Title : Goodbye to bell hooks, the feminist author who died yesterday. This would be a good time to review her theories, but we are distracted, as usual, by the lower-cased name.
link : Goodbye to bell hooks, the feminist author who died yesterday. This would be a good time to review her theories, but we are distracted, as usual, by the lower-cased name.
Goodbye to bell hooks, the feminist author who died yesterday. This would be a good time to review her theories, but we are distracted, as usual, by the lower-cased name.
Author bell hooks opted not to capitalize her name, hoping to keep the public’s focus on her work.
Did she ever admit that this strategy backfires, that this effort at minimizing her name maximizes her name? It's like the old saying if you want people to listen to you, whisper. Maybe that's what she wanted! Why not?
But over her decades at the forefront of Black feminist writing, the punctuation choice became a constant curiosity....
McGrady's word choice is a curiosity. "Punctuation"? Capitalization isn't punctuation.
Early on, hooks, born Gloria Jean Watkins, wanted a way to honor her maternal great-grandmother while detaching herself from her work. She wrote dozens of books using her great-grandmother’s name but didn’t capitalize it.
I think this means that the great-grandmother's name was bell hooks. But McGrady is forcing me to guess... and then go to Wikipedia to check and I see that the great-grandmother's name was Bell Blair Hooks. An excellent name, and much cooler than Gloria Jean Watkins... though perhaps there's a feminist issue in the preference for Bell Blair Hooks over Gloria Jean Watkins. What's in a name? A lot, when you're a wordsmith!
What does "detaching herself from her work" mean?
During a 2013 visit to Rollins College, she told an audience that she always wrote her name in lowercase because she wanted people to focus on her books, not “who I am.” (Ironically, the spelling of her name became a matter of public fascination.)...
It's an interesting concept, because these days, everything seems to be about identity. There's more about who wrote it than what was written, and if the wrong type of person writes something it can destroy the reputation of the work. (Remember "American Dirt"?)
“Even when people capitalize my name, I don’t freak out, even though that would not be my choice,” she said in a 2009 interview. “I’m not attached to it, and in that sense I think we have to choose, what are the issues that really matter? I think we are obsessed in the U.S. with the personal,” she continued, “in ways that blind us to more important issues of life.”
Still, she admitted to getting “a little pissed at people who write me and want me to do things, and spell my name wrong.”
Spell?! Don't get me started. Capitalization is not spelling.
I think when people capitalize a name they are following a rule of consistency within their own writing. You can de-capitalize your name on your own book cover, but how can you reach into other people's writings and change their system? Well, you can if you can. You can shame or scare them into violating their own rules for you. But she only said she got pissed — "a little pissed" — at people who write to her and ask her for something and don't follow her approach to her name. That's not the same as expecting major publications to adopt your approach to capitalizing your name.
I wonder if she thought it was funny that she could get people to cater to her. Look at Wikipedia, not capitalizing "hooks" even when it begins a paragraph:
Thus articles Goodbye to bell hooks, the feminist author who died yesterday. This would be a good time to review her theories, but we are distracted, as usual, by the lower-cased name.
You now read the article Goodbye to bell hooks, the feminist author who died yesterday. This would be a good time to review her theories, but we are distracted, as usual, by the lower-cased name. with the link address https://usainnew.blogspot.com/2021/12/goodbye-to-bell-hooks-feminist-author.html
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