Qualitative Inquiry

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bell hooks: Ethics From the Margins

Angharad N. Valdivia
Qualitative Inquiry 2002; 8; 429
DOI: 10.1177/10778004008004003
The online version of this article can be found at:
http://qix.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/8/4/429

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Valdivia /ETHICS FROM THE MARGINS

bell hooks: Ethics From the Margins

Angharad N. Valdivia
University of Illinois
This article explores much of the body of bell hookss work. It analyzes her long trajectory
from her opening salvo, Aint I a Woman, to her latest books and essays in a framework
that contextualizes her explicit and implicit ethical stances in terms of issues of multiculturalism, feminism, and the media. Using a multipronged approach that questions central ethical questions of community, autonomy, voice, inclusion and exclusion, access,
and representation, bell hooks challenges us to construct a transnational, feminist, and
multiculturalist project that will allow us to interpret and criticize the contemporary situation and its popular culture. bell hooks stands out as an unflinching critic and contributor to a body of work that reminds us that much of our received intellectual traditions as
well as new and current scholarly work, popular debates, and mass media products
remain embedded in a framework of analysis, production, and representation that serves
to oppress and not to liberate.
When intellectual work emerges from a concern with radical social and
political change, when that work is directed to the needs of the people, it
brings us into greater solidarity and community. It is fundamentally lifeenhancing.
hooks and West (1991, p. 164)
I do, however, wish to help make a world wherein scholarship and work
by black women is valued so that we will be motivated to do such work,
so that our voices will be heard. I wish to help make a world where our
work will be taken seriously, given appreciation, and acclaimed, a world
in which such work will be seen as necessary and significant.
hooks (1989, p. 48)

In the vast and ever-growing arena of feminist, transnational, multicultural studies, bell hooks1 stands out as a prolific and vocal contributor. Contemporary scholars of this wide-ranging area delve into global, race, ethnic,
class, and sexuality issues in relation to culture, politics, and economics, in
sum the global/local situation that envelops us all (Grewal, 1996; Ong, 1999;
Authors Note: The author would like to thank Marie Claire Leger and Diem-my Bui, as
well as Sharon Bracci, Clifford Christians, and Cameron McCarthy for their insightful
comments.
Qualitative Inquiry, Volume 8 Number 4, 2002 429-447
2002 Sage Publications

429

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Shohat, 1998). Given the wide reach of new telecommunications technologies, as well as the continued proliferation of U.S. media and our location as
students and scholars within the beast, as it were, issues of identity and
oppression must remain at the forefront of our research and activist agenda.
Feminist scholars whose analysis of gender oppression is carried out to end it
inevitably play an activist role. Similarly, scholars of race and ethnicity pursue their studies to reveal the explicit and implicit discriminations and discursive strategies that serve to privilege Whiteness as well as the constructed
nature of the concept and deployment of race. Thus, by definition, ethical
questions of community, autonomy, voice, inclusion and exclusion, access,
and representation challenge us transnational, feminist, multiculturalist
scholars to complicate our future utopias and our present criticism. bell hooks
stands out as an unflinching critic and contributor to a body of work that
reminds us that much of our received intellectual traditions as well as new
and current scholarly work, popular debates, and mass media products
remain embedded in a framework of analysis, production, and representation that serves to oppress and not to liberate.
In a volume such as this onedevoted to issues of ethics and communicationsbell hooks is all the more relevant. Not only has hooks contributed to
feminist discussions about ethics in her prolific writing (Sanders, Cannon,
hooks, Townes, & Copeland, 1989), but she has explicitly confronted ethical
issues in her own essays (hooks, 1984, 1989). Her engagement with ethical
issues is more of a diffuse treatment rather than a philosophical probing. In
what is almost a politicization of ethics, she relates issues of representation,
media production, and identity formation to Black people and people of
color. For bell hooks, as for many contemporary activists of civil rights and
the broad-ranging feminist movement, issues of ethics and representation are
central to contemporary struggles about representation and become the organizing and mobilizing issues of force for a minority politics of ethics in the
United States (see Lets Get Real About Feminism, 1993), which ought to, in
turn, inform, change, and revolutionize the mainstream. This article explores
feminist discussions as they overlap with some of the major concerns hooks
expresses in her essays. It situates the implicit politics of ethics suggested by
hooks in her vast corpus of cultural critique as it relates to the feminist themes
of voice, authority, and appropriation. Finally, it illuminates how hooks has
applied this politics of ethics to her analysis of the media.
In particular, bell hookss work has varied (and continues to evolve)
between testimonial, academic prose, and social criticism, with a great deal of
overlap and hybridity. Lately she has even ventured into childrens literature
(hooks, 1999a) similarly to Gloria Anzalda, roughly her counterpart in
Latina/Latino studies. What remains unchanged, throughout her corpus, is
her commitment to a politics that foregrounds gender, race, sexuality, and a
critique of capitalism based on a Marxian analysis that never forgets issues of
class (hooks 2000b), both on a local and on a global level. She is one cultural

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critic who continues to use the concepts of colonialism and imperialism to

describe the contemporary situation. Moreover, drawing on Tony Cade
Bambaras (1970) work, hooks was one of the earliest voices within the second
wave of the womens movement to speak out against the racism within that
movement as well as being a similarly early critic of the sexism within the
civil rights movement. An increasingly influential voice within feminism,
socialism, African American studies, and cultural studies, never abandoning
any of them nor desisting from their sharp critique, she stands out as a longtime contributor to issues of media in general and film in particular. Her work
can all be seen as implicit and explicit attempts to expand and deconstruct
mainstream ethics.

