feministin-autorin

7.   bell hooks, Stuart Hall, Uncut Funk. A Contemplative Dialogue (New York and London: Routledge, 2018), 117.

8.   These words are borrowed from Paul Gilroy’s foreword to Uncut Funk, where he observes how globalization valorized
     Afro-American culture outside the conditions of its production (Paul Gilroy, foreword to hooks, Hall, Uncut Funk, ix-xiii,
     xi).

9.   hooks, Uncut Funk, 88; Gilroy, foreword, ix.



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Speaking the Unspeakable                                                                                  USAbroad. Vol. 6 (2023)




2 Where We Stand
         Nowadays it is fashionable to talk about race or gender; the uncool subject is class. It’s the
         subject that makes us all tense, nervous and uncertain about where we stand.10

     Two processes are highlighted by these lines, written by bell hooks at the beginning of the new mil-
lennium as an introduction to Where We Stand. Class Matters. First, there is an integration of antagonis-
tic cultures such as feminism and Black resistance within contemporary capitalist society and political
institutions. Commodification has turned them into fashionable items, consumable “lifestyles.” Their
oppositional capacity has been neutralized by the very system they are supposed to contest. This
process has caused trouble in “the neat binary categories of white and Black, male and female.” Class
relationships split each of them in two: “the changing face of global labor” and transnational migra-
tions do not allow us to easily “identify the enemy, […] who to fear or who to challenge,” while making
it more difficult to organize, to find a common language fit for confronting an “ongoing and sustained
class warfare.”11 To be clear, this trouble is not new at all. Since her first seminal work, Ain’t I a Woman?,
by writing a Black feminist history of North America bell hooks actively contributed to showing how
the concept of woman is doubly polemical: while it is politicized by women in movement against
the patriarchal conditions of their social and political subordination, it is also crisscrossed by power
relations and conflicts fought along color and class lines.12 This is what makes the historical depth of
her inquiry so important: not only was she among the first to systematically unveil the patriarchal
and racist roots of the capitalist society born out of slavery, but her work is itself produced within
changing historical conditions, that is during the emergence of the neoliberal program which shaped
our global present.
     The Sixties are a turning point in hooks’ history of the present, a period overlapping the end of
segregation in 1964 and the beginning of the thirty-year-long dismantlement of the welfare state, in-
augurated in the name of Johnson’s War on Poverty under the auspices of Daniel P. Moynhian’s 1965
report, The Negro Family. According to hooks, at this turning point “class-based racial integration”
disrupted cross-class racial solidarity, which was stronger when the color line was carved into the
law. This integration prevented “a radical talented tenth […] lead the Black masses to revolt and cul-
tural revolution.” The public blame neoconservative social scientists put on Black women dependent
on welfare enforced the idea, already rooted in the slave society, that “the acquisition of patriarchal
power and privilege” was a paradigm for racial uplift.13 The white middle class family was made the
standard of integration for Black people by pitying “women who received assistance from the State
[…] because they did not have men to provide for them.” At the same time, in the early Seventies mass
media spread the image of the poor “as parasites and predators,” as if the massive unemployment and
underemployment of Black men were an individual guilt rather than a structural condition of the
existing economic system that prevented those wearing Black skin to dress as white breadwinners.14
     These changes were accompanied by “a shift in global politics”: under the pressure of anticolo-
nial movements, it became clear that “white people would have to do business with people of color
globally to maintain US imperialist economic domination,” and that “the old colonialism could not
form the basis of contemporary exchanges globally.” In this post-colonial context, when migrant la-
bor became increasingly central in production and services, women’s class mobility activated by the
feminist movement intertwined with cross-border mobility: “when privileged women left the home



10. hooks, Where We Stand, vii.

11.   Ibid, 6.

12. Cf. Paola Rudan, Donna. Storia e critica di un concetto polemico (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2020), ch. 3.

