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COMMUNION
The Female Search for Love
By bell hooks
William Morrow, 256 Pages, $24.95
Feminist Looks at How Women Can Embrace Authentic Love
By Paula L. Woods, Los Angeles Times
A philosopher, intellectual and writer, bell hooks has never
been afraid to tackle difficult subjects, whether they be
the differences in feminist thought and practice between
white women and women of color, the convergence of race,
class and gender in the movies or her difficult childhood.
Across a publishing career that spans almost 15 years and
20 books, hooks has consistently challenged conventional
ways of thinking and being while attempting to illuminate
the everyday lives of a legion of women.
Although usually touching on love in her books and essays,
hooks did not write her first book-length exploration of
the topic until 2000's "All About Love." Part
self-exploration, part critical analysis of popular self-help
books, "All About Love" was a general discussion
of love in American life and culture, from familial love
to romantic attachments. It laid the groundwork for a second
volume, last year's "Salvation," which critiqued
the ways in which African Americans are victims and perpetrators
of rigid, patriarchal modes of love that repress their humanity
and capacity for emotional connection. The third book in
what has become a trilogy, "Communion" extends
the themes of the first two by considering the challenges
and rewards of loving in midlife.
Though discussions of love by feminists might strike some
readers as an oxymoron, hooks is the perfect person to synthesize
a generation's worth of scholarship, self-help books and
women's personal experiences on the subject of self-development,
intimate relationships and love. For hooks, the beginning
of understanding the tremendous opportunity women have to
love is to acknowledge the debt women owe to the feminist
or women's liberation movement. "By challenging sexist
ways of thinking about the body," hooks asserts, "feminism
offered new standards of beauty, telling us plump bodies
were luscious and big bellies sublime.... It created new
possibilities of self-actualization in both our work lives
and our intimate lives." And though many can remember
the gains achieved during the feminist movement regarding
equal pay for equal work or a woman's right to control her
body, few recall the battle for equality in loving relationships.
Luckily for the reader, hooks does and recounts, through
personal experiences in consciousness-raising sessions and
the bedroom, her intellectual and sexual awakening during
the women's movement that seems almost like an Everywoman
story for certain groups of college-educated baby boomers.
A Southern Baptist girl away from home at Stanford University,
hooks was dazzled by the heady atmosphere of questioning
and experimentation that went along with the feminist movement
of the 1970s, especially when it came to love. "Radical
feminism encouraged women to question our obsession with
love," hooks remembers. "In extreme cases, individual
women urged us to forget love and get into power."
And though feminism had its greatest triumphs in the workplace,
it is on an emotional level that hooks believes feminism
failed to show ways that women and men could throw off male-dominated
modes of thinking and relating to each other to embrace
fuller, more authentic relationships. "Communion,"
then, is hooks' quest to get at the root causes for the
lack of intimate, loving relationships between women and
their partners and find ways in which women can break the
cycle of thinking that has retarded their emotional growth.
In addition to chapters that emphasize coming to terms with
and loving oneself "right where you are," hooks
does a masterful job in critiquing the envy among women
(mothers, daughters and friends) that destroys their self-esteem
and capacity for trusting relationships as well as the ways
in which some men's emotional withholding and distancing
are barriers to true intimacy.
Equally important and moving are chapters that explore the
search by women at midlife for partners to love and the
importance of platonic "romantic friendships"
that help extend the circle of love beyond an all-consuming,
primary connection.
In an era when Americans are reassessing the meaning and
value of the great social movements (civil rights, women's
rights, gay rights) and what they have to teach future generations,
pioneering feminist hooks' insights on the appropriate place
of love in women's lives comes as a refreshing tonic in
a discourse that has grown stale and bitter between men
and women and between the generations. Call it a midlife
manifesto or just a thought-provoking read, "Communion"
is a thinking woman's (and man's) valentine—more nourishing
than candy, more enduring than the floweriest language Hallmark
has to offer—and a fitting conclusion to hooks' groundbreaking
work on love in American life. |
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