On Practicing Love with bell hooks

As I sit down to write this first post, it feels only right to begin with bell hooks. Her teaching and her vision of love have shaped me profoundly. The first book I read of hers was Teaching to Transgress, in a class on transformational teaching. In it, hooks wrote that she “came to theory because [she] was hurting” (hooks, 1994, p. 59), and that struck me. So much of academia revolves around analyzing and naming problems (which has its place), but hooks pointed me toward something more: the possibility of transformation. She spoke honestly about pain while also insisting on the potential for imagining how things could unfold differently.

Later, when I read Teaching to Transgress alongside Teaching Community, I felt she was giving language to truths I had carried but that opposed the reality of my own experience as a public school teacher. hooks wrote about love in a way that was accessible and honest. In All About Love, she reminds us: “Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action” (hooks, 2000, p. 4). That line stays with me. Love is not passive, not something that simply happens. It is a practice we commit to again and again—in relationship with ourselves and our communities.

Love as Resistance

Much of what we learn about love in mainstream culture is filtered through patriarchal and individualistic narratives such as romance as possession, care as self-sacrifice, and affection as performance. In schools, it is even more uncommon to talk about love in any real way. Love is treated as something private, something you’re supposed to figure out outside of classrooms. The result is that many of us grow up equating love with abuse or mistaking loyalty for love.

bell hooks challenged these scripts, insisting that love is never just personal—it is political. She wrote: “The practice of love is the most powerful antidote to the politics of domination” (hooks, 2000, p. 87). What she meant was that love resists systems built on hierarchy, control, and exploitation. To choose love is to refuse domination; it is to say that every person’s wholeness and dignity matters, that no one is expendable. Love becomes not only a feeling, but a practice that actively interrupts oppression.

Her words remind me that love is always a force of resistance, especially when institutions constantly tell us we are unworthy or that we must work harder or achieve more in order to deserve love. But real love doesn’t need to be earned. As Paulo Coelho writes in The Alchemist: “One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving” (Coelho, 1993, p. 123).

Loving Self, Loving Community

One of the most misunderstood aspects of love, in my experience, is the belief that it always means giving to others first. Especially for women, the message has often been: care for everyone else to earn love for yourself. hooks turned this on its head. She insisted that self-love is not selfish—it is foundational.

She wrote: “Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape” (hooks, 2000, p. 37). That resonates. To love others well requires first being in honest relationship with ourselves. If we give without that grounding, what looks like generosity can actually be fueled by ego or fear. Self-love is not an escape from community, but the deepest preparation for it.

Reciprocity

For bell hooks, love is always inseparable from justice. It resists hierarchy and domination, instead rooting itself in reciprocity—a mutual giving and receiving that affirms the dignity of everyone involved. In Teaching to Transgress, she writes: “To teach in a manner that respects and cares for the souls of our students is essential if we are to provide the necessary conditions where learning can most deeply and intimately begin” (hooks, 1994, p. 13).

That sentence has stayed with me because it reframes what teaching is supposed to be. So often, classrooms are organized around control: the teacher holds power, the students are expected to comply. But hooks calls for something different. Respecting and caring for students’ souls means treating them not as empty vessels or problems to manage, but as whole human beings with experiences and knowledge that matter. Learning in this way becomes more about relationships than content.

I’ve felt this tension in my own teaching. As a public school teacher, I was handed scripts and standardized expectations. The underlying message was clear: teach the content, produce results. Yet the moments that stand out to me most were the times a student felt safe enough to share a personal story, to bring their curiosity into the room, or to push back against something in the curriculum. Those exchanges were reciprocal. I was teaching, yes, but I was also being taught.

This is what hooks means by an ethic of reciprocity. Love as pedagogy requires us to show up fully, to give students our care and respect, but also to receive what they bring. It asks us to risk vulnerability, to allow teaching to transform us as much as it transforms our students. In practice, that might look like slowing down a lesson to listen to a student’s question, inviting their lived experiences into the conversation, or acknowledging when we don’t have all the answers. Reciprocity doesn’t diminish the teacher’s role; it deepens it, grounding teaching in mutual growth rather than control.

The Courage to Write

One of the most powerful lessons I’ve learned from bell hooks is the courage to write plainly. She rejected the elitism of academic language, choosing instead to write in ways that were accessible, clear, and honest. Even her decision not to capitalize her name was a refusal of hierarchy. For this, she was often ridiculed—dismissed by some as “not a real academic.” But hooks understood something deeper: language should open doors, not close them.

I think I identify with this so strongly because of an experience early in my teaching career. When I moved back to the United States, the first school I worked at tried to suggest that I wasn’t being “rigorous enough.” At the time, it shook me—it made me question myself. But eventually I realized the criticism wasn’t about rigor; it was about resistance. I was teaching in ways that were progressive, humanizing, and rooted in love. And when you choose to lead with love inside systems that don’t value it, you will face pushback. hooks reminded me that the pushback is not proof you’re wrong—it’s proof you’re disrupting something that needs to be disrupted.

I remember being struck by this when I first read her work. She modeled a kind of truth-telling that refused to hide behind jargon or abstraction. She believed that love should not require translation. That conviction has stayed with me: to write clearly, to teach clearly, to speak in a language that anyone can enter—that too is an act of love.

On Love

hooks offered a definition that I return to again and again: “The will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth” (hooks, 2000, p. 33).

This definition has shaped how I think about love in my life, in my teaching, and in my writing. It reminds me that love is an ethic. It is built from care, knowledge, respect, responsibility, trust, and commitment.

For me, choosing love in this way has been a practice of stumbling and returning again. I still catch myself confusing love with self-sacrifice or people-pleasing. But hooks’ words help me come back. They remind me that love is something we practice, imperfectly, and that practice itself is what makes it real.

References

Coelho, P. (1993). The alchemist (A. R. Clarke, Trans.). HarperCollins.

hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. Routledge.

hooks, b. (2000). All about love: New visions. William Morrow.

hooks, b. (2003). Teaching community: A pedagogy of hope. Routledge.