New York, New York -- Whatever you have read by or about bell hooks does little to prepare you for meeting Gloria Watkins.
The former is a pseudonym, distinctive for its lowercase letters, stamped on a dozen books of feminist and cultural criticism. The latter is the professor who created them.
Where bell hooks plays the rebel, sounding tough and crass and sometimes unforgiving, Ms. Watkins sounds childlike, her voice tiny and vulnerable as she answers the intercom at her West Village walk-up. While bell hooks writes about “sexism” and “misogyny,” the professor longs for flowers from a man but today settles for buying her own, an exotic red lily -- a Gloriosa, she exclaims.
It’s more difficult to reconcile the use of vulgarities in her recent works, classroom lessons, and everyday speech with her assertions that she is deeply spiritual and deeply Southern. Where bell hooks seems to find no simple pleasure in mainstream movies -- viewing them as fodder for her critiques -- Ms. Watkins admits that she wept at Speed because, in the end, Keanu Reeves stays with Sandra Bullock.
“I haven’t really tried to take on the identity of bell hooks,” Ms. Watkins says. “It’s been very much a writing name, and now more of a writing persona.”
These days, the pseudonym has taken on a life of its own.
bell hooks has been anointed a “black public intellectual,” the only woman in a cadre of men who have been given the label. She’s been dubbed the “doyenne of black cultural studies” by her fans, a “do-me feminist” by some casual readers, and a “hustler” by her critics. Critiques of her work and ideas have appeared in Esquire, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, and Elle.
Her curriculum vitae reads: Gloria Jean Watkins, "(a.k.a.) bell hooks.” Even her students at City College are as likely to call her Dr. hooks as Dr. Watkins.
She is clearly ambivalent about her recent stardom: She likes the attention but wants to control it. She readily agrees to an interview with The Chronicle, but then, moments after a reporter’s arrival, asks, “What do you know about me?”
bell hooks’s 1984 book, Feminist Theory: from margin to center, and another slim book, Ain’t I A Woman: black women and feminism, changed people’s lives, feminists say, and challenged the domination of feminist studies by white women. Those books told black women that they could be feminists, too, and made white women listen.
A decade and six books later, bell hooks moved to Manhattan and began rocking racier worlds. In her 1994 book, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, she analyzes books, films, and pop-culture icons -- skewering the likes of Camille Paglia and Spike Lee and trying to shake up readers with the street talk more associated with rappers than with professors.
With that book and another, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, the media spotlight finally found her.
Former colleagues at Oberlin College say bell hooks was gaining in popularity during Ms. Watkins’s six years there, and they tried to keep her. But a distinguished professorship of English and its $94,980 salary lured her last year to the City University of New York, where her work really began capturing attention.
Always the critic, Ms. Watkins has her own ideas about why and how her work is being written about. “I think the mainstream press, in its own attempt to erase feminism, is trying to make it seem as though I just appeared on the scene.”
“I’ve been saying I was going to write a piece called ‘Writing me in to write me out.’”
She points to an article in The New Yorker that focused on the work of four “black public intellectuals": Derrick Bell, Michael Eric Dyson, Cornel West, and bell hooks. “There’s a way in which I’ve been written into the public script right now, as important -- but. Like in that piece, the men come off as these people who are reasonable intellectuals, and then there’s this strident lunatic bell hooks. But even for someone to write about my work and act as though it begins with Outlaw Culture and Teaching to Transgress, and not that it began with two little books that really rocked the foundations of feminist thinking, is to really misconstruct.”
She says even the idea for her pen name springs from feminism. Ms. Watkins’s great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks, was an outspoken woman. “When feminist movement was just beginning in intensity, there was a real focus on tracing our lineage through the woman’s name” and on writing anonymously, she says.
“The thing I feel like I have to speak out against is acting as though my power lies in some kind of spectacle, what I used to call ‘darkie spectacle.’”
Ms. Watkins seems both to want to belong to this group of black public intellectuals and to distance herself. In Outlaw Culture, in a chapter on censorship, she talks about her own self-censorship in disagreeing publicly with an opinion that Henry Louis Gates, Jr., wrote for The New York Times about black anti-Semitism. She thought there were “gaps” in his piece that would legitimize keeping blacks from ever criticizing Jews about anything. “I suppressed the impulse to write a response because I feared negative repercussions from black and white readers,” she wrote. “Interrogating this fear, I saw it as rooted in my desire to belong, to experience myself as part of a collective of black critical thinkers and not as estranged or different.”
But in an interview, she points out her differences. “My own emergence into the more mainstream public eye is not the same as a Cornel West,” she says. “It’s not been the kind of received stardom, where other people have written about you as a brilliant, charismatic thinker. I’m here because of the way people use my work. People come up to me and say, ‘This book saved my life.’”
In all of bell hooks’s books, she writes about the way black people in general, and women in particular, are represented in pop culture. She writes about her family, about how black men and women relate, and about how a “white supremacist” society marginalizes and oppresses them. Ms. Watkins believes the strength of her work is its accessibility, a goal she says she achieves by mixing theory with vernacular speech.
Joseph Wittreich, head of the English department at CUNY’s Graduate Center, calls her work “down to earth.” He adds: “She addresses head-on the issues others want to tackle only obliquely -- largely issues of race and class.”
Some scholars and critics disagree. They wonder if even feminists who praise her work really understand it. A critique in The Village Voice described it as a blend of “bombast, cliches, psychobabble, and lame guilt tripping.”
Ms. Watkins prefers to do the reviewing. By midday, during the interview, she has loosened up and taken charge. She orders lunch -- teriyaki chicken, California rolls, and seaweed, delivered to her apartment. After checking her many telephone messages and making a few personal calls, she turns the conversation to girl talk. “We’re not working now, we’re just talking,” she says as she brings up men and “true love.” But it feels a little as if she’s collecting ideas for her next book.
