bell hooks - Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics

Even though I had been writing cultural criticism for magazines for years, Yearning was the first book length compilation of my work. Putting the diverse essays in this collection together was exciting because it allowed me to express the range of my theoretical interests. Writing about popular culture I could engage the intersections between race, class, and gender. Moreover I had discovered in classroom settings and while giving public lectures that using a visual text, film, art, or television as the base by which to talk about race and gender engaged folks. No matter race, class, gender, everyone seemed to have ideas and ways of thinking about visual narratives that served as a catalyst for meaningful discussion.

Focusing critique on cultural productions opened a space for education for critical consciousness that could serve as a pedagogy of liberation both in the academy and in the larger society. Unlike feminist theory and practice which ultimately demanded commitment to feminist politics and an overall change in society which was experienced as dangerous and threatening, cultural criticism allowed for a more democratic discourse. Although much critique was written from a progressive or radical perspective it did not have a radical militant agenda as its core foundation.

Unlike feminist theory, which was emerging from a more abstract discussion of what it means to challenge patriarchy and create new cultural paradigms, cultural criticism approached from a feminist standpoint could engage audiences more directly by allowing everyone a space to engage in radical critique. And most importantly, it could allow audiences to recognize the interconnectedness of systems of domination. Nowadays it is cool to talk about intersectionality, the overlapping of systems like racism, sexism, class elitism. However interconnectedness is a more vital way of framing the discourse in that it serves as a constant reminder that we cannot change one aspect of the system without changing the whole.

Certainly in the area of race and representation it became evident that cultural producers might create a work that was progressive in its articulation of an anti-racist agenda while relying on sexist stereotypes to give audiences familiar tropes, thus rendering the work less threatening. As a critic I hoped to use cultural criticism to aid in our effort to end domination and oppression in all its forms. This focus allows for an inclusive standpoint where one is not required to choose gender over race or vice versa, where there is not demand that issues of class and sexuality be left out of discussions for fear that radical thinking will be undermined.

Radical visionary cultural criticism aims to do more than deconstruct cultural production, it endeavors to call attention to alternative modes of creating, to new ways of seeing, thinking, and being. When I began to concentrate attention on cultural criticism I was moved by its potential for inclusive focus. I began to think that just as the interconnectedness of systems of domination was a necessary standpoint from which to critique cultural production, it also led me to think deeply about ways we were all connected across race, class, gender, sexuality, and religion.