BRIEF BIOGRAPHY
Born Gloria Jean Watkins in 1952, bell hooks grew up in segregated Kentucky in a nuclear family of five sisters, a brother, a mother and a father, with
nearby extended family. She deems the composition of her family important
to note as it challenges some of the sociological and most popular culture representations of the Black family as dysfunctional due to missing men in general and the absent father figure in particular. Important to her life were both
religionas her family were members of a Black Baptist churchand the
written word, which throughout all the stages of her writing career have
translated into spiritually guided prose. In a childhood described as painful
and alienating as well as self-enhancing, hooks claims to have found solace,
comfort, and liberation through the written word, whether secular or religious. She began to develop her keen sense and theory of justice and privilege
as a young girl watching both her father and her brother enjoy a disproportionate authority and control in family and community matters as well as
learning from her grandfathers more just ways.
A vocal youngster with a brilliant intellectual curiosity, she excelled in her
studies and attended Stanford University as an undergraduate in the 1970s.
As she encountered womens studies, other radical movements of the time
and in that geographic area, and her first dose of living in a White elitist setting, hooks penned her first of many books in her still prolific career under the
lowercase pseudonym of her great-grandmothers name.2 Aint I a Woman:
Black Women and Feminism (hooks, 1981) was not only written when she was a
19-year-old undergraduate but was also listed by Publishers Weekly in 1992
among the 20 most important womens books in the past 20 years
(www.artculture.com). Her continuing studies led her to pursue a doctorate
in English at the University of Wisconsin, and her first faculty appointment
was in English and Black studies at Yale University.
Despite this elite academic trajectory, hooks has maintained a strong and
continuing dedication to have her work be accessible to a wide range of audi-

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ences. This was the reason that her first book and most of her other works do
not have endnotes and sometimes also not a bibliography. In an interview
with Cornel West (hooks & West, 1991), she claimed that she carefully thought
through this code of publication as she surveyed different working-class
communities as to their reaction to endnotes. Her finding that they immediately thought that an endnoted book was not meant for them to read guided
her decision not to have endnotes in her books. It is impossible to tell whether
this move is solely responsible for the longevity and popularity of her work,
one that is unparalleled by that of nearly any other contemporary intellectual.
After teaching womens studies at Oberlin College, bell hooks moved to City
College of New York, where she is a Distinguished Professor of English, and
she currently resides in New York City. Her most current books (and by the
time of publication, this is bound to be an outdated list) include Happy To Be
Nappy and Remembered Rapture: The Writer at Work, both published in 1999, as
well as All About Love and Where We Stand published in 2000.3 This latter batch
of written work signals an ever-increasing productivity as well as a turn to
more reflective writing.

LESSONS FROM FEMINIST ETHICS

As Steiner (1989) reminded us, the feminist project, as heterogeneous as it
may be, sets out to challenge oppression and therefore is implicitly and
explicitly an ethical project. In the proposed change and/or eradication of
present patriarchal systems and discursive structures, we need to aim for different norms and values. In sum, we need to come up with a revised or altogether new ethical theory. If we define ethical theory as an effort to articulate
moral obligation within the fallible and irresolute voices of everyday life
(Christians, 1999, p. 76), especially one that is sensitive, and indeed guided by
the gender, racial, and class diversity of any given culture in the contemporary setting (Brennan, 1999; Christians, 1997), then bell hooks becomes a central voice and theorist in our pursuit to develop a new paradigm of morality
capable of delivering our popular culture from persistently racist, sexist,
homophobic, imperialist, and classist normative ideals.
Just as we cannot say there is only one feminism (something that bell
hooks has been instrumental in foregrounding), nor can we say that there is
only one approach to feminist ethics. Although feminists can largely agree
that feminism is a project that seeks to understand, analyze, and end the
oppression of women, there is no necessary agreement on how to achieve that
goal. However, by the year 2001, feminist ethics is a well-trodden path often
overlapping with other intellectual movements such as liberalism,
poststructuralism, and postmodernism. Whereas feminist theory is committed to a moral view that women are worthwhile beings (Lugones & Spellman,
1983), feminist ethics seeks to position women as moral agents and therefore

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account for womens moral experience (Brennan, 1999). At the very least,
feminist ethics can begin by criticizing the exclusively male canon at the level
of artifact and the exclusion of women and gender at the level of theory. Only
recently have scholars such as Alison Jaggar, Seyla Benhabib, Sandra Harding, and Iris Young, among others, been included in overviews of contemporary ethics. In fact, although Carol Gilligans (1982, 1987) ethics of caring
may have solidified the notion of gender difference, it was undoubtedly one
of the first feminist interventions in a then purely male and masculinist field
of ethics (Brennan, 1999; Steiner, 1989). Still in most generalist ethics overviews, feminist approaches are included as an addition, not as a core organizing principle of the field. Brennan (1999) suggested that
feminist ethics as an academic pursuit begins with the claim that traditional or
mainstream ethics, as practiced largely by white middle- and upper-class men,
has constructed ethical theories which reflect the experiences of this group and
leave out, or make it impossible to make sense of, the experiences of women and
others. (pp. 860-861)

