We can’t combat white supremacy unless we can teach people to love justice. You have to love justice more than your allegiance to your race, sexuality and gender. It is about justice. i145961266 |b1440003069801 |dbanf |g- |m231213 |h4 |x0 |t4 |i1 |j70 |k230331 |n10-01-2023 18:15 |o- |a305.409 HOO

The words of bell hooks are intimate and universal at the same time. She should have been here for many years to come, and the only comfort now is that her words will be here always. Imani Perry I once met bell hooks, at her dark, barely lit apartment at an undisclosed and mysterious downtown Manhattan location. She was hungry and wanted to go to eat. As we did, she sized up and tested me to determine how authentic and genuine I was about my work against gender violence.

About the reviewer

Communion: The Female Search for Love shares our struggle to know true love and our triumphs. Gathering together wisdom gleaned from women who have come to know love in midlife, women who often wandered lost in a desert of the heart through most of our teen years and on into our late twenties, Communion lets us hear the knowledge of women over thirty and beyond who as seekers on love’s path discovered along the way new visions, healing insights, and remembered rapture. hooks urges us to change ‘love’ from an oft-used noun to a rarely understood verb; this is not just a semantic move, but a shift away from lovelessness towards an ethic of love. From the start, then, females are confused about the nature of love. Socialized in the false assumption that we will find love in the place where femaleness is deemed unworthy and consistently devalued, we learn early to pretend that love matters more than anything, when in actuality we know that what matters most, even in the wake of feminist movement, is patriarchal approval. From birth on, most females live in fear that we will be abandoned, that if we step outside the approved circle, we will not be loved. The vast majority of us have flesh on our bones. I wish I could report that we all love that flesh. Some of us do. Most of us do not. A great many of us simply give up, engaging in a process of negative acceptance. By that I mean that an individual woman may not like her looks, her weight, but ceases trying to change herself so that she no longer confroms to conventional sexist aesthetic standards, because to do so lessens her anxiety and stress. But she is still not self-loving. We cannot negate our bodies and love them. Ouch. If this isn't me to a T. The highlight of this book for me was hooks’ chapter on romantic friendships. This chapter spoke to me as someone who values my closest friendships way more than any man I’ve been into romantically or any man I will be into romantically. Here’s a passage from that chapter that I resonated with a lot:

Den Text bzw. die Aussagen von bell hooks sind sehr pauschalisiert. Sie provozieren. Aber genau diesen Aussagen konnte ich nicht zustimmen, sie nicht teilen, mich nicht mit ihnen identifizieren. Ein möglicher Gedanke, weshalb ich mich mit einigen Aussagen nicht so recht identifizieren konnte könnte sein, dass das Original bereits 2002 erschienen ist und aufgrund dessen eventuell die eine oder andere Aussage überholt ist. In this case, the power structure being scrutinized is patriarchy, a power structure that degrades, dehumanizes, mutilates, maims, and destroys the bodies of women, and does so through sexualized violence. Sexualized violence renders violence invisible (a quote from Gail Dines). Which is also to say: sexualized violence renders dehumanization invisible. As Andrea Dworkin consistently points out, regarding rape culture and the patriarchy, the message of sexualized violence, no matter what horrifying thing is being done to any individual woman, is always crystal clear: "She wants it. They all do." The victim is always to blame. "She wants it. They all do." She was a teacher and I imagine she recognized early that it is through empathetic connection that students really learn, especially when the subject matter is dealing with the really tough stuff within ourselves and our society. May more like her carry on. Evangeline LawsonI don't know a whole lot about feminist theory, but what I learned about it here I found fascinating. hooks' treatise on love is passionate and positive, and goes a long way to build up strength and determination in readers.

This book is testimony, a celebration of the joy women find when we restore the search for love to its rightful, heroic place at the center of our lives. We long to be loved and we long to be free. Communion tells us how we fulfill that longing. Sharing the pain, the struggle, the work women do to overcome our fear of abandonment and of loss, the ways we push past the wounded passion to open our hearts, Communion urges us to come again and again to the place where we can know joy, to come and celebrate, to join the circle of love. One Aging to Love, Loving to Age It takes courage for women to challenge the seduction of domination, the making of Love synonymous with erotic conflict between the powerful and the powerless." We, women who love, are among a generation of women who moved beyond the patriarchal paradigms to find ourselves. The journey to true selfhood demanded of us the invention of a new world, one in which we courageously dared to rebirth the girl within and welcome her into life, into a world where she is born valued, loved, and eternally worthy. Loving that girl within has healed the woundedness that often led us to search for love in all the wrong places. Midlife for many of us has been the fabulous moment of pause where we begin to contemplate the true meaning of love in our lives. We begin to see clearly how much love matters, not the old patriarchal versions of love but a deeper understanding of love as a transformational force demanding of each individual accountability and responsibility for nurturing our spiritual growth. Published in 2002, "Communion: The Female Search for Love," by bell hooks/Gloria Watkins, is an excellent nonfiction title by this prolific and deeply insightful author. For me, forgiveness and compassion are always linked: how do we hold people accountable for wrongdoing and yet at the same time remain in touch with their humanity enough to believe in their capacity to be transformed?In my first book on the subject, All About Love: New Visions, I was careful to state again and again that women are not inherently more loving than men but that we are encouraged to learn how to love. That encouragement has been the catalyst for women to seek love, to look hard and long at the practice of love. And to confront our fears of not being loving, of not being loved enough. The women in our culture who have the most to teach everyone about the nature of love are the generation of females who learned through feminist struggle and feminist-based therapy that self-love was the key to finding and knowing love. I’m so glad that, in my opinion, there’s more discourse about elevating friendship in society now, from explicitly naming the oppressive force of amatonormativity to openly discussing relationship anarchy. Throughout Communion and especially in the chapter on romantic friendships, hooks highlights her ability to question the status quo about relationships and to think outside of the box to procure long and lasting love. I’ll end this review with one more passage from that chapter I enjoyed: She made us face our complexities, contradictions, consumptions and appropriations. May we better and always honor her work and life by daring to sit with what audiences found so compelling about her contributions, including the parts we don’t like. Stephanie Troutman (Robbins) I liked this book even though I don’t think it was as groundbreaking or tightly argued as her books The Will to Change or All About Love. For the first 70% of Communion, I felt that bell hooks made several strong and interesting points about women, gender, and relationships: that women are taught to search for love in romantic relationships, that women are also capable of perpetuating sexism and patriarchy, and that men who may advocate for racial justice or even gender equality may still enact sexism in contexts such as sexual relationships. I agree with other reviewers who state that hooks generalizes her points a bit much at times. While I didn’t mind that rhetorical technique when she used it either more accurately or more sparingly in her other books, in Communion it stood out to me more in a negative way, perhaps because I also found that her points blurred together and were a little discursive within chapters at times.