we can’t embody and give love if we are picking and choosing in which specific ways we are self loving. I appreciate how she may not be able to speak on that, but an acknowledgement of her limitations would have been prudent, I think. A woman who does not learn how first to fulfill her psychological needs for acceptance will operate from a place of lack. It’s not until page 88 that she tells us what she thinks love is (mostly paraphrasing someone else), and then she’s glad to leave it at one sentence, and none of the components (such as respect, trust, responsibility, knowledge) are elaborated on.

It explores how we are surrounded societally by ideas of love based on saving and romantic fantasies, as well as narratives of how to manage men (hooks describes popular books about relationships as examples), and be in patriarchal relationships, but we are not taught how to challenge patriarchy and how to transform the whole system. hooks is clearly masterful at writing and thinking and there were a ton of aspects that I will take with me.But I would not recommend it to someone who isn't already familiar with/educated about the feminist movement. And I’m sure bell hooks herself would disagree with this attitude, and she did briefly mention that lesbian relationships can lack meaningful love, but I still came away with the impression of “gay people are magic! She tells us that it’s not just giving care, but since she herself admits that most people have this idea of it and that she herself didn’t know what it meant to be loving until midlife, it is clearly not self-evident what “love” is or in what context she uses the word. Communion also explores the dimension between gender and sexuality when it comes to love and nurturing.

Como cuando acuerda con su pareja que él ponga la mayor parte del dinero de gastos comunes para que ella, que gana mucho menos, pueda ahorrar, y luego se muestra orgullosa de haber sido lo bastante lista (más que muchas de sus compañeras feministas) como para ahorrar y poder de ese modo abandonarle sin pasar por dificultades económicas. No matter how sweet the love between two people, we ask too much if we demand that this relationship and this one other person be 'everything. I love bell hooks in general, but happened to read this book at exactly the right time in my life so that it was a profound and transformative experience; it is always gratifying to see my own philosophy laid out in print with articulate grace, and "Communion" was deeply affirming in that way. Her words stir us to devote as much of ourselves to love, to loving our partners, our bodies, our pasts, our parents, as we do our careers and our independence.Nothing was more frightening to women who wanted to be with men than a feminist movement exposing the depths of male contempt and disregard for the female sex. Previously a professor in the English departments at Yale University and Oberlin College, hooks is now a Distinguished Professor of English at City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Many of us feel better about aging because the old scripts that told us life ends at thirty or forty, that we turn into sexless zombies who bitch bitch bitch all the time and make everyone around us miserable were thrown away.I'm a big proponent of BDSM, and often find myself annoyed at the negative tone almost everything I read takes toward it. I would have abandoned Communion at the first chapter if it weren't for a book club I wanted to attend. Idea of a "coming out process" to yourself for realizing/believing/identifying yourself as straight, sharing same process as those who had to consciously come out as queer (p.

Celebrated as one of our nation's leading public intellectual by The Atlantic Monthly, as well as one of Utne Reader's 100 Visionaries Who Could Change Your Life, she is a charismatic speaker who divides her time among teaching, writing, and lecturing around the world. In chapter two, titled Love’s proper place, Bell Hooks explains that in teaching men how to love, they would be less contentious about female’s agency and rebel against the system that has permitted such absurdities. All that will be achieved is a reversal of roles, rather than the emotional equality achieved through the act of loving that every person desires.While feminism helped these women soar, it often failed to change in any way the lives of masses of ordinary women.