As such, feminist ethics challenges the principles and universality of mainstream ethics.
From a standpoint of race, most contemporary scholars agree that race is a
socially constructed category, which nonetheless serves to structure contemporary life (Lopez, in press). Although ethnicity is often applied to culture
and race to biology, this theoretical distinction does not neatly transfer to policy and media representation. If we share a commitment to universal principles of justice, race prejudice and discriminationwhat W.E.B. Du Bois called
the color line in 1903issues of race and ethnicity remain some of the most
relevant and pressing issues facing us today (Hill Collins, 2000). Differentiating and assuming superiority based on a socially constructed racial system
challenges the logic of universalistic morality of mutual respect among all
human beings, a morality that presupposes our equality as human beings
(Appiah & Gutmann, 1996, p. 164). Race is a socially constructed category
whose contradictory presence cannot be denied. Race accords value and
worth in our social structure, rendering some superior and others inferior.
Although the race line may be complex, dynamic, and self-preserving, this
does not mean that we are ready to throw the language and law of race out the
window while strategizing to leave racism behind us (Lopez, in press).
Contemporary ethical issues, many of these in health and science with
immediate life and death ramifications, such as abortion (Brennan, 1999);
health trials, especially in AIDS research (Rothman, 2000); and doctor-patient
privacy (Shildrick, 1997), point to the absolute necessity to continue our
efforts to develop ethical theories that are inclusive and have the potential of
promoting the common good. What feminist scholars and activists strive for
is an inclusion of the position of, consequences for, and opportunities for
women and therefore for humankind. Are theories, laws, and studies of abor-

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tion culturally sensitive to the different moral and religious backgrounds,

expectations, and autonomy of different women? In the case of health trials,
why were women not included in original AIDS research? In terms of race
and ethnicity as well as Third World location, are women of color used for
research in places such as Thailand, Mexico, and Senegal afforded the same
ethical safeguards as women in the United States? In doctor-patient relationships, are only well-to-do, middle-class subjects availed of the luxury of privacy and confidentiality? Does confidentiality become something deployed
against Third World subjects in AIDS research? Contrary to what some pejorative descriptions of feminism may hold, the promise of feminism is not to
just improve the oppression of women but to make the world a more just and
hospitable place for all who reside in it, something hooks repeatedly stresses
(Lets Get Real About Feminism, 1993). The enormity of the above examples does not promise to decrease in the near future. Rather, given the increasing rate of travel and globalization, we will continue to face ethical quandaries at whose core gender, race, and class issues will predominate.
Whereas nearly everyone can agree that when we cross national boundaries, we will encounter cross-cultural dimensions, within the United
Statesas well as within most nationsthere is also a multicultural population. Gone are the days when culture could be neatly collapsed into the
nation-state. Thus, the United States of America cannot pretend that it is a
White country given that 1971 was the last year when white Americans had
enough children to replace themselves (Hacker, 2000, p. 12). African Americans, Latinas/Latinos, and Asian Americans promise to become the majority
within this century. Within each of these ethno-racial categories, there is
immense variety and diversity of race, origin, and class, so that heterogeneity
must be expected at every turn. Meanwhile, we continue to witness a wage
differential among the sexes, ceteris parebus, and a thick glass ceiling in many
of the most lucrative and powerful occupational categories within the
workforce.
How can this inform an ethically appropriate research? Is it inappropriate
for men to conduct research with women? What about Western men and
Third World women? What about any powerful group over a less powerful or
dependent group? Is this type of research necessarily exploitative (Scheyvens
& Leslie, 2000)? How do we cross the boundaries of our own identity? Who
does research empower? What do the researched women say? What do they
get from research (Lugones & Spellman, 1983)? How do we know if women of
color are participating in research voluntarily (Rothman, 2000)?
These questions take on a more concrete form when considering the mass
media. How is an ethical media theory going to account for, or at least be
responsible to and respectful of, the human integrity of all human beings?
Media studies, informed by feminist and race scholars, can suggest some
major paths of inquiry. At the heart of the gender and color lines is the truth
that the term minority does not necessarily refer to sheer numbers as it does to