13. hooks, Where We Stand, 91–92 and Killing Rage. Ending Racism (New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1995), 82–85. On Moynhian’s
    report, see Bottomfish Blues, Amazon Nation or Aryan Nation. White Women and the Coming of Black Genocide [1989–1990]
    (Montreal: Kersplebedeb, 2014); Barbara Omolade, The Rising Song of African American Women (London and New York:
    Routledge, 1994); Melinda Cooper, Family Values. Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (New York: Zone
    Books, 2017).

14. hooks, Where We Stand, 20, 124 and Killing Rage, 66.



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Speaking the Unspeakable                                                                                    USAbroad. Vol. 6 (2023)




to work, someone had to stay in the home and do the dirty work” for little pay. The sexual division
of labor was not challenged, but rather reorganized across a transnational, post-colonial color line.15
     hooks analyzes these changes in the organization of production and social reproduction by empha-
sizing the ideological shift which justified the neoliberal shift in public policies fostered in the United
States by neoconservatives:16 while the Sixties and Seventies where marked by “a sense of bounty that
could be shared,” in the Eighties and Nineties “widespread communal concern for justice and social
welfare was swiftly replaced by conservative notions of individual accountability and self-centered
materialism.” The blaming of Black women and the poor which accompanied the dismantlement of
the welfare state was paralleled by a devaluation of the “traditional religious belief” that, particularly
within the formerly segregated Black communities, had supported solidarity and a notion of “commu-
nalism.” Having experienced this Black Christian solidarity when she was young, bell hooks considers
the idea that poor people “chose” their fate, and mundane success is a sign of divine blessing, more
as an effect of “the new-age thought” rather than of the old protestant ethic. What is important for
her, however, is how “opportunities of class mobility created by radical political movements for social
justice, civil rights and women’s liberation” unintendedly supported “the popular truism that ‘anyone
can make it big in America.’ ”17 The myth of a “classless society,” and the rise of a “Black bourgeoisie,”
socially integrated via patriarchal family values, had the ideological effect of hiding class conflict, mak-
ing of the middle-class a “fetish,” the quintessential representation of a progressive process of universal
integration into the existing society and political order.18
     This ideological effect further intensified in the Eighties, when the idea of a classless society was
supplanted by “the notion that everyone can be wealthy.” The road to widespread hedonism and
consumerism was paved by money talk: money became “the measure of value, where it is believed
that everything and everybody can be bought.”19 This fundamental assumption of classical political
economy acquired a new meaning during and after the Cold War. Before 1989, “we knew the word
communism because keeping the world safe for democracy was discussed. And communism was the
identified threat.” After 1989, the global failure of socialism helped to affirm the refusal of any “vision
of communalism” based on the re-distribution of wealth. When debt became “the American way of
life,” talking of money instead of class established a continuity between the “century of ideologies” and
the “end of ideologies” by erasing all alternatives from the horizon of political expectations.20 Money
talk enacts the ideological effect of making social differences indifferent: first by promising universal
accessibility to the American dream, then by ensuring that everyone can enjoy wealth, even if some
will fall in the attempt. Instead, talking of class means politically valorize social differences as lines of
conflict against the ideological effect of money.21




15. hooks, Where We Stand, 92, 107, 6. This process was studied by Barbara Ehrenreich, to whom hooks refers for her early
     seminal works on the “femininization of poverty,” though complaining that she failed to offer a radical critique of capitalist
     patriarchy. Cf. bell hooks, Feminist Theory from Margin to Center (Boston: South end Press, 1984), 98 ff; Barbara Ehrenreich
    - Arlie R. Hochschild, Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy (New York: Metropolitan Books,
     2003).

16. On North American neoconservatism, see Scienza & Politica, 61 (2019), special issue edited by Raffaella Baritono.

17.   hooks, Where We Stand, 64–65, 44. On the contradictory movement which lead from the “long Sixty-eight” to neoliberalism,
      cf. Sandro Mezzadra - Maurizio Ricciardi, “Nel segno del Sessantotto,” Scienza & Politica, 59 (2018), 5–16.

