bell hooks' "Seeing and Making Culture"
bell hooks successfully challenges stereotypes specific to poverty by writing to two separate audiences using ethos, pathos and vocabulary common enough for most people, yet elegant enough for academics. In her essay, "Seeing and Making Culture," hooks uses an ethos way of writing when she uses quotes throughout the text. In addition, hooks also uses pathos by appealing to our emotions with the interactions between herself and her grandmother. She successfully writes a narrative that many audiences can response to and appreciate such as the lower class "common folks," and the more educated upper middle class and academics. In this regard, hooks gives voice to an enormous group of people she claims remain voiceless in modern American society, the poor. When she was growing up, hooks states that everyone they knew fell into one of four general categories; destitute, working poor, middle class and affluent.…...

Bell Hooks
In "The Oppositional Gaze," Bell Hooks frames gender in terms of power. Gender is one aspect of social hierarchy, and represents the social construction of power. The act of gazing, looking someone in the eye, or staring, likewise carries important connotations of power. Culturally specific, the norms regarding gazing determine norms related to relational power. Looking intently at someone is construed as brash, confident, and assertive. Therefore, persons with a low social status, such as children, women, and blacks, are told not to stare. Bell Hooks subverts gender and race disparities by owning her gaze.

Hooks also extends the concept of gazing to other forms of visual representations. Gazing has a political dimension, and that dimension can be seen in the rendition of blacks in the white dominant culture. People in power have entitled themselves to represent blacks, and women, as they see fit. Thus, to watch white representations of…...

(pp.45-58) Hooks also recognized that when integration occurred these change agents were alienated from black children and alienation and discrimination ensued, associated with being taught white history and democratic ideals, rather than reformation of education, which was the intention. (p. 3)
Both perspective childhood stories imply implicit as well as environmental (explicit) characteristics of wisdom, as Hooks acknowledges that she may have been singled out, as a child of a certain class, gender and race but it may have been because people recognized her implicit character of wisdom and potential. Hooks, by virtue of watching people in her own community live out characteristics of patriarchal ideals demonstrates wisdom far beyond the years she reflects upon. In this phenomena, as reflected by Bell Hooks' experiential learning and reflection, one can clearly see the implicit-explicit dichotomy, discussed in ternberg and Jordan's a Handbook of Wisdom: Psychological Perspectives. In this work the idea…...

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Sources Science, and Society West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press

Carney Smith, J. & Phelps, S. (1996) Notable Black American Women Book II. Detroit, MI: Gale Research Inc.

Hooks, B. (2000). Where We Stand: Class Matters. New York: Routledge.

2004). We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity. New York: Routledge.

1981) Ain't IA Woman: Black Women and Feminism. New York: South End Press.

Another provocative element of hooks' text is the way that she renders whiteness problematic and alien, while the dominant culture has always done this with blackness. The quest to know what is not 'us' and to know the 'other' she implies, is endemic to all societies (hooks 32). Yet the academy has shown scant interest in how blacks perceive whiteness, only how whites perceive blackness. This renders white people and whiteness invisible as an ideological construct and renders black people invisible as human beings.

Instead, black people are merely reduced to serving bodies, as hardly human, as something for whites to use as reflections to see what they are 'not,' rather than as legitimate subjects with a perspective of their own. This recalls how the first native people were classified, almost as animal subjects, in the first encounters of Europeans with the New orld, and discovered as objects or primitive representations…...

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Works Cited hooks, bell. Killing Rage: Ending Racism. NY: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, 1996.

Omi, Michael Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s. NY: Routledge, 2994.

Bell Hooks Argues There Must be no Split Between Theory and Practice
Hooks also argues quite compellingly about not splitting theory and practice when it comes to feminism. In other words, practice what you preach. The best theory in the world cannot help anyone if it is not put into common practice. As Hooks notes, "I have come to see that silence is an act of complicity, one that helps perpetuate the idea that we can engage in revolutionary black liberation and feminist struggle without theory" (Hooks 39). There must be a theory to believe in, and there must be action to make the theory come true and be realized. She goes on to expound on her thoughts, "By reinforcing the idea that there is a split between theory and practice or by creating such a split, both groups deny the power of liberatory education for critical consciousness, thereby perpetuating…...

