Many years ago, when I was in my 20s and lived in London, and there were still feminist bookshops, I bought a book with an interesting title in one of them. It promised to be really relevant to my life!
On the bus home, probably the 38 from Tottenham Court Road to Graham Road in Hackney, I opened it. And I didn’t understand it. It was dry, dense text that did not make sense to me.
I was angry and frustrated. Why did what seemed a very useful book turn out to be so awful. Why did it have to be so academic and impenetrable? Why had I wasted my money? Why had I not checked the book more carefully before I bought it. But I don’t remember blaming myself for being too thick to be able to understand it. I do remember feeling alienated from women’s studies and feminist scholarship.
Recently, I have been rereading a book by a black feminist writer, bell hooks, who is someone I have long admired. The book is called Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. And in this book, hooks words remind me about how I felt finding that book and she gives me new ways of thinking about theory and its uses.
hooks talks about how she came to theory because she was hurting - and her words made sense to me. She describes theory “as a location of healing” (p.60) for her and this is what has drawn me to theory and to learning and to education.
But she also points out that theory “is not inherently healing, liberators or revolutionary” p.61 and that we have to decide that we are going to use theory in this way.
Doing a PhD based on my experiences of activism means I pay particular attention to how useful theory can or can’t be for activism.
Mad has come from the experiences and activism and knowledge production by people who have experienced madness and been subject to the systems that seek to tame, cure, eliminate those experiences. Mad Studies is always struggling to find how we can be both inside and outside the academy and never detaching ourselves from the realities of people outside it. Or it should be.
So managing this tension is important for me personally and intellectually. I have other tensions to manage too! But they are for another day. Right now, this is what I am thinking about.
So rereading bell hooks reminds me of the need to pay attention to this tension and to make sure that those of us in the academy do not be co-opted. And to make sure that those of us who are based in activist spaces do not reject theory-making. We need to be doing this intellectual work wherever we are located.
Writing of her own experiences in feminist and anti-racist spaces, she says “…we needed new theories rooted in an attempt to understand both the nature of our contemporary predicament and the means by which we might collectively engage in resistance that would transform our current reality.” p.67 Because what worked in the past won’t work now and it is through ‘theorising’ that we find new ways forward.
hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge
Note:
"bell hooks chose to style her name in lowercase letters to shift the focus from her identity to her ideas. Using lowercase, she intended to de-emphasize the importance of the individual behind the work and instead highlight the substance of her writings and theories."
I strongly encourage you to go to https://bellhooksbooks.com/ to find out more about bell hooks' work.
