Bell Hook's "Essentialism and Experience"

     I am not sure I truly understand why we were instructed to read a piece of literature such as this, one thought I have is to see an example of someone else’s close reading of a piece.  To help myself further understand what this passage was discussing I looked up the term Essentialism, and defined it as a belief that things have a set characteristics that make them the way that they are and that certain groups possess the same characteristics.  This allowed me to understand the relationship that was being discussed in the passage about feminism involved with race and gender.

     To allow myself to blog about this passage I am going to analyze the extent to which the author analyzed Diana Fuss’s work, “Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference.”  Although it does make it difficult that I have not read her work so I cannot testify to how in depth Bell Hooks analyzed Fuss’s work, I can analyze based on the understanding I have gained.  One example of understanding I found was when Hooks stated, “Now I am troubled by the term, ‘authority of experience’….” (page 11)  I can easily relate this to our assignment two we just finished because Hooks (like us) directly quoted the author that he was analyzing in a small amount of words and attempted to unpack the quote helping the reader to further understand what the original author may have meant.  I found by reading what Hook wrote, Fuss may have concluded in her work that a student can only fully understand a class when they learn it from a professor who has first-hand experienced the information that they are teaching.  The example Hook used was learning about African American history and their society from a black professor versus a white professor.  From this one example, I find that Hook truly analyzed Fuss’s work to the extent where a reader (like myself) who has not read Diana Fuss’s work, can understand the meaning that she intended to portray.