bell hooks: Ethics From the Margins

This article explores much of the body of bell hooks’s work. It analyzes her long trajectory from her opening salvo, Ain’t 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.