18. hooks, Killing Rage, 85 and Where We Stand, 91. Cf. Matteo Battistini, Middle Class: An Intellectual History through Social
    Sciences. An American Fetish from its Origins to Globalization (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2022).

19. hooks, Where We Stand, 80, 47. I use money talk working on hooks’ comments on Toni Morrison’s conception of “race talk,”
    where talk is conceived of as a popularized discourse which materially affects social relations (hooks, Killing Rage, 3).

20. hooks, Where We Stand, 22, 40–41, 55; Killing Rage, 176. On ideology cf. Maurizio Ricciardi, “L’eterna attualità dell’ideologia
    tra individuo, storia e società,” in Storia d’Europa e del Mediterraneo, XIV: Culture, ideologie, religioni (Rome: Salerno Editore,
    2017), 717–747; Carlo Galli, Ideologia (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2022).

21. hooks, Where We Stand, 47, 157.



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Speaking the Unspeakable                                                                                USAbroad. Vol. 6 (2023)




3 Representation and Social Reproduction
The centrality bell hooks recognizes to class domination and conflict does not lead her to focus on
a critique of the relationships of production, but rather on the ideological conditions of their social
reproduction.22 The turning point of the Sixties is globally relevant for understanding her analysis,
since at that time racist domination changed: once Black people were no longer subjugated through
slavery or segregation, the minds of both whites and Blacks became the space to be colonized in
order to ensure the coexistence of racial integration and a “neo-colonial white supremacy.” Television
played a crucial role in neutralizing the Blacks’ “spirit of resistance” by breaking the barrier between
whites and Blacks, between the values of the dominant and the dominated. For bell hooks, therefore, a
cultural critique of mass media is necessary for reactivating social antagonisms through the formation
of an “oppositional world-view.”23
     hooks rarely speaks of “social reproduction,” and rarely conceptualizes the key-words of her cul-
tural critique of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy, such as ideology and representation. This
does not mean that her critique lacks a theory, but rather depends on her problematic choice to write
theory through a non-academic language, in order to speak directly to oppressed and exploited peo-
ple who yearn for social justice.24 Among her sources, Stuart Hall’s work provided crucial theoretical
materials for hooks’ practice of cultural studies as a critique of society and is illuminating for under-
standing that practice. Particularly, three elements of Hall’s discourse operate within hooks’. Firstly,
a non-deterministic conception of ideology: the correspondence between the position which a class
holds in economic relations and its ideology is not necessary, but is “the effect” of an ideological prac-
tice. Thus, in the singular, ideology defines the articulation of a socially situated subject— whether
“class or other social forces”—and ideas. Its function is to reproduce - not only biologically or tech-
nically, “but socially and culturally as well”—the social relations of production. The second element
concerns the role played by the media. In the plural, ideologies are “systems of representation […]
in which men and women […] live their imaginary relations to the real conditions of existence.” Rep-
resentation is productive of meanings, i.e. “codes of intelligibility” that allow our experience of the
world and spread from social practices of signification. Among these practices, the media are “the
modality of functioning [of ideology].” Lastly, systems of representation are historical: the individual
enunciates him- or herself “in relation to different range of social sites,” and through “a variety of rep-
resentational systems” which includes sex and race.25 In short, the critique of representation is crucial
for understanding “where we stand.”
     These presuppositions help to understand hooks’ explanation of the non-existence of “a strong
organized politicized working class” in the US where, through the socialization of mass media, most
working people “learn to think ideologically like the rich” whatever “their economic circumstances.”
The non-necessary correspondence between the subject’s social position and his or her ideology
makes room for the “pedagogical role” of the mass media. The system of representation which on
the television screen shows the poor as undeserving and the rich as vulnerable (The rich also cry is the
title of a renowned soap opera from the Eighties) hides the fact that the wealth of the latter is based
on the exploitation of the former.26 Similarly, the systematic “devaluation of Black womanhood”
enacted by the media through the reactivation of sexist and racist representations rooted in the age of
slavery, like the savage “Sapphire” and the servile “mammy,” justifies both their sexual violation and
exploitation by the white man and pushes Black women to identify with patriarchal family values
and white middle class social standard of femininity as ways to escape racist and sexist oppression. As
for Black men, their representation as undeserving, emasculated, and idle—which was necessary first

22. For an overview on the feminist conceptualization of social reproduction, cf. Cinzia Arruzza, “Functionalist, Determinist,
    Reductionist: Social Reproduction Feminism and its Critics,” Science & Society, 1 (2016), 9–30.

