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ebook Becoming bell hooks Aneta Ostaszewska

Wydawca: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego

Rok wydania: 2023

Stając się bell hooks. Opowieść o samoupodmiotowieniu czarnoskórej dziewczyny, która została feministką

Niniejsza książka to opowieść o Glorii Jean Watkins (1952-2021), czarnoskórej kobiecie z małego miasteczka w Kentucky, która stała się bell hooks – ikoną feministyczną, jednym z najbardziej znaczących i odważnych głosów współczesnej debaty na temat dyskryminacji rasowej, feminizmu oraz praw kobiet i mniejszości. Autorka skupia się na autobiograficznym wymiarze twórczości bell hooks – jest to opowieść o „pracy biograficznej” kobiety, która tworzy siebie w trakcie pisania swojej autobiografii.

Publikacja na licencji Creative Commons Uznanie autorstwa 3.0 PL (CC BY 3.0 PL) (pełna treść wzorca dostępna pod adresem: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/pl/legalcode).

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This book is the story of Gloria Jean Watkins (1952-2021), a Black woman from a small town in Kentucky who became a bell hooks – a feminist icon, one of the most significant and courageous voices of the contemporary debates on racial discrimination, feminism, and women’s and minority rights. The author focuses on the autobiographical dimension of bell hooks’ essays – it is a story about “biographical work” of a woman who creates herself in the course of writing her autobiography.

The publication is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Poland license (CC BY 3.0 PL) (full license available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode).

Spis treści ebooka 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