Becoming bell hooks

Preface 7 Introduction: why bell hooks? 8 1. Autobiography as a research field 17 1.1. An attempt at a definition 17 1.2. Extra-textual understanding of autobiography 30 1.3. Women’s autobiographical writing 31 1.4. Features of women’s autobiographical writing 32 1.4.1. Experience 33 1.4.2. Relationality 41 1.4.3. “The personal is political” 46 1.4.4. Writing as an empowerment strategy 48 2. Biographical work as a tool for self-empowerment 50 2.1. Autobiography as a practice of living 50 2.2. Biographicity as an emancipatory and developmental potential 52 2.3. Bildung: self-improvement and biography 53 2.4. Biographical work in the context of self- empowerment 56 3. The research approach 60 3.1. Sources, research questions and stages of the study 62 3.2. Close reading as a methodological postulate 64 3.3. Feminist methodology as a framework for autobiographical research 69 3.4. The biographical method 74 3.5. Analytical strategies 78 4. Reconstruction of bell hooks’s biography 86 4.1. Historical and social context 86 4.2. bell hooks, or Gloria Jean Watkins 88 4.2.1. The pseudonym 92 4.2.2. “Talking back”: views and writing output 93 4.2.3. Subject bibliography 100 4.3. Biomythography in autobiography: an introduction to analysis 102 4.3.1. Talking Back. Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black 103 4.3.2. Bone Black. Memories of Girlhood 105 4.3.3. Wounds of Passion. A Writing Life 106 5. bell hooks as a narrator, biographical subject and observer 108 5.1. The narrator: to speak with her own voice 109 5.1.1. The autobiographical stance 109 5.1.2. The temporal perspective of the narrative 111 5.1.3. The choice of experiences 112 5.2. The biographical subject: a Black woman from Kentucky 118 5.2.1. The feeling of loneliness: the relationship with the mother 120 5.2.2. The art of quilting: the relationship with the grandmother 124 6. Reception and criticism: bell hooks’s self-empowerment 126 6.1. Writing autobiography as writing oneself 126 6.2. “I was mapping a different destiny”: the process of becoming 130 6.2.1. The autobiographical potential 130 6.2.2. To speak with her own voice 132 6.2.3. Stigma as a developmental category 132 6.2.4. The processual nature of self-empowerment 135 6.3. Levels of autobiographical expression 136 6.4. Types of reality 138 6.5. Stages of biographical work 140 Afterword: to read bell hooks 145 Bibliography 149 Index of names 159