In Conversation with bell hooks: Theory, Practice, and Becoming
Reading Theory as liberatory practice by bell hooks (1991) has felt like a transformative experience in itself: filling the margins with thoughts, reflections, and connections has elicited overwhelming excitement, gratitude, and resonance at a cellular level. Theory as liberatory practice feels like a window into hooks’ mind and existence, and it is thrilling to recognize so many parallels to my own life within her words. Through reading and reflection, I have become aware that I, like hooks, have been “doing theory” for as long as I have been able to think. Only now I also have language and a framework to understand and deepen this reflexive process. I also have a newfound understanding of myself within what hooks calls the “identity” of practitioner (p. 3). hooks’ words provide a roadmap, revealing how the seemingly disparate pieces of me can coalesce into a more coherent whole. Moreover, encountering this reading in the context of my first MA-IS course feels like a homecoming: MA-IS is where I will find the next several iterations of myself, as well as my place within academia and perhaps even society as a whole … all while retaining the authenticity that defines me.
hooks’ essay called forth a long-forgotten memory of my first exposure to women’s and gender studies. As a first-year student at the University of Guelph, I walked into what felt like a room filled with women’s rage. At 19, I was still raw from the trauma caused by my first boyfriend, a malignant narcissist who had taken great pleasure in tormenting me with physical, psychological, and sexual violence. When I entered that room, I did not have the capacity to wrestle with such seemingly-abstract concepts like patriarchy. I would love to say that I sensed the ickiness underlying the academic takeover of feminism, but I do not recall giving it that much thought before dropping the course. Looking back through my present lens, it is easy to see that the trauma I was reeling from stemmed from the same patriarchy and misogyny that my professor spoke of, but I have compassion for the version of me that was too consumed by survival to contemplate deconstruction.
In addition to doing theory, reflexivity is something I have always engaged in despite not having language to understand it. I am constantly thinking, reflecting, revising, and integrating my understanding of myself and the world. Intersectionality demands that I acknowledge the privileges and vulnerabilities I carry through life: I benefit from whiteness and the legacy of settler colonialism, yet being Autistic and ADHD (AuDHD) in contemporary Western society is inherently disabling; although I am queer, I benefit from being cisgender, and a lifetime of adapting to patriarchy and compulsory heterosexuality (comphet) has taught me how to please and appease men; I was raised and am now raising my children below the LICO, but I am privileged by an education that provides pathways to greater financial security. Reflexivity, intersectionality, and social justice are at the core of why I am pursuing an MA-IS in the first place: to engage these concepts through hooks’ work feels powerful.
I see so many parallels between Theory as liberatory practice and the debate about applied behavioural analysis (ABA) within autism advocacy spaces. ABA is a major issue of contention: the medical and educational systems uphold ABA as the “gold standard” approach to autism despite the harmful effects described by Autistic adults. And since ABA is a lucrative industry, individuals and organizations alike benefit from perpetuating the status quo. Recently, I witnessed a dramatic conflict between two Autistic mothers at opposite ends of the ABA debate: Eileen earns her living as a vocal proponent of ABA, representing Autism Speaks (A$) and posting about her life raising a profoundly autistic child. In addition to being generously compensated by the dominant systems, Eileen is immensely popular on social media. The other figure in this debate is Henny, an autistic savant, published autism researcher, and #BanABA founder. Her work is highly critical of ABA and its proponents, and exemplifies the agitation and disruption that hooks describes as vital to transformative change. Henny has spoken out about efforts to discredit and bury her work within academia and medicine, and I have witnessed the backlash she encounters when speaking out on social media. Although I do not agree with everything she says, I admire Henny’s willingness to be the agitation and disruption necessary to create fundamental, transformative change within autistic support spaces.