Ms. Watkins believes that efforts to compare her writing persona to herself are shallow attempts to “get a handle” on her, “to try to cope with a person that’s not predictable.” By way of explanation, she blames the softness of her spoken voice on the “construction of Southern womanhood,” though she says she can summon up her native Kentucky accent only when talking to family.
Then she takes a break to order $400 worth of clothing from J. Crew on the telephone, leaving the reporter to talk to a former student.
Students seem to worship Ms. Watkins and all her contradictions. Some have mistakenly believed that her close friendship would translate into lenient grading. But most students understand the dual role she plays, she says. Throughout this day together, students come around to hang out. Terence Dougherty, a former student of hers at Oberlin who is now considering graduate school, picks up a list of her errands. After running to the post office and the grocery store, he stays to talk. Later, Tanya McKinnon comes over. She’s a graduate student at the New School for Social Research whom Ms. Watkins met eight years ago when she was lecturing at Tufts University. She has helped edit some of bell hooks’s books. “Hi, Lovey,” “Hi, Sweetie,” the women gush. Both call Ms. McKinnon the professor’s adopted daughter.
Dionne Bennett, a graduate student at the University of Southern California, is breathless in describing her former professor. “There’s this kind of trendy recognition of bell hooks, like she’s some pop-culture diva,” she says. “She’s so much more powerful than that.”
Students say much of Ms. Watkins’s power is in the way she brings her own life into the classroom. In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks wrote, “When education is the practice of freedom, students are not the only ones who are asked to share, to confess.”
Ms. Watkins practices what she preaches, and students seem to take it in stride. One morning, discussing Sula in her seminar on Toni Morrison at CUNY’s Graduate Center, she compares the life of the novella’s heroine -- a single, outspoken woman -- with her own. The professor wonders, if Ms. Morrison had let Sula live, would the character’s life have looked something like hers? She lets students know that she’ll never have children -- she’s had a hysterectomy -- and that she believes that in our society, given that she is over 40, “there are probably many more young women thinking, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to have sex with bell hooks?’ than young men.”
For all Ms. Watkins’s talk of engaged pedagogy, she doesn’t like teaching very much. She feels trapped into teaching, because she thinks she’s good at it and, therefore, it’s her duty.
What Ms. Watkins loves is writing. She is prolific. She wrote Ain’t I A Woman when she was an undergraduate at Stanford University. She published it in 1981, two years before she earned a doctorate from the University of California at Santa Cruz.
For many professors and students, her power lies in her early works. Some, like Chandra Talpade Mohanty, an associate professor of women’s studies at Hamilton College, use those books as required texts.
Robin Kilson, an associate professor of history and women’s studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is also a fan of bell hooks. But, she says, “it’s too bad, as a scholar, that it’s been such a long time since she’s really produced a lengthy work,” as opposed to the compilations of essays she’s published lately.
Still, “it’s hard to quantify her impact, it’s been so immense,” Ms. Kilson says. “Is there any other black woman author who turns up on as many bibliographies? The answer is No. She’s everywhere.”
Ms. Watkins’s own work has been criticized for its lack of citations. She brushes off the criticism: “I think that’s a screen for people who don’t want to teach my work. A lot of French theorists do not follow the M.L.A. Style Sheet in their books.”
But even scholars who respect her work worry about the pull she has with graduate students. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, a professor of history and former head of women’s studies at Emory University, once tried to hire her. “Gloria was bright and lively and committed to students,” Ms. Fox-Genovese says. But at the same time, Ms. Watkins’s work is “not exactly what I want for my graduate students.” Ms. Fox-Genovese doesn’t want students to think that they can get away with doing research without footnotes.
“You have to be Gloria and have that kind of drive and personality and interest in being a public intellectual to pull off the kind of work she does,” she says.
“I say this with real respect. I am not being catty,” Ms. Fox- Genovese adds. “She is a great seductress. I have never seen any woman, with the exception of Catharine MacKinnon, who has that way of hooking into late-adolescent women.”
Ms. Watkins can turn on the charm for others, too.
By late afternoon, she announces the interview is over. She’s had it with the questions. She wouldn’t have let the interview go on so long if she hadn’t liked the discussion, she says. Then she offers a stem of paper-white narcissus and a kiss on the cheek goodbye.
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- Current position: Distinguished professor of English at City College of the City University of New York.
- Education: B.A. in English, Stanford University, 1973; M.A. in English, University of Wisconsin at Madison, 1976; Ph.D. in English, University of California at Santa Cruz, 1983.
- Dissertation: “Toni Morrison’s Fiction: Keeping ‘A Hold on Life.’”
- Professional career: Instructor or lecturer at the University of Southern California, the Universities of California at Riverside and Santa Cruz, Occidental College, and San Francisco State University, 1976-84; assistant professor of African and Afro-American studies and English, Yale University, 1985-88; associate professor, American literature and women’s studies, Oberlin College, 1988-94.
- Books: And There We Wept (Golemics, 1978); Ain’t I A Woman: black women and feminism (South End Press, 1981); Feminist Theory: from margin to center (South End Press, 1984); Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black (South End Press, 1989); Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics (South End Press, 1990); Breaking Bread: Insurgent Black Intellectual Life (South End Press, 1991); Black Looks: Race and Representation (South End Press, 1992); The Woman’s Mourning Song (Harlem River Press, 1993); Sisters of the Yam: black women and self recovery (South End Press, 1993); Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (Routledge, 1994); Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge, 1994); Art on My Mind: Visual Politics (New Press, June 1995); Killing Rage: Ending Racism (Henry Holt, September 1995.)
- Personal: Born in Hopkinsville, Ky., 1952.