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share of power and resources. Therefore, many of the assumptions made in

mainstream ethics have to be reconsidered. Let us begin with the issue of who
benefits from speaking. Issues of legitimacy, authority, and authenticity pervade the discourse about media production, representation, and reception.
Whereas nearly everyone abhors a purely relativist perspective (Scheyvens &
Leslie, 2000; Sterba, 2000), we cannot be seduced by an idealized equality that
ignores issues of ethnicity, sexuality, and class and the resulting power differentials that affect our ability to be considered legitimate, authoritative, and
authentic subjects. Approaches that privilege the so-called natives as the only
authentic voices about their situation rehash the binary division between the
scientific and cultured West as opposed to the traditional and natural rest.
In essence, that approach reifies the authentic other within the realm of tradition and outside of modernity (Rosaldo, 1993). Thus, legitimacy and
authority cannot be granted only to those authentic speakers. However, the
potential result of this antinativism is that only the Western subjectread
White, male, middle class, heterosexualcan speak for himself as well as for
all others.
Clearly, an ethical theory of voice has to lie somewhere in between these
two poles, that is, only the authentic Other can speak for tradition or only the
Western subject can speak for everybody. Poststructuralist feminist ethicists
suggest that the ongoing feminist commitment is to a fully contextualised
dialogue . . . that must always ensure that multiple and partial perspectives
are in continuous negotiations . . . that we should acknowledge always the
impossibility of fixing that judgment in either time or space (Shildrick, 1997,
pp. 137-138). This dynamic and shifting prescription challenges more universalistic attempts to develop timeless principles while simultaneously opening a space for the multiple subjectivities and locations we occupy as individuals and groups.
One of the central issues of the day is that of access. Drawing from the
extensive work by political economists of the mass media, we know that the
media are concentrated in terms of ownership and control in a manner that
even 10 years ago seemed hallucinogenic. The fact is, not even the garden
variety Mr. Joe Q. Public has much access to the production of media. Women
and people of color, especially those of lower incomes and education, who are
precluded on the basis of cultural capital as well as race and gender, have
even less of a chance to affect media production. Questions of access also
apply to the consumption of media in terms of what audiences can understand and afford. A highly stratified consumption of media potentially overlaps, if not linearly, with gender, race, ethnicity, and class.
Autonomy is another principle within mainstream ethics that does not
quite hold up in a feminist multiculturalist perspective. The impartiality
assumed within the concept of autonomy has largely been deployed in a
gendered manner; that is, men could be impartial but women were seen as
more easily manipulated. This binary opposition dovetails quite closely with

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the mind-body divide that positioned men as rational and thinking subjects
whereas women were driven by emotion, which disqualified women at a conceptual level and rendered them objects to the male subject (Shildrick, 1997).
In terms of media, have women been taken seriously as autonomous speakers
and actors? Until quite recently, for example, most women in the news were
described in terms of their relation to men: wife, mother, grandmother,
daughter, and so forth. Even somebody as prominent as Indira Ghandi was
often described as a grandmother. The great value placed on autonomy also
reveals the tremendous influence of liberalism on mainstream ethics. Autonomy is part and parcel of a philosophy that places the individual above all.
This is troubling for feminists and women of color. Communitarian tendencies, on the other hand, enable us to think of ourselves as part of a group and a
human continuum. Brennan (1999) pointed out that feminists have much to
gain and to be wary of a reformulation of the moral self as imbedded. On one
hand, the self-interested, implied male moral being is revealed as a gendered
construct. On the other hand, a large part of the feminist project has been to
expose the oppressive national, community, and family conditions of many
women and to assert their right to choose their connections. However, hooks
has added that segregated communities were complex in that they presented
subjects of color with a safe place for identity formation in terms of Blackness
as well as with a site for permanent exclusion and discrimination within the
mainstream culture. Therefore, hooks concurs with the poststructuralist feminist position that community with consent is a preferable option rather than
the outright embedded model.

WALKING ON TIGHTROPES: MULTICRITICIZING

Whatever ones opinion may be on the execution of her task, few could
doubt the courage it takes to develop a critique on multiple fronts and continually maintain these in critical relation to each other. It is the intellectual
equivalent of a juggling act, one in which hooks has undoubtedly dropped a
few balls, but one to which she has remained steadfastly dedicated. Her first
book, Aint I a Woman (1981), was very much a reaction to the racist practices
of the early second wave womens movement. These included outright exclusion of women of color4 coupled with a rewriting of womens history and theory that ignored what women of color had already contributed. In addition,
White women adopted condescending attitudes toward non-White women
participants in the womens movement as if to remind them/us that the
movement was theirs and we were not equals within it (hooks, 1984, p. 11).
Beyond belonging, hooks also pointed to White womens universal use of the
sign of woman to mean themselves as racialized, classed, and heterosexual
beings.

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Like [Betty] Friedan before them, white women who dominate feminist discourse today rarely question whether or not their perspective on womens reality is true to the lived experiences of women as a collective group. Nor are they
aware of the extent to which their perspectives reflect race and class biases,
although there has been a greater awareness of biases in recent years. (hooks,
1984, p. 3).

