When Love Becomes a Social Issue: Contributions of bell hooks’ Black Feminism

For those who don’t know her, bell hooks (1952–2021), from the United States, was (and continues to be) an icon of Black feminism. In this article, I will talk about her book All About Love: New Visions (Italian edition, 2022), which I find extraordinary and groundbreaking because it brings the debate on the concept of love into the political arena. The legacy of Erich Fromm, who in The Art of Loving (1986) argued that love should become a social as well as an individual phenomenon, is very strong.

bell hooks believes that our lives are characterized by a great void of love and a strong need to be loved—shortages that she attributes to the capitalist value system that permeates our societies. Materialism creates a world of pathological narcissists, where only the “I” matters, whose sole aim in life is to satisfy their own needs and consume; generating a culture where things count more than people and where one is willing to kill for a luxury item.

Consumerism spreads the belief that every need can be satisfied through material growth: it exploits the void of love to keep people in a constant state of lack, increasing the desire to have more and pushing them to buy.

In this context, the ethics of love proves to be necessary: consumerism transposed into relationships leads people to believe that relationships only matter insofar as they instantly satisfy individualistic desires, whereas loving authentically means investing time and effort.

But how did we get here historically?

In the United States, toward the end of the 1970s, after the failure of radical movements for social justice, people stopped talking about love. The hippies and their practices of love did not lead to the reorganization of the system around the values of peace, love, and justice. Instead, the cult of money and materialism took over: this reflected the imperialist needs pursued by U.S. foreign policy, in which big corporations played an important role. Consequently, poor citizens began to be deprived of government-funded social services, while huge sums of money were invested in military spending.

This cultural shift led to a reorientation of role models and icons: admiration for visionary political leaders and activists was replaced with the worship of the rich and famous, movie stars, and singers. Another effect was the normalization of ostentatious displays of material luxury, even within poor communities: one way for the few poor to get rich was through quick money made in the street drug industry.

How can we bring love into our lives?

First of all, to embark on what bell hooks calls the “journey toward love,” we need to clarify our destination. So, what is love?

Many people claim that love takes on subjective meanings that differ from person to person, but according to the author, this happens because a precise definition of love would force them to acknowledge the absence of love in their own lives. Yet admitting and confronting the lack of love in our fundamental relationships—whether past or present—is the first step toward self-healing.

The first point she makes is that the origin of our difficulty in loving lies precisely in the confusion surrounding the meaning of love: no shared definition exists, and it is taken for granted that we instinctively know how to love.

As you read these lines, whether you are aware of it or not, you already have a conception of love, both because of the ideas about love disseminated through books or films, and because we have internalized a very specific way of loving: the way we were loved during childhood.

However, we grew up in a culture that tells us that sooner or later romantic love will automatically arrive for us, regardless of the pain experienced in our childhood. Of course, romantic relationships have the potential to redeem our wounds of love—but only if we are “ready to be saved.” Otherwise, all relationships become spaces where old patterns are repeated.

For this reason, we must first take responsibility for our own well-being: we must heal from past wounds, betrayals, and the emotional neglect of our parents before freeing ourselves from learned models, from the unconscious certainty that no one will ever love us as we truly are, and only then can we develop love within ourselves and rewrite our memories.

Few writers talk about the link between the lack of love in families and patriarchal models, where some affectionate aspects coexist with practices of domination and oppression. But love and abuse cannot coexist: a family that abused, neglected, or mistreated you did not love you.

The predominant family model within the patriarchal system is the nuclear family.

A very fertile ground for abuses of power, since within this small nucleus, parents exercise full power over their children. The author defines it as “the only institutionalized sphere of power that can be calmly autocratic and fascist.” She reminds us that children do not have the tools to organize collectively and denounce the abuse and mistreatment they endure within the family. Unfortunately, it is common sense to think that this only happens in poor families, while abuse and emotional neglect are just as frequent in wealthy or very rich families.

When the family is part of a wider community, such as an extended family, there is more variability and a greater chance that children may encounter a loving adult. Despite many studies confirming that the patriarchal nuclear family is predominantly dysfunctional, many people continue to claim that it is the ideal environment in which to raise children. It is important to remember that the privatized patriarchal nuclear family is not only recent but also a minority compared to other family organizations worldwide.

Furthermore, many societies, like the United States, normalize pathology: they spread the message that all families are a bit dysfunctional, that “that’s just how they are,” and that it’s abnormal to believe that one can have a functional and loving family.

According to the author, it is within communities that we learn to love—as a remedy to rampant individualism and to the limits of the nuclear family. She defines community as “an aggregation of individuals who have learned to communicate honestly with one another, whose relationships go deeper and beyond the masks of decorum, and who have seriously taken on a sort of commitment to ‘rejoice together, mourn together,’ and to ‘be well together and take on each other’s problems as their own.’”

The author argues that if we do not experience love in the family we are born into, it is in friendship that we have the opportunity to experience an intimate, sincere, and profound bond—and therefore love. Nevertheless, we are taught that friendship should not be given the same importance as family or romantic relationships: we have been educated to believe that romantic relationships must be venerated above all else.

bell hooks further explores the interweaving of love and patriarchy: she argues that fighting for the abolition of patriarchy is itself a step toward love.

In our society, the way men and women are taught to love is different: the majority of boys are taught to behave as if love does not matter and to be rational, while women are entrusted with the task of dealing with feelings and emotions. The pressure to conform to patriarchal models leads many men to distance themselves from their emotions and from romantic dreams.