23. hooks, Killing Rage, 109–110; bell hooks, preface to Feminist Theory.

24. hooks’ Feminism is for Everybody. Passionate Politics (Cambridge, MA: South end Press, 2000) is exemplary of this attitude,
    which is also discussed in Teaching to Transgress. Education as the Practice of Freedom (London and New York: Routledge, 1994).

25. Stuart Hall, “Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-Structuralist Debate,” Critical Studies in Mass
    Communication 2 (1985), 91–114.

26. hooks, Class Matters, 69–77.



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Speaking the Unspeakable                                                               USAbroad. Vol. 6 (2023)




to expel from the “public conscience” their hard labor as slaves, then to justify the dismantlement of
welfare—triggered their identification with the phallocentric ideal of masculinity proposed by the
white supremacist capitalist patriarchy: Black men “have been shaped by these representations” and
actively reproduced them.27 This productive function of representation explains bell hooks’ ruthless
criticism of the societal role of mass media. Representation produces identification where identity is
lacking:

       Stereotypes, however inaccurate, are one form of representation. Like fictions, they are
       created to serve as substitutions, standing in for what is real. […] They are a fantasy, a
       projection onto the Other that makes them less threatening. Stereotypes abound when
       there is distance.28

    hooks’ reactivation of the etymological, theatrical meaning of representation as something which
‘stands for,’ a proxy that fictionally occupies the place of reality and fills a gap of knowledge, makes rep-
resentation a way of appropriating and producing reality through the construction of images. These
images emerge from within and in turn legitimize existing social relations of domination by shaping
their subjects.29 In this sense, cultural criticism is a critique of the modes of social reproduction.
    These modes are themselves historical. hooks highlights a shift from a system of representation
based on the assimilation of difference to one operating through the commodification of differences
which neutralizes their antagonist capacity and makes their representation a means of social reproduc-
tion. The case of “Black beauty” is exemplary: after de-segregation, the aesthetic pride of Black people
was a polemical stance against assimilation. This radicalization of the Black liberation movement was
subjugated by white supremacism in two ways: one, in the Seventies, was economic and spread from
the fear of falling into poverty—i.e., of not finding a job—by appearing as non-assimilated. The other,
at the end of the Eighties, was cultural. The presence of “Black beauty” in the morning television
programs suggested that aesthetics was a question of “personal preferences,” unrelated with racism.
The commodification of difference “promotes paradigms of consumption,” and produces “the Other”
through representation, by denying “the significance of that Other’s history through a process of de-
contextualization.” The commodified difference incorporates the socially produced dominant values,
which in turn confirm white supremacy as “an epistemological standpoint” that continues to make
Blackness “an ontological symbol” of oppression,30 while turning it into an object of individual con-
sumption devoid of any oppositional capacity and collective meaning. Depoliticization does not only
occur through the erasure of class as a political signifier of a difference which highlights social antag-
onism, but also through the capitalist valorization of differences via representation. Therefore, an
effective cultural criticism must question both the social production of identities through representa-
tion and the capacity of their politicization to interrupt the social reproduction of transnational white
supremacist capitalist patriarchy.



4     Identity Troubles
In 1992, in the introduction of Black Looks. Race and Representation, hooks announced:

       These essays are about identity. Since decolonization as a political process is always a
       struggle to define ourselves in and beyond the act of resistance to domination, we are
       always in the process of both remembering the past, even as we create new ways to imagine
       and make the future.31



27. hooks, Killing Rage, 70–78; Black Looks, 88–90.