These are all issues with which mainstream womens movements in the West
continue to struggle (Mohanty, 1984) and that currently might seem nearly
trite to mention. Yet hookss voice was revolutionary in the early 1980s, and
not just within feminism. Furthermore, hooks warned against a simple
dichotomization of female and male spheres, which are, of course, untenable
from racial and class perspectives but equally problematic within Whiteness.
For example, in her writing about militarism (hooks, 1996c), she challenged
us to think beyond the easy male-warlike versus women-pacifist dichotomy,
as many women in the United States are neither anti-imperialist nor
antimilitarist. To make matters more complex, the nonpacifist woman could
also be a poor woman of color. Identity does not map itself directly into
politics.
Feminism, broadly defined, can also be extended to include sexual politics
and issues of sexuality and sexual orientation. As a sexual radical, bell hooks
was also one of the earliest African American scholars and popular culture
critics to focus on the homophobia within Black culture, which she sees as
strong and embedded both in the religious and nationalist traditions so influential among U.S. African Americans. Thus, Louis Farrakhan embodies both
of these tendencies in that he leads a movement that is masculinist, homophobic, and nationalist and as such is quite useful, in bell hookss analysis, to
White supremacists and the political Right. Joining with other African American writers such as Alice Walker and Latina writers such as Gloria Anzalda
and Cherrie Moraga, hooks unabashedly explores the sexual possibilities and
prejudices within the Left, womens movement, civil rights movement, Third
World anti-imperialist movements, and the way these are represented, especially in film.
Since writing Aint I a Woman (hooks, 1981) and continuing through her latest work and interviews, hooks has combined the focus on gender with a
focus on race, criticizing the patriarchy but walking that tightrope where her
critique does not become a tool for White supremacists to put down Black culture, Black men, and the Black family.5 Thus, she has both criticized violence
and power by Black men against Black women and simultaneously criticized
the White patriarchys disempowerment of the Black male. She has done all
this with a persistent focus on mainstream and alternative media production,
using both Micheaux and Spike Lee as examples. As such, Spike Lee stands
almost as a metaphor for both the potential of film to illustrate the Black male
situation vis--vis White supremacy and the nearly criminal reproduction of

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both White supremacist and Black misogynist attitudes toward and representations of women of color.
As mentioned in a previous quote, hooks also incorporates the category of
class as a central component of her framework of analysis. She criticizes mainstream feminism for its racial and class biases by emphasizing that it was a
mark of class and privilege that allowed White middle-class feminists to
make their interests the primary focus of the womens movement. She criticizes fellow Black male scholars for their gender and class blindness. Moreover, hookss class analysis is both local, in terms of bringing attention to
uneven distribution of wealth in the United States as well as unequal access to
education and other opportunities, and global in that she sees the global capitalist system as part and parcel of the situation of the Black underclass in the
United States. She insists it is only by analyzing racism and its function in
capitalist society that a thorough understanding can emerge (hooks, 1984, p.
3). For example, in a conversation with Cornel West, she urged all readers
then to rejoice with us that this subject-to-subject encounter can be possible
within a White supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal context that would, in fact,
have us not be capable of talking to one another (hooks & West, 1991, p. 5).
There as elsewhere, she brought her multiply-pronged analysis to bear on the
subject at hand, in this case the public conversation between two prominent
Black intellectuals (hooks & West, 1991). Yet later in that book of conversations and interviews, she criticized West himself for his omission of the Black
female tradition in his essays on the Black intellectual. Still in another conversation with Black female theologians, she chided them for not being sufficiently aware of the gains and promising potential offered by feminist studies
and the womens movement (hooks, 1989). In sum, her body of work never
abandons her attention to the intertwined vectors of oppression that affect us
differentially yet must be tackled in a concerted manner.

MEDIA ANALYSIS
Whereas bell hooks writes widely and ranges across a number of disciplinary boundaries, it is no surprise that she would focus on the mass media as
both a site of critique and an area to teach or formulate a resistant or revolutionary practice. Her approach might be described as one of ethical pedagogy.
Thus, much of her work appears in education journals and series as well as in
media and cultural studies. Of course, she would be the first to note that there
is great overlap between the two. Her writing about culture nonetheless
engages media and film scholars in a conversation that highlights issues of
race, class, gender, and sexuality. Through her extensive body of work, an ethical strand weaves it togethernamely, what are the ethics both of media production and of theoretical production? Neither Spike Lee nor many White
feminists and African American males are absolved from the interrogation.

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Thus, whereas critical of Black sexism, whether it be in intellectual circles,

such as her critique of Cornel West, or in media production, such as her critique of Eddie Murphy and Spike Lee, she is always extremely careful and
specific in her analysis, as there is much to be gained by White supremacists
through criticism of the Black male.
Although she writes about music and magazines as well, she focuses her
attention much more on film, both the mainstream Hollywood variety and
alternative film. Moreover, she often picks on television as a medium of colonization, which by coming into the homes of people can take over or influence
what was once a safe space. She singles out television, in fact, as central in the
process of internalized racism and colonization of the mind, whereby Black
people learn to think of themselves as White supremacist culture renders
them.
When television was first invented and many black folks could not afford TVs or
did not have the luxury of time to consume representations of whiteness all day
long, a barrier still existed between the value system of the dominant white culture and the values of most white folks. That barrier was torn down when television entered every living room. (hooks, 1995, p. 111)

In her frequent calls to community formation and bonding, she repeats that in
segregated areas preceding the encroachment of television, Blacks could form
a community of resistance, where Blackness was not constructed as the negative Other.6 In this sense, she is not very different from many scholars who
take film much more seriously as an object of study than the dismissed and
deleterious boob tube that is nonetheless assigned strong effects. She analyzes film and film content on a film-by-film basis whereas she dismisses television as an institution without attention to particular shows and changing
patterns of representation and therefore possibly changing patterns of
reception.
In her frequent calls to community, hooks warns both that Black audiences
consume popular culture in atomized ways and that Black media producers
sell out to mainstream supremacist codes of production as well as abandon
the community they came from. Deeply connected to this sense of community is the spiritual component, which is consistently anticapitalist. Televisions major damage, according to hooks, is that it severed ties among the
Black community. Capitalism compounds this effect by making profit more
important than human ties and connections. The mass media are part and
parcel of a process whereby the spiritual community is lost in favor of a
media-created and -supported community, which among other things
expounds racist, sexist, and classist ideologies.
Given this rather bleak scenario, there are many possible applications of
ethical theory to mass media and popular culture, and the possibilities
increase once we deploy feminist, multicultural ethical lenses. At the very
least, and from a liberal philosophical perspective, we can be concerned with