Near the end of Theory as liberatory practice, hooks (1991) speaks about her insistence on writing in a way that keeps her work accessible to everyone, even when it is produced within academia. This resonates deeply for me, reinforcing my commitment to embrace my authentic voice as I write, regardless of the intended audience. My academic and activist pursuits are inextricably (and intentionally) intertwined, and every attempt I have ever made at writing another way has failed spectacularly. It is here, as I reflect on the parallels between hooks’ writing and my own, that my reflective analysis deepens.
What I enjoy most about hooks’ work is that it feels like a conversation with a friend: her voice is clear and authentic, and she speaks with, rather than at, her readers. This quality is something I have also been told about my own writing, and for many years I dismissed this praise based on the notion that writing is something that anyone can do just as easily as I. It is incredibly difficult for me to write openly about the parallels between hooks’ writing and my own, in part because I am deeply averse to giving the impression of boasting. In fact, I am more confident minimizing my accomplishments than acknowledging them.
A few days ago, I told a new friend that I am pursuing a Master’s degree. Her response was one of genuine excitement and congratulations, followed by:
“Wow, that’s amazing. You must be so proud of yourself!”
For a moment, I did not know how to respond. Finally, I replied, “Well, yes, I am. It’s been a lifelong dream … but it’s probably going to take me five years to complete.”
The conversation wrapped up soon afterwards, but I am still pondering it days later and recognizing it as one instance in a longstanding pattern of minimizing my own achievement. I cannot separate this tendency from my Autistic identity: many of us, myself included, struggle with a fear of being perceived, often due to past experiences with social interactions that have gone awry. The reality is that I have had to overcome innumerable obstacles to get to this point, not the least of which has been my own imposter syndrome. I deserve to be proud of myself. hooks (1991) encourages feminist scholars to persist in the face of dismissal, devaluation, and backlash: I fully intend to do exactly that, one course at a time.
References
hooks, b. (1991). Theory as liberatory practice. Yale Journal of Law & Feminism, 4(1), 1-12.
Finding a Home in Community Studies
My lifelong fascination with people has always been multidisciplinary. Although I cannot recall when my childhood dream of becoming an anthropologist waned, I suspect it was around the time I realized that fieldwork would require getting literal dirt on my hands, and that’s one sensory nightmare I prefer to avoid. My first undergraduate degree included courses in psychology, sociology, English, political science, human development, and philosophy, among others. Over the next two decades, my work and further education spanned the social and human services, until a profound burnout forced me to reconsider my path forward. Losing my mom to cancer in 2018, discovering and embracing my AuDHD identity, and discovering intentional communities further cemented my pathway into MA-IS and into Community Studies (CS) specifically.
At its core, CS asks how communities can be designed to serve their members holistically and support human flourishing, while also functioning as healthy and sustainable systems. Central to this inquiry is the challenge of balancing individual needs with collective wellbeing, as well as identifying what changes are necessary to make such communities possible. Within this framework, purposive action and transformative change emerge as key concepts, particularly as they relate to dismantling and reimagining the settler colonial, White supremacist, capitalist patriarchy that underpins Western social structures and systems. Taking a critical approach, CS acknowledges that our current neoliberal systems offload responsibility for wellbeing onto individuals, while simultaneously oppressing and disempowering all but a select few. A salient example of this is the way women and mothers are disproportionately burdened with responsibility for collective wellbeing, as evidenced by historical patterns of blaming women and mothers for all manner of personal and social problems (Kinser, 2010).
Several MA-IS 601 readings and discussions are directly relevant to Community Studies. Newell’s conceptualization of interdisciplinary studies as reflexive, iterative, and emergent mirrors the development and flow of community work at the grassroots level. Similarly, hooks’ insistence that theory and practice are inseparable foregrounds the lived experiences of oppression and marginalization that community-based work must address, while Sheldrake’s commitment to questioning dominant assumptions reflects the kind of critique necessary for transformative change. These ideas can be applied to the structure of contemporary communities, particularly the shift from communal, interdependent structures toward nuclear family models shaped by industrialism and capitalism. I experience the consequences of this shift as a lone parent of AuDHD children, navigating life without a true village and relying instead on limited paid supports, which are themselves a form of privilege that is contingent on precarious and temporary disability-related funding.
