Communion: The Female Search for Love

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of emotional abuse.

bell hooks was born Gloria Jean Watkins on September 25, 1952, in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, to working-class parents Rosa Bell Watkins, a homemaker and maid, and Veodis Watkins, a janitor. hooks chose the pseudonym bell hooks in honor of her great-grandmother, and she chose to keep it lowercase to put the focus on her work instead of her identity. During her childhood and adolescence, Hopkinsville was segregated, and hooks was educated in segregated schools. hooks was an avid reader, something she recalls her parents shaming and humiliating her for during her childhood in Communion. hooks’s childhood was also marked by strife in the home, as her father was highly patriarchal, controlling, and emotionally withholding, while her mother permitted and at times even participated in hooks’s father’s degradation of hooks.

This mistreatment inspired hooks to leave home, against her father’s orders, to attend Stanford University, where she earned her BA in English in 1973 before earning her MA in English from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1976. After years of teaching and participating in academia, hooks earned her PhD from the University of California, Santa Cruz. hooks is the author of over 30 books, the first of which was a 1978 chapbook of poems titled And There We Wept, but her first major work was her 1981 nonfiction text