The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love

hooks was born in Kentucky in 1952 as Gloria Jean Watkins. Profoundly influenced by the women in her lineage, she adopted the pen name “bell hooks” to honor her great-grandmother. She intentionally chose to keep her name lowercase to emphasize the importance of her works rather than her persona. In The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love, hooks describes her own experiences with patriarchal culture and the ways that both her mother and her father acted out patriarchal structures that justified violence and aggression.

As a member of a rural working-class Black family with six children, hooks’s philosophies were shaped by her experiences with racism and classism. She attended a segregated school, and her family struggled financially; she recalled experiences such as hunting with her grandmother for worms and churning butter. hooks earned a BA in English in 1973 from Stanford University and an MA in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1976. In 1983, she obtained a doctorate in English from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She taught at several distinguished universities and received a plethora of awards, including the American Book Award in 1991 for Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics and the award from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 2001 for Happy to Be Nappy.