Book: A Culture of Place (2009) Bell Hooks

…….To a certain degree hooks’ concept of feminist critical regionalism bridges Spivak and Butler’s systemic political and economic analyses with what we might know as ecofeminism.  Bina Agarwal has described the ecofeminist movement as consisting of four principles, two of which we can see intersecting in hooks’ work: the attempt to expose the commonalities between gender oppression and environmental destruction that is mainly a product of patriarchal dominance; and the praxis of combining feminism and ecological thought to work toward egalitarian, nonhierarchical structures (68).  However, hooks’ subscription to the remaining two principles is more tenuous: that in a patriarchal worldview women are identified as closer to nature and men closer to culture, and by extension women and nature are deprivileged in relation to men and culture; and that because of this intimate comparison women have a responsibility to cease male domination over both (68). This means that hooks’ critical regionalism in theory and practice is inclined toward ecofeminism’s more radical feminist tenets (rejecting the subjugation of women and nature and working toward social and environmental justice) than its cultural feminist principles (an essentialist view of the differences between women and men or a retreat from public politics toward a focus on individual lifestyle).  More than that, however, I would argue that any environmentalism in hooks’ critical regionalism is more inclined toward a Marxist political ecology: her linking of gender oppression and environmental destruction and her work toward social and environmental justice stems from a larger critique of industrial capitalism and neoliberal development.

By the time hooks writes Belonging: A Culture of Place (2009), her critical regionalism works within a complex dialectic of center and periphery, local and global that holds in tension multiple spatial levels—the home, the region, the nation, and the world—and their potential as sites of resistance—for anti-racist, feminist, and anti-globalization movements. hooks argues that this spatial consciousness proved important because it allowed her to recognize the way in which her Kentucky childhood imprinted on her oppositional habits located in the connection between “black self recovery and ecology” (3). More to the point, hooks argues that through her critical return to the U.S. South—and specifically to a critical return to the domestic space of her Kentucky home—she found a space, “an untouched truly wild wilderness that would resist being tamed by the forces of imperialist white supremacist capitalism” (19). Thus, her critical regionalism simultaneously turns toward the problems of feminism, racism, materialism, domesticity, and ecology.  hooks makes the home front and family life spaces of critical resistance—the starting points for reckoning the contradictions of democracy, capitalism, and sustainability.