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issues of worthiness of debate and perspective (Steiner, 1989). As well, issues

of the common good and of an engaged press can be applied to news coverage
(Christians, 1997). The theoretical difficulties of worthiness, perspective, and
the common good have already been introduced in the previous discussion
about feminist ethics. However, postmodern and poststructural approaches
present us with a new set of challenges. Given the foundational critique of
universalizing tendencies proposed by those theoretical positions, we potentially face a paralyzing moment. One possibility from this anxiety-provoking
exercise is to avoid or at most pejoratively dismiss any attempt to discuss the
applications of worthiness, perspective, and the common good to issues of
journalism and popular culture. Alternatively, some poststructural feminists
suggest that this discussion ought to be at least attempted given that because
women are already enslaved within the grand narratives of patriarchy it is
surely worth the risk of seeing how and where those narratives might fracture (Shildrick, 1997, p. 134). Yet another possibility would be to keep the
notion of universalism yet disengage it from its connection to rationality and
the enlightenment. Thus, it becomes a universalism rooted in diversity and
potentially very much in accordance with a feminist poststructuralist vision
as well as with hookss implicit utopia.7
In taking up issues that concern her, bell hooks opens up the possibility of
thinking about more diverse and therefore ethical communication patterns.
Her work enables us to tie ethical accountability to potential benefits and
harms of inescapable communicative processes rather than to a fixed authentic self for Black people, a construct she continually complicates for there is no
essential Black person nor Black woman nor Black man. White people as well
are similarly diverse though generally benefiting from White supremacy. It is
not simply about setting out to produce positive images; as Marlon Riggs
so eloquently interrogated in Ethnic Notions (Riggs, 1986) and Color Adjustment (Riggs, 1991), there is nothing innocent about the deployment of positive images. The issue is a much more vexing one of representation within
the framework of walking on tightropes among and along the vectors of difference of race, gender, class, nation, sexuality, and so forth. We need diversity
and complexity of image that neither stereotypes nor positions some segments of the population in superiority over others.

HOOKS ON THE ETHICS OF THE SELF

Neither the fact that black women have not organized collectively in huge numbers around the issues of feminism (many of us do not know or use the term)
nor the fact that we have not had access to the machinery of power that would
allow us to share our analyses or theories about gender with the American public negate its presence in our lives or place us in a position of dependency in relationship to those white and non-white feminists who address a larger audience.
(hooks, 1984, p. 11)

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In terms of the representation of Black women in popular culture, hooks

(1993) speaks not so much of an absence but rather of a dearth of appealing
images, much like Gaye Tuchman (Tuchman, Daniels, & Benet, 1978)
defined symbolic annihilation not as the outright annihilation of women
and minorities but rather as the underrepresentation of these groups as well
as their trivialization, stereotyping, and victimization. The negative applies
primarily to females, including girls, whereas the Black male is represented as
the masculine superstud devoid of love and caring, especially when it comes
to Black women. Eddie Murphys Raw is a paradigmatic example of this version of masculinity (hooks, 1992). Also, hooks adds, the moment when a
Black comedian appeared in drag was often the most successful part of their
comedy routine (for example, Flip Wilson, Redd Foxx, and Eddie Murphy).
The few women, such as Iman, who enter the global media screen beautiful
and Black eventually are reinscribed within a White beauty ideal, so that
Iman inevitably shows up with a blond mane. Much more often, we get either
the pseudoindependent, oversexualized, quite often victimized, Black
woman such as Tina Turner rather than Tracey Chapman who remains and
stands out as one of the few instances in the mass media of a dark, Blackhaired, nappy, beautiful, and powerful Black woman. The ethical pedagogy
of these patterns is the internalized and explicit racist and oppressive behaviors and institutional arrangements that these representations sustain.
In terms of how audiences interpret and make meaning of popular culture
(hooks, 1992), there is also feminist film theory from Mary Ann Doane to Constance Penley to E. Ann Kaplan, which still compiles collections virtually
ignoring race and therefore the pain and hurt that spectatorship offers Black
women. hooks (1992) warned that the problem is that feminist film theory
largely continues to be framed in terms of a totalizing narrative of woman as
object whose image functions solely to reaffirm and reinscribe patriarchy (p.
123). She suggests that psychoanalytic scholars might have to face sex/sexualitys possibly not being the primary signifier of difference. What about race?
Similar to White supremacys forcing Blacks not to look at injustices and
therefore not to speak out about them, feminist film theory disallows the
possibility of a theoretical dialogue that might include black womens voices
(hooks, 1992, p. 125.) Violence perpetrated by discourses of feminist theory is
copied by White media producers in their productions about Black people.
In a critique that can also be applied to issues of race and sexuality, hooks
(1992) took a close look at the drag ball documentary Paris Is Burning. She
noted that the Black drag queens within the video are represented as aspiring
to a White femininity. She complicated the reading of so-called transgressive
play by noting that drag queens (at least in this film) replicate the reification of
White female beauty as the standard. Moreover, she reminded us that drag is
not necessarily about identifying with women but is really yet another
empowered representation of the feminine, which is, after all, masculine.

