Two incidents from grad school keep popping up as I re-visit bell hooks All About Love and Communion.

At the end of my MA program, I took my first feminist theory classes with a professor, who inspired me. She challenged me, and I admired her. She is the reason I ended up in the Ph.D. program at my school. She pushed me to go somewhere else, but I wanted to continue to study with her. In the end, she left the university right after I submitted my dissertation proposal, so I probably should have listened. (That is an entirely different story.) The exact name of the course escapes me, but I am sure it had something to do with feminist pedagogies and composition. I am sure, because I unwittingly ignited a firestorm of feminist debate at our end of the semester dinner party.

At the end of that semester I completed my first year teaching composition at the local community college. I’d opted to complete an internship style program rather than write a thesis. I brought some Cowboy Cookies (around my house that means oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips and walnuts) that I’d baked as part of my contribution to the dinner. At some point, I must have mentioned that I had also made enough cookies to take to celebrate the end of my first year teaching with my composition students.

After twenty years, I don’t remember the conversation verbatim, I am pretty sure it started with an exasperated comment from my professor wondering if I’d learned anything at all in her class. Because baking cookies for my students perpetuated gendered stereotypes about how women professors should care for students. Basically, I’d forsaken feminist pedagogies, shored up expectations that women will perform uncompensated caring labor, and made things more difficult for women who don’t fit the stereotype. I didn’t have a great come back. I pointed out that it was the end of the semester, and that the point wasn’t about caring for the students. I was celebrating a milestone – the end of my first year teaching. A classmate, who was every bit as passionate, strong-willed, and inspiring as our professor, vehemently defended me. She argued that the point of feminism is that I had the choice to make cookies or not make cookies.

They went on about it for long enough that the whole incident became a reference point for those of us in the class for the next few years.

A couple of years later, during my Ph.D. work, I had the opportunity to hear bell hooks speak. I believe it was at Winston-Salem State University. I don’t remember the exact talk now, but I know she talked about love. I know because I remember, with regret, how dismissive I was about her message. Still influenced by my professor and other feminist scholars, I was too focused on how work considered, “women’s work” is devalued within systems. And as hooks writes, “Patriarchy has always seen love as women’s work, degraded and devalued labor.” I went into the talk wanting a different kind of feminism from hooks; what she offered was more radical than I knew at the time.

It wasn’t until 2021 or 2022, that I finally started to read hook’s work on love, that I was ready to really listen. In the All About Love chapter “Community: Loving Communion,” hooks opens by reminding us that “Communities sustain life — not nuclear families, or the “couple,” and certainly not the rugged individualist.” For hooks, “When we see love as the will to nurture one’s own or another’s spiritual growth, revealed through acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming responsibility, the foundation of all love in our life in the same. There is no special love exclusively reserved for romantic partners. Genuine love is the foundation of our engagement with ourselves, with family, with friends, with partners, with everyone we choose to love.”

My professor wasn’t wrong. Overtly caring work like nursing, teaching, child care has been characterized as women’s work and degraded and devalued. You can find a million articles about it, and if you require less academic/more real world proof, watch Meet the Parents again and pay attention to all the jokes about Ben Stiller’s profession. Resisting that devaluation has been important work, particularly when we consider the way that devaluation compounds as it impacts across race as well as gender.

We are, however, so clearly living in broken communities. [gestures hopelessly at the world]
hooks’ message was more radical than I knew, because I couldn’t comprehend the ramifications of these broken communities. Love isn’t all we need. We also need action. We need the “acts of care, respect, knowing, and assuming responsibility” hooks says demonstrate love. I think we also need the accountability that comes with responsibility.

I know I’m guilty of conflating love/acts of care a bit as I am trying to work out their relationship in my stories. Their relationship and the difficulty of teasing them apart for discussion is some of the point. We need a broader vocabulary of love, and we need a less gendered understanding of the labor of love that enables us all to assume the responsibility of it.

Clearly, there is a lot to think through here. I’ve reached the limit of blog-post attention span, though. So, I’ll pick up the threads another time.