Organizing bell hooks’ frameworks for interrogating representations

Abstract

The feminist bell hooks is a staunch critic of sexist, racist, and classist media representations. Despite this, hooks has been called out for being unscholarly and disorganized in her cultural criticism. Through a close reading of hooks’ works, this paper attempts to make sense of and organize her cultural criticism frameworks toward a possible system for a critical discourse analysis. Hooks’ works are taken apart to examine how the parts fit together to understand the order, interventions, and intellectual motivations of her methods. Certain processes by which these frameworks may be used by scholars and critics for interrogating sex, race, class, and other intersectional representations are also discussed.