bell hooks ’ The Will To Change’

bell hooks was an American author, theorist, educator, and social critic. She is best known for her writings on race, feminism, and class. The focus of hooks’ writing was to explore the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she described as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. Her work addressed love, race, class, gender, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism.

Patriarchal Expectation of Manhood

The book is driven by a desire to understand why traditional feminism and existing anti-patriarchal thinking fails to make an impact across society, and therefore, why members of society continue to fall victim to patriarchal thinking and patriarchal acts of violence. In this book, bell hooks wants to reinstate the place of men as subjects within patriarchy and not solely as perpetrators or profiteers of patriarchy. The key to anti-patriarchal success is to ensure that the will to change encapsulates all members of society. This book looks what stops this change, what allows the fear of change to overcome the will to change.

“What will never change is the will to change and the fear of change. It is the will to change that motivates us to seek help. It is the fear of change that motivates us to resist the very help we seek.”

As for a lot of victims of patriarchy, the author’s journey of pain and understanding with patriarchal actions begins with her fraught relationship with her father. A complicated and…