She began her academic career in 1976 as an English professor and senior lecturer in
ethnic studies at the
University of Southern California. During her three years there, Golemics, a Los Angeles publisher, released her first published work, a
chapbook of poems titled
And There We Wept (1978), written under the name "bell hooks". She had adopted her maternal great-grandmother's name as her pen name because, as she later put it, her great-grandmother "was known for her snappy and bold tongue, which [she] greatly admired". On the unconventional lowercasing of her pen name, hooks added that, "When the feminist movement was at its zenith in the late '60s and early '70s, there was a lot of moving away from the idea of the person. It was: Let's talk about the ideas behind the work, and the people matter less... It was kind of a gimmicky thing, but lots of feminist women were doing it." In the early 1980s and 1990s, hooks taught at several post-secondary institutions, including the University of California, Santa Cruz,
San Francisco State University,
Yale (1985 to 1988, as assistant professor of African and Afro-American studies and English),
Oberlin College (1988 to 1994, as associate professor of American literature and women's studies), and, beginning in 1994, as distinguished professor of English at
City College of New York.
South End Press published her first major work, ''Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism
, in 1981, though she had started writing it years earlier at the age of 19, while still an undergraduate. In the decades since its publication, Ain't I a Woman?
has been recognized for its contribution to feminist thought, with Publishers Weekly'' in 1992 naming it "one of the twenty most influential women's books in the last 20 years". Writing in
The New York Times in 2019,
Min Jin Lee said that ''Ain't I a Woman'' "remains a radical and relevant work of political theory. She lays the groundwork of her feminist theory by giving historical evidence of the specific sexism that black female slaves endured and how that legacy affects black womanhood today." media roles and portrayal, the education system, the idea of a
White-supremacist-
capitalist-
patriarchy and the
marginalization of black women. At the same time, hooks became significant as a
leftist and
postmodern political thinker and
cultural critic. She published more than 30 books, to personal memoirs; and sexuality (in regards to feminism and politics of aesthetics and
visual culture).
Reel to Real: race, sex, and class at the movies (1996) collects film essays, reviews, and interviews with film directors. In
The New Yorker,
Hua Hsu said these interviews displayed the facet of hooks's work that was "curious, empathetic, searching for comrades". As hooks argued, communication and literacy (the ability to read, write, and
think critically) are necessary for the feminist movement because without them people may not grow to recognize gender inequalities in society. In
Teaching to Transgress (1994), hooks attempts a new approach to education for minority students. Particularly, hooks strives to make scholarship on theory accessible to "be read and understood across different class boundaries". In 2002, hooks gave a
commencement speech at
Southwestern University. Eschewing the congratulatory mode of traditional commencement speeches, she spoke against what she saw as government-sanctioned violence and oppression, and admonished students who she believed went along with such practices.
The Austin Chronicle reported that many in the audience booed the speech, though "several graduates passed over the provost to shake her hand or give her a hug". Her 2008 book,
belonging: a culture of place, includes an interview with author
Wendell Berry as well as a discussion of her move back to Kentucky. She was a scholar in residence at
The New School on three occasions, the last time in 2014. Also in 2014, the
bell hooks Institute was founded at Berea College; During her time at Berea College, hooks also founded the bell hooks center along with professor Dr. M. Shadee Malaklou. The center was established to provide underrepresented students, especially Black and brown, femme, queer, and Appalachian individuals at Berea College, a safe space where they can develop their activist expression, education, and work. The center cites hooks's work and her emphasis on the importance of feminism and love as the inspiration and guiding principles of the education it offers. The center offers events and programming with an emphasis on radical feminist and anti-racist thought. She saw Lee as an "insider" to the film industry, making a film for predominantly White audiences that followed the conventions of "other Hollywood epic ... fictive biographies". She described the first half of the film as being half "neo-minstrel spectacle" and half "tragic"; criticised the portrayal of Malcolm's relationship with Sophia as having the "same shallowness of vision" as Lee's other filmic portrayals of interracial relationships; and disavowed Denzel Washington's potential to escape his reputation as "everybody's nice guy", meaning that he could never portray Malcolm's "'threatening' physical presence". All of which made Malcolm "appear less militant, more open". In her reading of the film, Lee is "primarily fascinated by Malcolm's fierce critique of White racism" and his early view of racism as "a masculinist phallocentric struggle for power between White men and Black men". Thus, the film missed Malcolm's later politics in which he had a "critique of racism in conjunction with imperialism and colonialism" and the film "certainly" did not contain Malcolm's "critique of capitalism". She also said that Lee wrote Black women in the same objectifying way that White male filmmakers write the characters of White women. She also criticized the documentary
Paris Is Burning for depicting the ritual of the balls as a spectacle to "pleasure" White spectators. She was inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame in 2018. In 2020, during the
George Floyd protests, there was a resurgence of interest in hooks's work on racism, feminism, and capitalism. ==Personal life and death==