28. hooks, Killing Rage, 38.

29. hooks, Black Looks, 2.

30. hooks, Killing Rage, 188–191 and Black Looks, 30, 10.

31. hooks, Black Looks, 4.



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Speaking the Unspeakable                                                                                USAbroad. Vol. 6 (2023)




    Identity is neither what defines one’s being, nor the presupposition of struggle, but rather what
results from a process of self-definition against domination. This process is conceived of as “decol-
onization”: if “colonization” is the name of a domination which changes historically—as it moved
from a system of conquest and ownership to a societal process which affects the mind—, and if it op-
erates through the imposition of an “epistemological standpoint” which provides schemes for inter-
preting reality, then in order to resist domination we must question our standpoint and the images—
representations—with which we identify.32 History is part of this process: the act of “remembering
the past” can bridge the gap between reality and representation, thus becoming a critical tool which
makes room for change. What counts for bell hooks is not the past as an archeological object, but
rather as the object of an act of remembering.33 This act can be healing, thus interrupting the repro-
duction of a historical wound that has the power to subjugate. Toni Morrison’s Beloved is clear on
this point, as the writer invokes the necessity of “rememoring”: Sethe’s killing violence was a “fleeing
from a history that is a burden too great to bear. It is the telling of our history that enables political
self-recovery.” History, therefore, is the practice of recognizing the present as a result of past domi-
nation in order to get rid of the presence of the past.34 All this means, however, that the past is itself
made by the act of remembering, a representation of reality which produces identity within changing
historical coordinates. In a context in which differences are commodified, the politicization of identi-
ties may challenge the existing relations of domination, while always running the risk of being “eaten,
consumed and forgotten.”35
    According to bell hooks, Black nationalism couldn’t escape this trap. Black nationalism is a con-
solidated object of her criticism, which begun with Ain’t I a Woman? and culminated with the ruthless
attack against Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March on Washington in 1995.36 What is worth noticing
here is how in this case, for hooks, history was mobilized to produce an “essentialist-based” identity.
In Black nationalism, history does not serve to answer the urgent cry for the struggle for Black lib-
eration that is also able to challenge capitalist exploitation and sexism, but as a representation of the
“primitive,” an “atavistic narrative, a fantasy of otherness.”37 This fantasy enables criticism of “Euro-
centrism” because of its unitary representation, i.e. universalization, of white experience which erases
the “African ways of knowing,” but is based on an equally unitary representation of Africa as a paradise
lost, where all was perfect before imperialism. Thus, while this representation of Black “authenticity”
legitimizes the claim for control over Black women’s bodies to assure that the Black nation is pure, and
silences them as ‘traitors’ when they refuse to be controlled, it also replicates the white supremacist
overvaluation of whiteness, “by seeing Blackness solely as a marker of powerlessness and victimiza-
tion.”38 This victimization, in turn, has a dual function: on one hand, it grants a “moral authority” over
the whites to self-victimizing Blacks, which is needed to build platforms for redress without changing
the existing structures; on the other hand, it comforts the whites by denying Blacks’ activism and self-
determination. Also rising from the need to resist cultural appropriation, this fantasy is used by the
contemporary commodification of Blackness, that is, from the white supremacist epistemic stand-
point: for being acknowledged as different within the “American Dream,” the Other “must assume
recognizable forms.” The cultural narrative of the “primitive” mirrors the “white western conception
of the dark Other,” rather than questioning this representation by highlighting its role in the reproduc-
tion of racial and sexed hierarchies. The mainstream white culture “offers the mantle of victimization


32. Ibid. 5. This recalls Spivak’s conception of “epistemic violence” as explained in “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Colonial Dis-
    course and Post-Colonial Theory. A Reader, eds. P. Williams and L. Chrisman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988)
    66–111: 76.

33. hooks draws from Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, ed. Jonathan
    Rutherford (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990), 222–237.