Community Studies is inherently interdisciplinary, encompassing the social sciences and humanities (e.g., anthropology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, geography, gender, and disability studies), communication and linguistic fields (e.g., narrative storytelling, cultural and linguistic studies), applied and practical disciplines (e.g., human services, education, health sciences), structural and systemic disciplines (e.g., economics, political science, law, public administration, systems theory), as well as creative disciplines (e.g., performing and visual arts). Its orientation toward theory is reflected in the emergent and reflexive use of critical, action-oriented, and grassroots approaches to social change. Rather than treating theory as abstract, CS applies it in a practical way to make sense of, question, and transform social structures and dynamics, as demonstrated by Pam Warhurst (2012) in her TED talk How We Can Eat Our Landscapes. She explains how a dedicated group of community members recognized a need (i.e., food insecurity) and took action without waiting or asking for permission: what began as a seed swap and community gardens expanded into community education, engaging local businesses, and creating the Incredible Edible Green Route to guide vegetable tourists around town. In her example, everyone is positioned as both a stakeholder and a beneficiary of grassroots solutions to shared problems.
While I am confident in my choice to focus on CS, I still wonder how I can possibly narrow my studies amid my expansive and interconnected interests. I suspect that the answer is to allow the MA-IS program to guide me in the responsive, iterative, and emergent way it is intended to. A second, more practical question concerns program structure: when courses are listed as electives across multiple focus areas, how are they applied to MA-IS degree requirements? For example, MAIS 616 is listed as an elective in CS, Cultural Studies, Literary Studies, and Writing and New Media: will it be counted toward my focus area or toward my non-focus area requirements?
References
Kinser, A. E. (2010). Motherhood and feminism. Seal Press.
Warhurst, P. (2012, August 9). How we can eat our landscapes [Video]. TED. https://www.ted.com/talks/pam_warhurst_how_we_can_eat_our_landscapes
Constrained by (Im)possibility
Joe Bageant’s AMERICA: Y UR PEEPS B SO DUM? offers a forceful and unapologetic critique of American culture and politics. Writing as an American who has fled to Mexico, Bageant observes the United States from outside what he describes as a self-constructed cage. He argues that the world is watching a crash unfold within a system intentionally created to produce such outcomes. Although his critique is directed at the U.S., many of his points feel disturbingly transferable to Canadian contexts, even if less overt.
Central to the essay is Bageant’s distinction between cultural ignorance and cultural stupidity. Cultural ignorance, he suggests, is a matter of simply not knowing; cultural stupidity, in contrast, is self-reproducing and viral, serving to perpetuate the system and elevate harmful leadership. Americans, he argues, not only buy into a hypercapitalist system that oppresses them, but actively defend their right to be exploited by it. They create and sustain institutions that ration vital resources such as healthcare, justify and rationalize harmful structures, and consume pseudo-information circulated through media, research, and political institutions. Primary truths are buried beneath junk commodities, and excess “stuff” is equated with quality of life, producing what Bageant calls “junk affluence” (p. 5). Under the guise of safety and security, fear is mobilized to justify surveillance and police violence, to the point where police tasers in schools are seen as necessary and inevitable. Bageant further argues that control over information is essential to maintaining this system: dominant institutions manage cultural narratives by denying harm, protecting their actions through legislation, and promoting their narratives through institutional research. The result is a population that believes itself free while remaining ignorant of the structures that confine it.
Bageant’s distinction between cultural ignorance and cultural stupidity is a false dichotomy: the overlap between the two is significant, and framing them as distinct categories serves to reproduce the binary logic at the foundation of the established order he vehemently critiques. Rather than a clean binary, cultural ignorance and cultural stupidity can be viewed as reciprocal, mutually reinforcing conditions situated within a broader paradigm. This raises the deeper question: within what paradigm are these distinctions being made?