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References

.Hooks, Bell. "Theory as Liberatory Practice."

bell hooks, the celebrated Black feminist writer and thinker, recently penned a book called Feminism is for Everybody. It is a provocative title to be sure, but hooks is not the first writer to tackle the subject of how so-called "women's issues" can often have profound consequences on men. Literary works of fiction have long struggled with this central theme. In particular, Jean Toomer's Cane includes some powerful vignettes which highlight just how damaging it can be for men when they do not understand and appreciate women as whole, 3-dimensional beings. Although the negative consequences the male characters suffer in "Karintha," "Becky," "Carma" and "Blood Burning Moon" are as varied as the men themselves, one could argue that the common thread amongst these men is isolation. It is ironic to the extreme, but each of central male characters in Toomer's vignettes actually themselves create a distance and isolation from…...

Cultural Criticism Bell hooks notes that “popular culture is where the pedagogy is, is where the learning is” (2006). This statement sums up her views rather well and gets right to the heart of what hooks is up to in her Cultural Criticism and Transformation talks. I agree a lot with what hooks says about popular culture and it lines up well with what cultural critics in the past have said. The Frankfurt School, for example, was very critical of popular culture and its effect on the mass of people. Horkheimer and Adorno (1944) were very critical about what popular culture was doing and how it was achieving a kind of hypnotic effect on people.
However, I tend to be a bit more traditional in my thinking when it comes to roles and I think having clearly defined gender roles in society is not a bad thing at all. I think that…...

Paulo Freire and Bell Hooks are both well-known for their influential thinking in the area of teaching, specifically relating to the contexts of race, gender, and culture. In his writing and teaching, Freire emphasized that that learning is an act of culture and freedom. Among his main arguments is the assertion that the current education system in many developed countries is a process of "knowledge banking" (Bentley). In other words, students "bank" the information taught to them by their teachers, and store it for use sometime later in their life (Bentley). He contends that this type of educational dynamic does not allow students to think critically, nor does it allow them to approach problems innovatively (Bentley).
Similarly, hooks emphasizes that more "freedom" needs to be applied in the methods of teaching. Unlike Freire, however, hooks focuses on more specific topics, such as: feminism, gender, race, and the media.

Freire's and hooks' writings…...

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Works Cited

Bell Hooks Addresses Packard Faculty Club." UMB website. Accessed June 18

2003.  http://www.umb.edu/news/1998news/reporter/ureporter0498/bellhooks.html 

Bentley, Leslie. Paulo Freire: A Brief Biography. Paul Freire website. December 1999. Accessed June 18, 2003.  http://www.unomaha.edu/~pto/paulo.htm 

Friere, Paul. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum. 1996-2002.

Feminism
Both Bell Hooks and Cherrie Moraga point out weaknesses and omissions in feminist theory in their respective articles, "Black Women Shaping Feminist Theory," and "La Guerra." Each feels that mainstream feminist discourse neglects to address certain groups of women, especially women of color and for Moraga, lesbians as well. Hooks' premise is that "White women who dominate feminist discourse ... have little or no understanding of white supremacy as a racial politic, of the psychological impact of class, of their political status within a racist, sexist, capitalist state." Similarly, Moraga states, "Within the women's movement, the connections among women of different backgrounds and sexual orientations have been fragile at best," (30). In their critiques, Hooks and Moraga both use the language of the oppressed, linking feminism with the empowerment of all disenfranchised groups. The authors' vision of feminism as an inclusive doctrine that applies to women of all backgrounds, classes,…...

Part One A. Describe the gender-specific relationship between men, women and love. How is it different? Why? How does gender socialization contribute to these masculine and feminine roles in relationship to love and relationships in general?
Pre-eminent feminist bell hooks addresses two issues simultaneously with regard to gender specific relationships between men and women. The first issue is gender norms and socialization, which restrict roles for men and women in their love relationships. Women are socialized as caregivers who place the needs of others before themselves: “she was also responsible for everyone else’s happiness,” (Communion 19). On the contrary, men are socialized to receive care, and to suppress deep and meaningful emotional responses as part of their construct of masculine identity—something that hooks describes in The Will to Change. Given the different ways females and males are socialized, their relationships with one another is mediated by gender norms and performativity.
Part of the…...

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Works Cited

Hooks, Bell. Communion: The Female Search for Love. Harper Collins, 2002.

Hooks, Bell. The Will to Change. New York: Atria, 2003.