Men are asked to provide a false self, to be strong, and not to show signs of being hurt, lonely, sad, or crying. If men were socialized to desire love as much as they are taught to desire sex, we would witness a cultural revolution. At present, most men are more concerned with sexual performance and satisfaction than with the ability to give and receive love.

The author highlights the existence, within patriarchal culture, of an asymmetry between men and women, especially with regard to the love received. On the one hand, almost all men feel they receive love and know what it is like to be loved: they perceive love as something owed to them, something they can receive without making any effort. On the other hand, many women long for love, but this need is rarely fulfilled.

The internalization of the idea that they will never know fulfilling love leads them to settle for unsatisfactory partners simply to soothe their pain and feel some peace. Often, we want a partner who is mature, reliable, affectionate, present, sensitive, and kind, but when we become aware of the gap between what we desire and what we have accepted, the fear of being alone and partnerless leads us to settle for someone incomplete.

This is also due to the dominant idea that when we fall in love, we have no choice—that when “something sparks,” it overwhelms us and takes over. (Expressions such as “to fall in love” validate and encourage this view.) But the author emphasizes that it is possible, indeed necessary, to evaluate a partner critically, with clarity and protecting our own needs.

At this point, the author reflects on the meaning of “to love,” and in particular, on its spiritual dimension.

Love is not only a feeling but rather a concrete action, a promise, and a commitment born from a conscious choice that implies taking responsibility for it.

Loving, according to bell hooks, means bringing together several elements: care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, trust, honesty, and open communication.

Of course, in many families, children receive plenty of care, but that is not enough: love can still be completely absent; the two are not incompatible.

What struck me most about this book is that the author considers love a spiritual practice, a sacred alliance that ignites the desire to nurture our own or others’ spiritual growth.

In fact, she conceives communion with the other, and the abandonment of oneself in the other, as a way to experience transcendence and to fully realize ourselves as human beings.

Moreover, the mysterious connection between our soul and that of another person can reconnect us with our own soul and help us rediscover our true self, discovering and fulfilling our deepest potential. In the author’s words: “soul connection is the resonance between two people who respond to the substantial beauty of each other’s individual nature, beyond the façade, meeting on a deeper plane.”

When we speak of spirituality, we are clearly not referring to any specific religion but rather to the recognition of our inner dimension—what we may call soul—that makes us feel more connected with the rest of the world and with the existence of multiple paths to approach it.

The author opposes certain New Age practices focused on individual self-improvement rather than on applying the principles of love within a community. For her, spiritual practice is not just about retreats or reading a good book, but above all about concrete action—an external manifestation of a mindset centered on valuing human interconnectedness.

bell hooks affirms that at a countercultural level, a slow spiritual awakening is making its way, which will grow stronger once the fashion of atheism and other dominant narratives that obscure our desire for spiritual evolution give way to our authenticity.

The spiritual desert of our lives is a perfect breeding ground for material greed and overconsumption: in a world without love, the passion for creating bonds can be replaced by the passion for possession, also because material needs are easier to satisfy.

Living according to the ethics of love means being whole and committed to cultivating solid bonds, prioritizing the value of human life over material gain.

Integrity means uniting thought and practice and not accepting certain contradictions. The author gives an example: in the United States, most citizens declare themselves opposed to domestic violence. Yet, when you explain to them that only the end of patriarchy can put an end to gender-based violence, a great gap appears between the values these people declare and their willingness to live them fully. This represents a betrayal of their own values, often dictated by fear of radical change.

But why do we need love in our society?

The last point I want to share concerns the transformative power of love in the sphere of the res publica.

bell hooks argues that if all public policies were created with a spirit of love, problems such as unemployment, homelessness, drug addiction, and the inadequacy of the school system would cease to exist.

If so many U.S. citizens accept the rules of neoliberal economics, which sows social decay, suffering, and war, it is because the capitalist machine has pushed them to withdraw into the private sphere and to ignore the links between the personal and the political, between individual history and society, between intimate life and the world. On the contrary, the ethics of love allow us to truly realize the democratic idea contained in our Constitution, replacing the culture of “I” with that of “we.”

The author speaks of the transformative power of love by drawing on the place it occupies in all great movements for social justice. Martin Luther King, in Strength to Love (1967), emphasized love as an active force uniting all lives in the struggle to end oppression.

We also need to bring love into the workplace in order to transform it, making it a place capable of ensuring our personal fulfillment: work should be good, satisfying, dignified for those who do it, useful and pleasant for those who benefit from it. Our capacity to love is also influenced by our work, since those who are frustrated in their jobs often bring this sense of misery and humiliation back into their families.

If communism suffered a global defeat, the communitarian ideal has not ceased to matter. All over the world, men and women are becoming more aware of the importance of living simply and sharing resources. The choice to live simply inevitably increases our capacity to love. This is how we learn to practice compassion, daily affirming our bond with the global community.

In this way, we can resist the great enemies of contemporary times—extreme individualism and materialistic logic—through the force of our passions, our dreams, and the creation of a solidary and loving community, recognizing ourselves as part of a whole in which the human is only an infinitesimal part. Love is a human need, and any society that excludes the development of love is destined to perish because of its contradiction with human nature.

Thank you for reading.

See you soon,Ylenia