Situating Bageant’s analysis within what Mark Fisher (2009) terms capitalist realism—the widespread sense that capitalism is not only the dominant economic system, but also the only viable or imaginable one—shifts the conversation. Fisher (2009) argues that capitalist realism is not merely an economic condition but an ideological atmosphere that structures culture, politics, and consciousness, making alternatives appear unrealistic or impossible. Within this framework, our choices appear free, yet they are structured by prior conditions we did not choose. We operate within a default setting that is largely invisible to us, and our political debates unfold within boundaries already determined by that worldview. Capitalism, in this sense, is more than a mode of economic production; it has become an all-encompassing ideology that structures contemporary reality, shapes our definitions of responsibility and accountability, and constrains what we consider—and imagine—as possible.
From this perspective, cultural ignorance and cultural stupidity are not separate pathologies, but rather two expressions of consciousness confined within capitalist realism. Moreover, within the limitations of capitalist realism it becomes extraordinarily difficult to imagine alternative societal structures, such as universal housing and income programs. Such social safety nets are deemed unrealistic and unattainable on the grounds that they are too expensive to implement within a model that prioritizes money over human beings. Capitalist realism presents an illusion of freedom that becomes paradoxical: we feel autonomous while our imaginations remain heavily constrained.
Bageant’s critique of managed knowledge resonates strongly with themes explored in MAIS 601 regarding the politics of knowledge production. Like Sheldrake’s challenge to unquestioned scientific common sense, Bageant interrogates dominant narratives that are presented as neutral, rational, or inevitable. Similarly, his insistence that consciousness is shaped and constrained by institutional power echoes hooks’ argument that theory is not the exclusive domain of elites, but a site of struggle over whose realities are recognized and legitimized. He proposes The Fifth Freedom as a response to cultural ignorance and cultural stupidity. Defined as “the right to autonomous consciousness” (p. 9), he asserts that reclaiming this freedom requires deconditioning from cultural ignorance: a transformative process that demands risk, discomfort, and a willingness to confront unsettling truths. Here, freedom is reframed not as material abundance, but as epistemic independence—a position that aligns with both hooks’ understanding of theory as liberatory practice and Sheldrake’s insistence that challenging dominant paradigms inevitably invites resistance.
The essay’s power lies in its insistence that the crisis is not merely political, but epistemological: a struggle over who defines reality and whose knowledge is permitted to count as truth. By exposing the management of consciousness within hypercapitalist America, Bageant reframes freedom as a matter of awareness rather than consumption. His argument challenges readers to reconsider the relationship between comfort, complicity, and autonomy in societies structured by money, power, and national mythology.
Critical Reflection Questions:
- Bageant describes the Tea Party as “collecting victims of cultural ignorance” (p. 8), situating it within a broader system of managed information, pseudo-knowledge, and institutional narrative control. Written well before the current consolidation of Republican political power in the United States and the normalization of demonstrable falsehoods in national political discourse, to what extent can Bageant’s framework be read as foreshadowing the present political climate? Does his distinction between cultural ignorance and cultural stupidity adequately account for the scale and normalization of disinformation today, or does the current moment represent an escalation beyond what he anticipated?
- Bageant argues that Americans cannot perceive the system that confines them because they are embedded within a hypercapitalist structure that manages consciousness through comfort, fear, and consumption. If many of his claims are transferable beyond the U.S., how might his analysis apply to contemporary political developments in Canada, including the rise of alt-right populist rhetoric (e.g., Maple MAGA) and the persistence of neoliberal governance under leadership such as Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose economic language includes terms like austerity? Are Canadians confronting similar structural dynamics in a less overt form, and if so, might our relative self-perception as more moderate or socially progressive obscure our awareness of the extent to which we are operating within our own version of the same system?
References
Bageant, J. (2011, January). America: Y ur peeps b so dum? Ignorance and courage in the age of Lady Gaga. ColdType. http://www.coldtype.net/Assets.11/pdfs/0111.Joe.Culture.pdf
Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist realism: Is there no alternative? Zero Books.
Candice Reich 