Orientalism, then, allowed the West to promote its political propaganda of colonizing Eastern societies. This propaganda of colonizing Eastern societies was legitimized by the West's insistence that the East needed to progress in the same way that it did (West) right after the economic success of the Industrial Revolution. Colonization was the West's method of "rehabilitating" societies it considered as a 'laggard' -- a society that, in the West's view and standards of modernity, had trailed behind other cultures throughout history. Colonization for Said is the "annihilation of the Asiatic society, and the laying of material foundations of Western society in Asia." The acceptance of the concepts of the Orient and Orientalism marked the validation of the intended colonization of the West of the Eastern societies. Colonization passed as a form of rehabilitation and democratization of a society is, interestingly, still practiced today, as was exemplified in the U.S.'s propaganda…...

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Bibliography hooks, b. (1994). Outlaw culture: resisting representations. NY: Routledge.

Said, B. (1979). Orientalism. NY: Vintage.

Short ReflectionThe theme that stands out for me among the readings is the idea of becoming vulnerable. This idea is in the talk given by Brene Brown. It is also in DTL chapter 1, where it is stated plainly that daring (making oneself vulnerable) is in knowing one will fail and yet going all in anyway. It is also in the concept of the promotion of literacy discussed by bell hooks. This is evident in the way hooks explains democratic education: it is not something that should be denied anyone; rather it is something that exists for all and that should be accessible by all. By offering everything to everyone, one holds nothing back for oneself. The teacher becomes vulnerable so that the learner can become empowered. It is the ultimate act of givingand that sense of giving is really the underlying theme that I see flowing through all the…...

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References

Brene Brown. The power of vulnerability. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCvmsMzlF7o&t=2s

Dare To Lead. Chapter 1.

Hooks - Democratic Education.

Gloria Watkins (using the pseudonym of "bell hooks"), Watkins presented the readers a detailed narrative of what it feels like to have writer's block and the reasons why she keeps on having it whenever she feels the urge to write about somebody or something else, and most especially when she wants to write something about herself, her inner feelings. She gave the readers some possible reasons why this happens, that is, why do writer's block happen during most important times, whenever memory recall of all important events in our lives are needed. Watkins solved her dilemma through contemplative thinking, wherein she traced her childhood experiences and significant events in her life to truly understand the origin of her recurring problem.
The first reason that she gives the readers is that "[t]here was clearly something blocking my ability to tell my story. Perhaps it was remembered scoldings and punishments when mama…...

The author writes "since the disruption of the colonized/colonizer mind-set is necessary for border crossings to not simply reinscribe old patterns, we need strategies for decolonization that aim to change the minds and habits of everyone involved in cultural criticism," so that black women are not, like the author says she was in her twenties, "inwardly homeless." (5; 9) This state of inward homelessness, or lacking a coherent identity is something, hooks acknowledges, that can be experienced by all marginalized peoples and ethnic groups in contemporary society -- and only by acknowledging the fact that we are all potentially, inwardly homeless, can the pain of past prejudice be assuaged.
The flexibility and instability of perceptions in "Crash," is not simply stressed in the script's continual, structured contrast between media representations and 'the real.' Even within the context of "Crash's" 'real life,' individuals who are non-white are continually misread in the…...

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Works Cited

Crash." Directed by Paul Haggis. 2004.

A hooks, bell. Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations. New York: Routledge, 1994.

Playing in the Dark & Art on my Mind
Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination and ell Hooks' Art on My Mind: Visual Politics are both works of nonfiction that center on the idea of cultural identity and its politics related to art and literature. Hooks is, of course, a forerunner in the critique of African-American culture and Art on My Mind closely examines the world of creating art in an environment that is overly concerned with politics having to do with identity. Hooks has long been known as a writer that is deeply interested in what is happening with the black community and what struggles that community faces. She examines in her book how art can be something that is empowering for the black community, however, she is discouraged by the lack of interest by critics to non-white art. Morrison, likewise, wants to empower the…...

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Bibliography

Hooks, Bell. Art on My Mind: Visual Politics. The New Press; First Printing Edition. 1995.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Vintage; Reprint

Edition. 1993.

1."The experiences we have as individuals shape our perspectives on the world." - James Baldwin

2."Social location is a powerful determinant of our opportunities and outcomes in life." - Kimberlé Crenshaw

3."Our social locations are like filters through which we interpret the world." - Patricia Hill Collins

4."The way we are positioned in society can have a profound impact on our ability to succeed." - bell hooks

5."Social location is not a fixed category, but rather a fluid and changing set of circumstances that can impact our lives in different ways at different times." -....