bell hooks · Politics
In <em>All About Love</em> (2000) and <em>The Will to Change</em> (2004), hooks argued that love is not a feeling but a practice - an act of will opposed to domination - and that patriarchy wounds men too, demanding they cut off their own capacity to feel and to love.
hooks thought our culture was confused about love in a way that made it almost impossible to practice. We treat love as a feeling that simply happens to us - we ‘fall’ into it and out of it, as if we had no say - and so we never learn it as a skill or hold ourselves responsible for it. Against this, hooks adopted a definition from the psychiatrist M. Scott Peck: love is the will to extend oneself for the sake of one’s own or another’s growth. The key word is will. Love is a choice and an action, something we do, not merely something we feel. This changes everything, because if love is an action then it can be judged: a person who neglects or controls or wounds another cannot hide behind the claim that they ‘love really.’ Feeling affection is not loving; love shows in conduct. In her plain formula, love is as love does.
From this definition hooks drew a conclusion that fuses her writing on love with her whole politics: love and domination cannot coexist. Real love, she argued, is built out of care, respect, recognition, responsibility, trust, and honest knowledge of another person - and every one of these is destroyed by the will to control. Where one person dominates another, however affectionate the language, there is not love but its counterfeit. This is why she insisted there can be no love without justice. Love is not a private refuge sealed off from questions of power; it is itself opposed to unjust power, in the home and in the world alike. A parent who rules a child through fear, a partner who coerces, a society that exploits - none of these is loving, because domination and love are contraries. To take love seriously, then, is already to take a stand against injustice.
The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (2004) is hooks’s most sustained argument that men can be freed by feminism rather than threatened by it. Patriarchy, she showed, trains boys to equate manhood with dominance and emotional shutdown, and the cost is enormous: men disconnected from their own hearts, unable to love well, prone to turning their unfelt pain outward as violence or inward as despair. But hooks refused to treat this as men’s fixed nature. The book’s title names her hope - that men possess the will to change, the capacity to reject the patriarchal script and build a masculinity grounded in mutuality, feeling, and love rather than in power over others. Crucially, she never treats men as the enemy; the enemy is patriarchy, a system women help enforce as well. To love men, on her account, is to refuse to accept the emotionally maimed version of them patriarchy produces, and to call them toward wholeness.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that hooks defined love as an act of will and a practice, not a feeling; argued there can be no love without justice because love and domination are opposites; and showed in The Will to Change that patriarchy wounds men by demanding they suppress emotion. Explain how love, for hooks, becomes a political pr…
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