I re-read it this past week for a feminist book club i recently joined, & i discovered that the real problem is that this book fucking sucks. so i thought perhaps having to wander so far into a different territory necessitating a radically different authorial voice, hooks struggled. she has historically shone as a thinker when writing about the intersections between race & feminism, & her writing on this topic has not always been simple & easy to digest. but because i still respected hooks as a theorist & a writer then, i charitably assumed that the problem was the structure-that hooks just wasn't cut out to with elementary introductory primers. I remembered disliking this book quite a bit when i first read it ten years ago. hooks positions herself as the leading authority on every issue she writes about (in all of her books), & in this one, she writes about topics that she has absolutely zero personal experience with & her expert tone grates. because there are no citations, footnotes, or leads to supplementary reading about the many, many issues that hooks touches upon in her shallow, four-page chapters, a beginning feminist reader can only assume that hooks's assertions are accurate & true, because they are presented to be so. as such, it is riddled with opinion disguised as fact & questionable arguments built on an ever-shifting bedrock of historical inaccuracy concerning the formations, goals, & fractures within the second wave feminist movement. there are little hints of the man-pandering mega-christian hooks was to become here, but my bigger issue with this book is that 1) the book, despite its brevity, veers wildly away from its own stated thesis to act as a basic introductory primer for people reluctant to align themselves with the feminist movement, & 2) the book instead functions as a repository for hooks's own myriad opinions about what feminism really is & how contentious inter-movement arguments should have shaken out.

in the decade since, her writing has gone steadily downhill & is currently almost completely unreadable, incoherent, hippie weirdness.

this book was my first hint that she can do some pretty serious wrong. yes, i originally read it shortly after it was released, because i loved bell hooks back then & felt she could do no wrong as a feminist theorist. I kind of live-blogged this book while i was re-reading it.

Feminism is for everyone bell hooks