34. hooks, Killing Rage, 46–47 and Uncut Funk, 88. On “rememoring,” cf. Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard: Selected Essays,
    Speeches, and Meditations (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2019), 283 ff.

35. hooks, Black Looks, 40.

36. Cf. hooks, Ain’t I a Woman, 108 ff, and Uncut Funk, 24, 29, where Malcom X’ patriarchalism is at least partially reconsidered.

37. hooks, Black Looks, 32–36.

38. hooks, Killing Rage, 243–244.



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Speaking the Unspeakable                                                                                 USAbroad. Vol. 6 (2023)




as a substitute for transformation of society.”39 Difference can be eaten, consumed as an exotic spice
on the mainstream table, and then forgotten.
    hooks’ criticism of essentialized identities also extends to feminism, not only white but also Black.
While sharing Audre Lorde’s attempt to produce a feminist politicization starting from the conver-
gence of race, sex and class, she also observes that Lorde evoked a “negative experience of Black
womanhood as ‘commonly’ shared,” suggesting that it “represents ‘authentic’ Black female reality.”40
In this way, an experience which is socially produced runs the risk of being turned into an essence.
The authenticity of the Black woman’s experience—which is made a true and proper “brand” by aca-
demic feminists—coincides with victimization and establishes a Black female identity that confirms
“white males as all-powerful victimizers,” while suppressing Black’s women experiences of resistance
and struggle. The moral authority of the victim becomes normative and “punitive” against the crit-
ical voices of these women, making of them “outsiders,” since victimhood must be aggressively de-
fended to obtain redresses for discrimination within the existing social structure, as middle-class white
women did.41 In this way, hooks places the ‘old’ critique of “sisterhood” into the new historical con-
text of the Nineties, in which “cultural difference sells” and corporate institutional multiculturalism
operates by fueling nationalism, fundamentalism, identity politics and separatism.42 She then urges
us to understand how the oppositional capacity of the politicization of identities is taken on board by
a system of representation in which differences are made commodities that incorporate the values
socially produced by the dominant epistemology. It is equally important to understand how to pre-
vent political identities from being absorbed into the market of multicultural exchange, in which all
differences can be included through the institutional recognition and redress of victimhood, without
questioning the structural conditions that produce subordination and exploitation.



5     A Living Discourse
According to bell hooks, a collective movement does not spring from a shared experience. This is
“a sphere of political inarticulateness” that reproduces fragmentation, as if only women should fight
for women’s rights, gays for gays’ and Blacks for Blacks’.43 When she states that “feminism is for
everybody” and that patriarchy also affects men’s experience, however, hooks is neither calling for
a paradoxically universal identity based on shared victimhood, where the distinction between who
dominates and who is dominated is erased by the assumption of an impersonal oppressive regime.
Domination is an asymmetric relationship which is both embodied and institutionalized,44 so much
so that what she defines a “privilege”—whether granted by sex, race or class, or by their simultane-
ous operations—is neither a status nor an ontological datum, which prevents the privileged subject
from rejecting domination and becoming part of relations of solidarity, but an active practice of prof-
iting from an advantage granted by the existing social relations.45 As Paul Gilroy observes in his 2018
foreword to the conversation between hooks and Hall, “there are no casual invocations here of ei-
ther privilege or victimage,” but only “a vital dynamic method” aiming to understand how”different



39. Ibid. 17–18, 60 and hooks, Black Looks, 32–36, 26. A similar critique of the moralism of identity politics emerges in Wendy
    Brown, States of Injury. Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

40. hooks, Uncut Funk, 35 and Black Looks, 43, where she critically reads Audre Lorde, “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and
    Anger,” in Sister Outsider. Essays and Speeches [1984] (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007). For a discussion of Lorde’s and hooks’
    “notion of difference,” cf. Joan M. Martin, “The Notion of Difference for Emerging Womanist Ethics: The Writings of Audre
    Lorde and bell hooks,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 9 (1993), 39–51.

