ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses life history of Bell Hooks, a feminist thinker. Family and social dysfunction, including impoverished communities, represent for hooks the everyday brutality of a dominant culture's control and oppression; a reality further complicated by mass media's reductive, stereotypical, and sensational imagery. Her key contribution to feminist thought lies in her incisive ability to explain the dynamics of patriarchal culture, and the ways gender, race, and class structure black experience in the United States. Patriarchal domination and control supports, promotes, and condones sexist violence. In a patriarchal culture, females tend to define themselves relative to men as blacks have relative to white society and privilege. Hooks attributes sexist attitudes and practices in males as well as females to socialization patterns that promote gender roles and expectations passivity in females and aggressiveness in males. Females become a safe target for the ambivalent macho identity.
