The Author

bell hooks (the lower case initials are deliberate) "is the author of numerous critically acclaimed and influential books on the politics of race, gender, class and culture." She is a respected lecturer on feminist theory throughout the United States and around the world, and has published several books on feminism in addition to this one. Her theoretical and experiential perspective is defined as much by her race (she is African-American) as by her gender; her essential hypothesis is that early feminist movement was defined solely by the desires and perspectives of members of the white, upper-middle class, unaware (as the author contends) of the limits of both their experience and their ways of thinking. Practical manifestations of that hypothesis are then defined in her writing by considerable thought: she is a university educated academic, which seems (at least to some degree) to set her apart from the...