Reading Feminism: All About Love

book review: all about love

by bell hooks

Words by Reading Feminism

Reading Feminism’s March book was bell hooks’ All About Love. This work, published in 1999, is an exploration of ‘love’ and an attempt to write a history and a theory of love that can radically intervene in what hooks describes as a world structured by a lack of love. For hooks, once ‘we’, as a culture and community, recognise that love and abuse cannot coexist and that self-love is a non-narcissistic and centrally important practice, we can then learn to structure our lives and relationships according to the ethics of love and forgiveness. Throughout this work, hooks makes strong and definitive claims on love and its interconnectedness with the personal and the political. hooks powerfully writes that “to open our hearts more fully to love’s power and grace we must dare to acknowledge how little we know of love in both theory and practice”. This idea is a transformative one, after all, “schools for love do not exist”. Many of us read All About Love in isolation, something that made us yearn for some collective and spiritual healing, and in this specific context hooks’s meditative theorisation on love is meditative and empowering.

However, when it came time to collectively flesh out our thoughts, we began to notice some of the reactionary dimensions of this work. hooks does not write about gender, race, class, and the ways that our particular locations shape our relationships to love; she suggests that love necessitates forgiveness, she tells grand and sweeping stories about the ‘nature’ of love that disallow nuance and complexity.

Thus this work did not wholly resonate with many of us; it is grounded in Christian spirituality, as well as a specifically North American national context. Many of us felt alienated by its focus on specifically heteronormative and familial loverelations, something that we felt did not capture the full and expansive possibilities that hooks’ central and grounding suggestion — that love is not a noun but a verb, an active, moving, and ongoing mode of relating that is transformative and world-changing — directs us towards. We did not feel that this book was unhelpful necessarily, but rather that hooks’ radical provocations were not given the space to materialise into radical alternatives.

We spoke about bell hooks’ other work, her significant contributions to a huge range of feminist fields and practices, and discussed the different times and spaces that we first encountered hooks and her work. Some of us ‘met’ her in the classroom, others online, others first heard her name in our feminist conversations. We shared other things we had read by hooks, works that resonated more deeply than All About Love but also served to enrich our engagements with its complicated politics. Teaching to Transgress, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, and Ain’t I a Woman were named as some of the most important works in our feminist toolboxes.