Goodbye to bell hooks, the feminist author who died yesterday. This would be a good time to review her theories, but we are distracted, as usual, by the lower-cased name.

I don't want to give in to the very overdone distraction, but staring me in the face is "Why bell hooks didn’t capitalize her name/Born Gloria Jean Watkins hooks was looking for a way to honor her maternal great-grandmother" by Clyde McGrady:

Author bell hooks opted not to capitalize her name, hoping to keep the public’s focus on her work.

Did she ever admit that this strategy backfires, that this effort at minimizing her name maximizes her name? It's like the old saying if you want people to listen to you, whisper. Maybe that's what she wanted! Why not? 

But over her decades at the forefront of Black feminist writing, the punctuation choice became a constant curiosity....

McGrady's word choice is a curiosity. "Punctuation"? Capitalization isn't punctuation.

Early on, hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins, wanted a way to honor her maternal great-grandmother while detaching herself from her work. She wrote dozens of books using her great-grandmother’s name but didn’t capitalize it.

I think this means that the great-grandmother's name was bell hooks. But McGrady is forcing me to guess... and then go to Wikipedia to check and I see that the great-grandmother's name was Bell Blair Hooks. An excellent name, and much cooler than Gloria Jean Watkins... though perhaps there's a feminist issue in the preference for Bell Blair Hooks over Gloria Jean Watkins. What's in a name? A lot, when you're a wordsmith!

What does "detaching herself from her work" mean?

"[Bell] Hooks had just come from a seminar entitled 'Transgression: Whose Booty Is This?'"

"She said, 'Pussies are out. It’s bootylicious all the way.' [Laverne] Cox agreed. 'It is the age of the ass,' she said. 'Booty as cultural metaphor is really interesting. J. Lo made the ass a thing fifteen years ago, and now we have issues of ass appropriation.'"

From a New Yorker piece about a conversation between Bell Hooks, the longtime activist feminist, who's currently a Distinguished Professor in Residence of Appalachian Studies at Berea College, and Laverne Cox, the LGBT advocate and actress who's in the TV show "Orange Is the New Black."

Hooks proceeds to declare that she has "had an ironing-board butt all my life," and Cox responds with an observation about astrology, but maybe Hooks is not "into astrology," and Hooks says: "Oh, I’m into psychics, telepathics, you name it... All the paranormal world is very interesting to me." And both of them speak retrogressively about aging: "This aging thing is a bitch" (Hooks, 62 years old) and "I do not [reveal my age]. My official age is 'over twenty-one'" (Cox).

Observations:

1. Ageism is certainly one of the "-isms" that people still seem to feel safe about openly displaying. Maybe some day we will look back with shame at what bigotry we spouted.

2. It utterly amazes me that people who want to present themselves as intelligent and sophisticated nevertheless openly profess belief in astrology and other "paranormal" nonsense, including people like Hooks and Cox who are activists purporting to push the rest of the world forward into enlightenment. How can you get any footing to push when you're standing in blatant idiocy?

3. Asses. When will they be out?

"A little girl we can lust after. A little girl we can prey upon. A little girl that can be Woody Allen's daughter taken up into the attic..."

"... and sexually abused with people witnessing from a distance but taking no action on her behalf. Because I feel we have to draw those connections of our enslaved black female body to the enslaved bodies of all girls, all colors, with that predatory gaze. Let's take the image of this super rich, very powerful Black female and let's use it in the service of imperialist, white supremacist capitalist patriarchy because she probably had very little control over that cover — that image."

Bell Hooks does not like that Time Magazine cover of Beyoncé. When pushed back with the assertion that Beyoncé probably used her own stylist and had final approval of the photograph that Time used, Bell Hooks said:

But then you're saying, then, from my deconstructive point of view that she's colluding in the construction of her self as a slave. Are you still a slave? It's not a liberatory image.

Here's the image in question for reference. How that's supposed to remind anyone of a little girl or a slave, I do not know. But congratulations to Bell Hooks for getting her name to rise in the new media morass, and I am happy to do my part in bringing this message forward. I don't particularly like seeing photos of pop singers looking inexplicably grouchy while wearing granny panties. But little girl/slave isn't what I'm seeing. If anyone's doing a "predatory gaze," it's Beyoncé.

Via Metafilter, where somebody says Beyoncé looks like she's wearing "very chaste beachwear" and somebody else says says:

Keep in mind the context, the title of the panel was "Are You Still A Slave? Liberating the Black Female Body."...  If the assertion is that [Beyoncé is] one of the most powerful people in America, then it's worthwhile to deconstruct the Beyonce imagery and machine. She's not off limits, she's THE person to talk about.... [W]hatever bell's comments are, they are NOT "crazy ragey hyperbolic shit." She has clearly thought a lot about this and does not use her words lightly.