41 pages • 1 hour read
Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
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Index of Terms
Feminism
According to hooks’s definition, feminism is “a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression” (1). She is careful to avoid definitions that cast men as “the enemy” (1). The reason so many view feminism as “anti-male,” writes hooks, is that “most folks learn about feminism from patriarchal mass media” (1).
hooks narrows her definition of feminism when discussing what she refers to as “visionary feminism.” Though rooted in reality, visionary feminism imagines “possibilities beyond that reality” (110). It operates in opposition to more reactionary forms of so-called “feminism.” Those reactionary approaches to feminism aim to improve women’s economic position relative to men, without critiquing the capitalistic patriarchal status quo. By contrast, visionary feminism embraces progressive, compassionate policies that run counter to all systems of oppression, including white supremacy.
Sexism
Sexism is prejudice, oppression, and discrimination on the basis of sex, typically against women. When anybody, regardless of sex or gender, behaves as if men are superior to women, that person has engaged in sexist thinking. Importantly, hooks believes that sexism is very damaging to men and boys as well, given that it reinforces patriarchal dynamics that are unhealthy for everyone.
Revolutionary Feminists and Reformist Feminists
hooks singles out two broad categories of feminists: revolutionaries and reformists.
Revolutionary feminists, many of whom are Black women like hooks, seek to “bring an end to patriarchy and sexism” (4). By contrast, reformist feminists seek “equality with men in the existing system” (3)—a system that reinforces oppressive ideologies, including white supremacy. hooks points to Betty Friedan, whose 1963 book The Feminist Mystique is often credited with popularizing second-wave feminism, as an example of a feminist engaged in reformist thinking. hooks writes that Friedan’s takedown of housewifery “was presented as a crisis for women [but] it really was only a crisis for a small group of well-educated white women” (38).
Patriarchal Violence
Rather than discuss “domestic violence,” hooks prefers to use the term “patriarchal violence” to describe violence in the home against women and children. This term, hooks writes, “continually reminds the listener that violence in the home is connected to sexism and sexist thinking, to male domination” (62). Even when women are violent against their children or other women, this violence is still “patriarchal” in nature because it is rooted in a “culture of domination” that tells both men and women that “a person in authority has the right to use force to maintain authority” (64).
Intersectionality
Coined by law professor and activist Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, the term intersectionality refers to how social and political identities—like race, gender, sex, and class—intersect to create forms of privilege and discrimination. The concept is very important to hooks, who argues that feminism and anti-sexist thought must exist in a framework that takes race, class, and other identities into consideration as well. For example, when well-educated white women began fighting for equal standing with well-educated white men, it created what hooks calls “white power reformist feminism” (41), which only supported existing patriarchal social structures. hooks adds that this mode of feminism left little room for non-white women, who began to “fear that feminism was really about increasing white power” (42).
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