Sounding the Bell

October 14, 1997

"It's more phallic now," noticed bell hooks, one of the most influential feminists in the nation, as she pulled the microphone out of its stand during her lecture at the University of Central Florida. As "the leading black intellectual in the United States," bell hooks speaks and writes about poverty, capitalism, education, pop culture, and the possibility of true freedom.

Labeled "a barking dog" by a conservative journalist, bell hooks calls for an intensification of the struggle to end domination and enhance our lives. She urged the diverse crowd to "talk back," to speak against the "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy" that permeates and limits the lives of everyone regardless of race, sex, class, sexuality, or ethnicity. The crowd, comprised of male and female professors and students with diverse backgrounds and experiences, responded favorably to the insights and observations of this astute cultural critic.

bell hooks, an English professor at the City College of New York, graduated from Stanford, received her Ph.D. from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and has taught at institutions such as Yale. She cautions against the tendency to elevate individuals to celebrity status and then focus on their personal lives. That type of focus can erase or obscure the real meaning of a person's ideas, she says.

The lecture condemned society for failing to question the misinformation and propaganda fed to us from the mass media - misinformation that leads to prejudice and uninformed opinions. bell hooks recounted an experience with a taxi cab driver who complained about college English courses that only discuss books written by "black, lesbian, handicapped women." He couldn't actually name any universities that had trashed the literary canon in favor of "fringe" writers because he wasn't actually basing his opinion on any first-hand experience. She emphasized that when we as individuals fail to think critically about old ideas, we participate in the construction of a "fake reality." Only if we "surrender the fantasy of freedom" will we finally achieve liberty and justice for all.

Sara Cotner
I'm a graham cracker-eating, teeth-flossing, water-drinking, ultimate frisbee-playing, feminist text-reading, plant-killing, pottery-collecting, cloud-watching, vocabulary-loving, web page-designing American Studies major at Stetson University who hates reducing her existence to complex adjectives.