The Ohio State University Department of Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies mourns the loss of legendary Black feminist scholar, activist, and public intellectual bell hooks. hooks’ scholarship consisting of more than 35 books, book chapters, and articles is taught in feminist classrooms and learning spaces around the world and guides and inspires justice seeking social movements. hooks’ vast writings on gender, race, class, and sexuality defined feminist scholarship by challenging the whiteness and unquestioned class privilege marking early feminist writers’ tendencies to write and theorize the movement in their own images. Instead, hooks’ writings created spaces for women of color, and black women’s voices in particular forcing a collective reckoning with what she artfully termed the “imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”

An enduring hallmark of her body of work is its insistence that feminism, to reach its potential must move beyond academic spaces to the everyday lives of everyday men and women. hooks successfully bridged the gap between academic and non-academic audiences, engaging communities in works such as Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery and holding a special space for children offering critical cultural discourses that taught self-love and affirmations of recognition with works such as Happy to be Nappy.

hooks held numerous positions as Professor of English and senior lecturer of Ethnic Studies at the University of Southern California, Professor of African and African-American Studies and English at Yale University, as Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and American Literature at Oberlin College in Ohio, and as distinguished Lecturer of English Literature at the City College of New York. In 2004 she joined the faculty at Berea College in Kentucky as Distinguished Professor in Residence in Appalachian Studies and founded the bell hooks Institute.

For our department, this marks the loss of a beloved friend and sistah-scholar.  bell visited with our department and the campus community on several occasions and during the 2012-2013 academic year she shared time with our department as a Distinguished Scholar in Residence. During her stay with us she generously offered small intimate talks, classroom lectures, afternoon dialogues and a distinguished lecture. She delivered her distinguished lecture before a standing room audience that crowded the aisles, stairs, and even the stage as students, faculty and community members gathered to share in her intellect and find solace in her words to teach us how to live together working against the contexts of interlocking systems of domination and oppression that overly determine our ways of being.  In true bell fashion, she did not allow a single soul to be turned away that evening and afterwards she stayed far into the evening signing books, taking photographs, and sharing embraces with so many who shared their stories on the impact of her work while clutching their personal well-read, tattered and worn print copies of her writings.

We invite you into community with us to share your favorite bell hooks’ quotes, insights, teachings, and reflections. Please join us as we collectively honor and reflect on the impact of our dear friend and colleague.