41. BL 43–45; KR 54–56.

42. hooks, Black Looks, 16–17, 43–45 and Killing Rage, 54–56, 201–203. About the commodification of difference, hooks refers
    to Jonathan Rutherford, “A Place Called Home: Identity and the Cultural Politics of Difference,” in Identity. Community,
    Culture, Difference, 9–27.

43. hooks, Uncut Funk, 76–77.

44. Cf. hooks, Black Looks, 93–94, and Killing Rage, 195.

45. hooks, Black Looks, 13, 152.



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Speaking the Unspeakable                                                                                  USAbroad. Vol. 6 (2023)




contradictions and conflicts become articulated together in specific, historical and economic circum-
stances.”46
     This is precisely the aim of hooks’ historical work: history can be reactivated polemically against
the ideological effects of money talk and of representations which hide the opposition between those
who dominate and those who are dominated, starting from the assumption that the opposing parts
are no longer homogeneous, if ever they were. Thus, while recognizing the need to tell the hidden his-
tory of the present from the point of view of the oppressed, she explicitly refuses the representation of
their past as uncontaminated by domination. Moreover, she is critical about the idea that the polem-
ical activation of history should rely on sources produced only by the oppressed. As her critique of
representation shows, subjects are shaped within social relations of domination, which means that an-
tagonistic subjectivity cannot emerge from a presumed ‘outside.’ Only starting from this assumption,
the act of rememoring can be an antagonistic practice which helps to understand and even transform
the present by placing it in a new relation with the past.47
     This brings hooks to align herself with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak when she calls for a “shift of
location,” and highlights “the radical possibility that surfaces when positionality is problematized.”48
This not only means to know where we stand, and to inquire into the historical processes which pro-
duced our identities, but also to take a stand on the side of the oppressed. These two practices cannot
be separated, particularly when capitalist society deploys a successful capacity of integrating differ-
ences through the market and institutional identity politics. hooks’ critical engagement with the latter
does not abstractly deny the oppositional capacity of politicized identities, but rather contextualizes
it by highlighting the risk of self-segregating into the position of the “native informant,” that is—again
in Spivak’s terms—the blank space generative of a cultural identity whose text is written by the dis-
course of domination.49 History, therefore, should oppose all processes of decontextualization that
turn the past into the fictional support of a presumed purity, where the binary opposition between
the dominant and the dominated is granted by their representation as essential, homogeneous unities,
i.e. through the denial of the social relations which cut identities in two.
     This clear insight into the critical, polemical capacity of history coexists aporetically with hooks’
tension towards an aestheticization, if not essentialization, of the past. Her emphasis on ancestral
worldviews—like the African one, which made “idleness” a time of contemplation rather than a mark
of guilt, or those shared by Blacks and Native Americans, linked by “bonds of blood and metaphysical
kinship,”—just like the memory of the “communalism” experienced by the segregated Black com-
munities, always aims to find resources for establishing political connections of solidarity. Rather
than unveiling history as a polemical field, however, these representations run the risk of multiply-
ing memories and their contingency, of turning re-memoring into a consumable commemoration50
while denying the possibility of acting in the present for changing the future into a revival of a myth-
ical past of pre-capitalist communities or pre-colonial bonds of solidarity. Even if the past is invoked
as the evidence of practicable alternatives to the existing system of oppression and exploitation, this


46. Gilroy, foreword, xi.

47. hooks, Killing Rage, 45, 245 and Uncut Funk, 37. From this viewpoint, hooks does not claim for any ‘sanitarization’ or
    moralization of history, which conservative and far-right opponents of the so-called “cancel culture” denounce in order
    to delegitimize it and win their position in the contemporary “culture war.” See Michele Cento, “Passare a contrappelo la
    storia. Il mestiere dello storico ai tempi della cancel culture,” Paradoxa 2 (2022) 39–54. hooks’ critique of the idealization of
    the pre-capitalist past focuses on Ivan Illich, but it can also be properly applied to contemporary streams of thought such
    as Walter Mignolo’s and Silvia Federici’s decolonial discourses.

