Part One
A. Describe the gender-specific relationship between men, women and love. How is it different? Why? How does gender socialization contribute to these masculine and feminine roles in relationship to love and relationships in general?
Pre-eminent feminist bell hooks addresses two issues simultaneously with regard to gender specific relationships between men and women. The first issue is gender norms and socialization, which restrict roles for men and women in their love relationships. Women are socialized as caregivers who place the needs of others before themselves: “she was also responsible for everyone else’s happiness,” (Communion 19). On the contrary, men are socialized to receive care, and to suppress deep and meaningful emotional responses as part of their construct of masculine identity—something that hooks describes in The Will to Change. Given the different ways females and males are socialized, their relationships with one another is mediated by gender norms and performativity.
Part of the socialization process creates a power dynamic in the family unit, whereby women’s work as caregivers is taken for granted, ignored, or undermined. As hooks puts it, “all her gifts were taken for granted,” including her financial contributions to the family (Communion 20). As feminism takes root in the culture and becomes inculcated into the public consciousness, gender roles and norms are changing. Women are able to redefine their roles in their love relationships, and carve out positions of power in their private and personal lives. In The Will to Change, hooks focuses more squarely on the unraveling of patriarchal norms for men in love relationships. Men have in some ways recognized the social impetus for changing the status of women overall in the society and in the household. Yet as hooks points out in The Will to Change, men have “believed themselves unable to change...in their emotional lives,” (2). Socialization of males prevents men from expanding their roles in intimate relationships, causing communication breakdowns and disappointments in all relationship dyads.
B. How does bell hooks define and describe love? How does her definition align with, contradict and/or expand cultural notions of love? Be specific.
Hooks defines and describes numerous types of love in her work. She defines love in terms of mutual respect and intimacy,...
Love has often been constrained by patriarchal values, according to hook, who notes that “women have followed the path of love set for us by patriarchal pathfinders,” but also that “more women than ever before now know that love and domination do not go together,” (Communion 6). Love is liberating, love is empowering, and love is universal. For too long, love has been restricted to its heterosexual, patriarchal concept, one that plays into dominant narrative discourses of power, dominance, and subordination. Changing cultural notions of love have opened up new means of achieving self-fulfillment, social harmony, and genuine intimacy. Liberated from the patriarchal construct of relationship, both men and women are now more capable of ever of defining love as they want it to be defined, within each relationship they have as well as within their own relationship with self. Love, for hooks, is all-encompassing, a human social, psychological, and spiritual need—even a health-related need.
In The Will to Change, hooks talks about how the new paradigm focuses on the male willingness to love, but also on the overarching need to cease expecting men to conform to outmoded gender roles. As hooks puts it, “caring about men because of what they do for us is not the same as loving males for simply being,” (The Will to Change 11). Here, hooks asks all readers, men and women, straight and gay, to take responsibility for cultivating a socially conscious love, a love that is genuinely unconditional and empowering. For hooks love is about promoting the values of human dignity, autonomy, and inherent human value: of expressing gratitude verbally and in gesture, of being honest and emotionally intelligent, and being willing to undergo the pain, fear, and loss that all real love actually entails.
Part Two
Communion 1. What is the main point of the book? Why did bell hooks write this book?
Communion is about helping women—indeed, all readers—locate power within, rather than seeking love and approval from others. Yet far from being constructed as a self-help book, Communion is designed to illustrate the underlying causes of deep-rooted emotional pain and suffering that comes from the feelings of inadequacy and low self-worth that many women internalize due to patriarchal gender role socialization. Females are taught…
