American feminist theorist, cultural critic, memoirist, and teacher — born Gloria Jean Watkins in rural Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and writing under the lowercased name of her great-grandmother to direct attention to the work rather than the person. Over forty years hooks produced more than thirty books addressed, unusually in American academic feminism, to a general reading audience: students, activists, ordinary people trying to understand the relations of domination in their own lives.
Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (1981), written while she was still a graduate student, argued that second-wave American feminism had centered the concerns of middle-class white women and left Black women structurally absent — a critique that, along with the work of Audre Lorde and the Combahee River Collective, helped reshape American feminist thought toward what would later be called intersectional analysis. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984) followed with the constructive argument. Teaching to Transgress (1994) brought her Freirean pedagogy to a wide audience, framing the classroom as a space of potential liberation rather than reproduction.
The later "Love" trilogy — All About Love (2000), Salvation (2001), Communion (2002) — took a surprising turn: hooks argued, against the general grain of academic theory, that love is a concept and a practice adequate for political analysis, and that domination in its many forms is maintained in part by the systematic undermining of the conditions under which love is possible. Drawing on the Black church tradition, Erich Fromm, and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "beloved community," she defined love as a practice involving care, commitment, knowledge, responsibility, respect, and trust — not a feeling. The books found a much wider readership than most academic feminism ever manages, particularly among people who would not have picked up her earlier theoretical work.