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Much as Marlon Riggs (1989) argued in Tongues Untied, hooks agreed that
even Black gay brothers are colonized by Whiteness. She concluded that
much of the tragedy and sadness of this film is evoked by the willingness of
black gay men to knock themselves out imitating a ruling-class culture and
power elite that is one of the primary agents of their oppression and exploitation. (p. 150)

hooks admonished Jennie Livingstone, the producer, for masking the reality
that this is not an ethnographic film but one made by a White lesbian (read
outsider) with a specific perspective and standpointa White woman daring to venture into the heart of darkness to bring White supremacist culture
some knowledge about the natives. Implicit in her critique is the vexing question of voice and authority in terms of who is to speak for the gay Black drag
queensonly themselves? Or is there a way for others to construct a documentary? If so, under what conditions so that the relationship between
videographer and drag queen will not be an oppressive one?

WHO SPEAKS FOR WHOM?

Implicitly and explicitly, as in the Paris Is Burning critique, bell hooks takes
up the problematic of voice. What are the ethics of one group speaking for
others? In recent Anglo history, Western men have spoken about and for the
rest of the world. hooks warns that it is important to seriously question the
racist and sexist politics which determine who is an authority (hooks, 1989,
p. 45). In the second wave of the womens movement, White women spoke for
all other women. In an exceptionally egregious example of this practice, Betty
Friedan even compared middle-class housewives, including herself, to Holocaust victims!
A crucial component of this debate is, Who speaks for whom? In the case of
African American feminists, as with any feminist of color (Lugones & Spellman, 1983) or Third World feminist, there is the specter of the all-knowing and
rational Western feminist (Mohanty, 1984). There is the issue of power differentials. There is also the issue of access to the means of publication and writing and to the academic and publication standards. At any given time, the
oppressed have been spoken about and for by White males who represent
authority about these powerless groups (hooks, 1989, p. 43).
When we write about the experiences of a group to which we do not belong, we
should think about the ethics of our actions, considering whether or not our
work will be used to reinforce and perpetuate domination. . . . Until the work of
black writers and scholars is given respect and serious consideration, this overvaluation of work done by whites, which usually exists in a context wherein
work done by blacks is devalued, helps maintain racism and white-supremacist
attitudes. (hooks, 1989, pp. 43-44)

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Clearly, in her own work, bell hooks demonstrates an effort to work

against this tendency. Not only does she repeatedly quote, invoke, and
rephrase African American women and men, but she also analyses media and
literature produced and written by African American women and men. She
published a book of conversations and interviews with a leading African
American male intellectual/scholar/philosopher of our time, Cornel West
(hooks & West, 1991). In a statement that could just as easily be applied to
media producers such as Jennie Livingstone of Paris Is Burning, hooks (1989)
suggested that
scholars who write about an ethnic group to which they do not belong rarely discuss in the introductions to their work the ethical issues of their race privilege, or
what motivates them, or why they feel their perspective is important. (p. 44)

Otherwise, the media production becomes an unethical project of appropriating other peoples cultures for profit and fame as well as continued oppression of the other.
Issues of appropriation are central in bell hookss analysis, whether they
be about Madonna, voguing, and Truth or Dare (hooks, 1994a); Jennie Livingstone and Paris Is Burning (hooks, 1994a); or Larry Clark and Kids (hooks,
1996c). Just wishing a Black director would make such a film does not absolve
producers of responsibility and accountability for progressive critical reflection, and it implicitly suggests that there would be no difference between
their work and that of a Black director. Underlying this apparently selfeffacing comment is cultural arrogance, for Livingstone implies not only that
White producers have cornered the market on the subject matter but that
being able to make films is a question of personal choice, like discovering the
raw material before a Black director does. In turn, what often happens is the
glamorizing of the harsh realities of daily life for oppressed people. In addition, hooks (1996c) highlighted that the ethical issues raised about the production of a pseudodocumentary such as Kids seldom include concerns about
how the politics of age, race, sex, and class shape the vision of the director
(p. 18). Her comments are revolutionary because they address not only issues
of race and appropriation but also the inescapably amoral profit drive guiding most media production today. The commodification of Black popular culture is something not only Madonna but also Tommy Hilfiger, Vanilla Ice, and
Eminem have profited from. Furthermore, commodification of Black culture
is not the sole province of White peoples. Black people are also complicit in
this undertaking.
bell hooks has been very critical not just of White supremacists and feminists but also of African American male radicals, whether they are scholars or
media producers. In addition to the previously mentioned exchanges with
Cornel West and her singling out Eddie Murphy, she also has developed a
sustained criticism of Spike Lee movies, whose Black male representation
often has been accomplished at the expense of Black and Latina women. In a