48. hooks, Killing Rage, 49.

49. hooks defines “native informants” those Black intellectuals who confirm the whites’ expectations of feeling unresponsible
    for racism (Black Looks, 15). This conception coincides with the ethnographic one discussed by Spivak. Cf. Gayatri Chakra-
    vorty Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason. Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (Cambridge MS: Harvard University
    Press, 1999), 6.

50. On the relationship between history, memory, rememoring and commemoration, read through the problematic lens of
    “presentism,” that is of a regime of historicity where the present time—the time of the event, the time of consumption, the
    real time of mass and social media—becomes omnipresent, shaping the way in which the past, the future and their rela-
    tionship are conceived, see François Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time (New York: Columbia
    University Press, 2015), part. Memory, History and the Present.



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Speaking the Unspeakable                                                                            USAbroad. Vol. 6 (2023)




does not explain how to overcome the effects of white supremacism, which has broken all bonds of
solidarity by triggering competition among social and ethnical groups. Even arguing that “memory
sustains a spirit of resistance,”51 it is unclear how this can happen when memories not only do not pro-
vide any shared past, but also multiply in the context of transnational white supremacist patriarchy. If
it is true that “subversion requires strategy,” and “simply stating the case is not enough,”52 then history
requires a theory in order to drive a politics of articulation.
     In hook’s discourse, the feminist perspective provides this strategical theory without relying on an-
cestral pasts. In writing her feminist history of North American capitalism, hooks did not conceive the
epistemological standpoint whence storytelling spread as essential or authentical. Being neither given
or homogeneous, the perspective of the Black woman allowed her to highlight the social operativity
of race and sex in the production of hierarchies articulated by contemporary capitalism as an overall
system of oppression and exploitation. The politics of the margin is the theoretical and political trans-
lation of this epistemological standpoint. Far from being only an objective condition, the margin is
the site from which to actively formulate an “oppositional worldview” that makes manifest both the
lines that divide and oppose the oppressed and the oppressors, and their interconnections in a contra-
dictory system of socially determined hierarchies. The partial perspective of the Black woman over
the totality of social relations offers the possibility of politicizing a difference against the capitalist and
multicultural valorization of differences, because it is the standpoint from which a feminist discourse
that activates political interconnections against social reproduction could spread. As the practice of a
political discourse, feminism should be up to the challenge of turning these connections into social
antagonism, pushing even those who, in different ways, are “at the center” to take a stand.53
     This anti-essentialist stance is what makes the politics of the margin a living possibility for the
present, within a post-colonial context in which, as hooks observes, the new forms of class power for
women are based on the exploitation of migrants under conditions of institutionalized “indentured
slavery,” and new anti-immigrant forms of white supremacism emerge among the working poor.54 To
meet bell hook’s ambition to make feminism a “mass-based movement,”55 the politics of the margin
should today deal with the transnational mobility that puts identities in trouble. By speaking the
unspeakable, tackling the uncomfortable subject of class in this increasingly complex transnational
disorder, feminist theory could help to go beyond the claims for partial redresses, which require an
aggressive defense of identities based on victimhood. In this way, it can aspire—as bell hooks did—to
become a movement “that has as its fundamental goal” not only women’s liberation, but “the liberation
of all people,”56 envisioning the possibility of changing an oppressive present where domination and
exploitation are represented as unavoidable.




51. hooks, Black Looks, 90, 183–184, 191.

52. Ibid., 78–79.

53. bell hooks, Yearning Race, Gender and Cultural politics [1990] (New York and London: Routledge, 2015), 22, 149 ff; hooks,
    Feminist Theory, 15. For a discussion of the political meaning of “the margin,” see Mako Fitts, “Theorizing Transformative
    Revolutionary Action: The Contribution of bell hooks to Emancipatory Knowledge Production,” The CLR James Journal 17
    (2011), 112–132.

54. hooks, Class Matter, 109.

55. hooks, Feminism is for Everybody, 8.

56. hooks, Ain’t I a Woman, 13.



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