From this story by Kat Stoeffel about a panel led by bell hooks at the New School this week:

We focus on Beyoncé because Beyoncé’s the one who put the word feminist up at the VMAs, hooks explained, and because what a “liberatory sexuality” looks like is a “crisis in feminist thinking.” “I wish she were here,” hooks said. “She and I need to talk.”

hooks and Beyoncé need to talk about “Partition,” specifically. The song’s lyrics exemplify hooks’s somewhat conservative fear that feminist women might be sexually liberating themselves “against their own interests.” “If I’m a woman and I’m sucking somebody’s dick in a car and they’re coming in my mouth and we could be in one of those milk commercials or whatever, is that liberatory?” hooks asked. “Or is it part of the tropes of the existing, imperialist, white supremacist, patriarchal capitalist structure of female sexuality?”

This line of criticism tends to undermine female pop stars’ control over their own image. Didn’t Beyoncé and Minaj choose to portray their sexualities this way — and shouldn’t we take them at their word that it is liberating? 

Well, no, I don’t think it’s that simple. I don’t feel like it’s my place to talk about Beyoncé specifically—I don’t listen to Beyoncé and the gender politics of pop music are not something I feel familiar enough with to discuss meaningfully. But I strongly believe that, in general, feminism is about working to oppose and dismantle patriarchal value systems, not about achieving power for women within those preexisting power structures by playing the patriarchal game and reinforcing the values at the heart of those systems. I think that we–all of us–are in danger of making choices that feel empowering because patriarchy has taught us that they are empowering and that the kind of power we are trading in—cultural or political or economic domination or supremacy, for instance–is good and should be craved. I think that part of what feminism calls on us to do is to question our choices, and to imagine, and strive to create, a world that isn’t founded on patriarchal ideas about power. Feminism cannot be about validating and celebrating any personal choice an individual might make just because it feels empowering, not when it’s undeniable that just about all of us have internalized some really bad, patriarchal shit.

To bring this back to a realm in which I do feel comfortable—video games—I keep seeing Shadow of Mordor praised and celebrated for how fun the game makes it feel to behead orcs, how fun it is to take control of Sauron’s armies, to achieve political power through manipulation and the employment of brutal acts of violence. And of course, this is what the game sets out to do, so maybe there’s a sense in which it must be praised: it had goals and it achieved them. It was successful. But no mainstream discussion of the game I’ve seen questions the value of those goals. Wouldn’t a culture that had a healthier relationship with violence and political power at least want to interrogate these goals a little bit, rather than rushing to uncritically celebrate the rush of adrenaline that comes from chopping someone’s head off, and the accompanying sense of domination you feel as you see a visual representation of the hierarchy of Sauron’s armies and understand how you are one step closer to supremacy? Isn’t the fact that we are so quick to embrace a game like this without taking a moment to reflect on these aspects of it possibly an indication that we as a culture have bought wholesale into what patriarchy teaches us about the positive value of such power?

I don’t think it is wrong to ask these kinds of questions. And so when hooks gives me an image of feminism that is not easy or effortless or uncritical, an image of feminism that dares to question and challenge what’s happening in pop culture right now, an image of feminism that is clearly concerned with opposing patriarchal power structures rather than operating and succeeding within them, when hooks raises her voice and says, “Is it part of the tropes of the existing, imperialist, white supremacist, patriarchal capitalist structure of female sexuality?” I am so grateful.

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Watch bell hooks in conversation with Laverne Cox and bell hooks in conversation with Cornel West.