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sense, Spike Lee was one of the first mainstream directors to represent the
inner city as multicultural. Whether in Do the Right Thing or He Got Game,
Lees urban landscape is populated by a hybrid combination of Blacks and
Latinas/Latinos. However, his Black male characters were consistently
developed at the expense of women in his movies. In her early and often
reprinted essay Whose Pussy Is This? hooks criticized Spike Lees female
representation in Shes Gotta Have It. She argued that Lee replicates mainstream cinemas patriarchal practices by positioning the Black woman as the
object of the phallocentric gaze. In his films, we are encouraged to become
voyeurs in the degradation of women of color. He transfers the objectification
of the White woman to the Black woman, thus making him the perfect Black
candidate for the Hollywood canon. Cornel West (hooks & West, 1991) agreed
that Spikes near genius, especially in documenting the element of play in
Black culture, that allows you to deal with the grief and also the absurdity of
our lives is unfortunately . . . fused with retrograde sexual politics and a limiting, neo-nationalist orientation (pp. 78-79). In hookss (1996a) book Reel to
Real and review of the film Shes Gotta Have It (1996b), hooks asserted that
Spike Lee did not do the women thing right until Girl 6 (hooks, 1996a). Here
she reversed her previous position about Lee: Contrary to what most viewers may imagine before they see it, this is not a film that exploits the
objectification of women. This is a film that explores the eroticisation of stardom (hooks, 1996b, p. 18).
In addition to Spike Lee movies, bell hooks similarly analyzes a broad
range of cultural phenomena such as the reaction to The Color Purple (both the
book by Alice Walker and the movie by Steven Spielberg), Arsenio Hall, the
television show In Living Color, Shahrazad Alis The Black Mans Guide to
Understanding the Black Woman, Oprah Winfrey, Michelle Wallaces Black
Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman, womens magazines (the positioning of
the Black female body in Vogue, Elle, and Mirabella), and Basquiat (hooks,
1993)the artist/person and his exhibit. She concludes that Black women are
regularly bombarded by negative images but by few role models other than
those found in the family and the Church. In sum, the media collude with the
White feminist tendency to make White women the focus of the womens
movement while largely ignoring Black women.8

CONCLUSION
In some ways, it is not easy to continue rendering an interrelated analysis
of oppression. In other ways, the mass media often make it all too easy to
point out instances and patterns of prejudice, discrimination, and exploitation running along the lines of gender, race, class, and sexuality. Eddie
Murphys Raw, for example, is saturated with very explicit misogynist and
homophobic components. bell hooks continues to highlight these instances

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and patterns and to develop an intricate web of interconnections not only

among individuals and groups but also in terms of the different vectors of
oppression that are deployed through the mass media.
There are neither easy questions nor easy answers in the complicated
multicultural ethics minefield. For example, it is not enough to focus on Black
people, as do Madonna and Jennie Livingstone. Nor is it enough for a Black
director such as Spike Lee to produce movies. This is not meant to paralyze
us, in terms of either production or consumption, but rather to urge us to continue to try to develop the immense potential still held by the mass media and
popular culture. According to hooks, through appropriation, voice, and
authority, the White supremacist mainstream media still largely position
White, male, heterosexual, middle-class subjects in a superior relationship
with others. Within feminism, not all but many White feminists function in a
similar way.
Given that the media are a site of struggle and subjectivity, bell hooks
argues for an expanded playing field and revised codes of production as well
as for a new cultural critique. Exploitation and oppression are carried out
both in media and in theory. Media and theories that serve to liberate rather
than oppress should be our goal. In other words, maybe her work enables us
to tie ethical accountability to potential benefits and harms of inescapable
communicative processes rather than to a fixed authentic self. In developing
the strategy for this goal, searching for universal moral laws might not be as
useful as the eternally contingent yet vigilant approach suggested by
poststructuralist feminists and deployed by bell hooks.

NOTES
1. Throughout this article, as throughout her body of work, bell hookss name will
not be capitalized. This is the way hooks chooses to write her name.
2. Interestingly, Bell Hooks was a Native American, something bell hooks wrote
about later in terms of the need to make Red and Black alliances.
3. hooks remains such a prolific writer and has published in such a wide variety of
venues that my reading of her work is admittedly partial.
4. Whereas in her first book, hooks provided us with a binary division of the world
into Black and White peoples, in her subsequent work, and increasingly more so, she
has acknowledged a more diverse color spectrum, often adding women of color
behind black women.
5. One of the lessons of poststructuralism is that the uses and abuses of ones cultural production can seldom be controlled. However, this does not stop hooks from
trying.
6. One assumes that this would include the new media such as the Internet, videocassette technology, and so forth.
7. I am indebted to a suggestion made by Clifford Christians about these issues.
8. Although she writes primarily about Black women, one could infer that she uses
that as a metaphor for women of color.

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Angharad N. Valdivia is a research associate professor at the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois. She is the author of A
Latina in the Land of Hollywood (Arizona) and editor of the forthcoming
Geographies of Latinidad (Duke) and Blackwell Companion to Media
Studies. Her research focuses on transnational multiculturalist feminist
issues with a special emphasis on Latinas in popular culture.

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