Work by women of colour and marginalised groups of white women (for example, lesbians, sex radicals), especially if written in a manner that renders it accessible to a broad reading public, even if that work enables and promotes feminist practice, is often delegitimised in academic settings. In ‘Theory as Liberatory Practice’, hooks diagnosed the dynamics of hierarchy, sidelining and co-option with which many women theorists of colour were (and still are, as Sara Ahmed reminds us) familiar: How is that a subject whose name, theoria, promises vision, imagination and serious contemplation, is something from which many students – often the most marginalised – feel they need saving? More than once I’ve had a student describe the essay as a lifeline, thrown to them after weeks spent discussing, in other political theory classes, how idealised agents might behave under conditions of strict compliance. In her 1991 essay ‘Theory as Liberatory Practice’, hooks describes the way that theorising was a kind of therapy for her as a lonely child, trying to escape an often hostile reality.

And both opened up – made it easier to teach and to talk about – questions of what theory is for, to whom it should be able to speak, and what, for better and for worse, it can do. Both were too young: 69 and 71 respectively. This year, bell hooks and Charles Mills died. But these reasons have only been formally acknowledged, at least where I teach, thanks to calls from students, especially those involved in the movement for Black lives and Rhodes Must Fall. The intrinsic reasons to include them have always been good ones. This year, work by both hooks and Mills has been officially added to the introductory syllabus for political theory at Oxford. He was used to these calls being ignored. He wrote an article in the early 1990s urging others to do the same. Charles had been teaching hooks and other Black feminist theorists for years. He looked up at the library, shook his head and smiled, unsurprised.

I circulated PDFs instead.Ī couple of years later I was walking by the Radcliffe Camera with the philosopher Charles Mills and told him the story. The Bodleian contains upwards of 13 million printed items.

I soon got an email to say there wasn’t a copy of the book in any Oxford library. hooks wasn’t on the official faculty syllabus, but I thought my students should get the chance to engage with her challenge to the liberal white feminists who were. A few years ago, as a postdoc at Oxford, I added bell hooks’s Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre to the reading list for a political theory course I’d been asked to teach.

Feminist theory by bell hooks