When I first read Mary Hunt's work, back in the early 1990's, I thought she was way out there. I thought she was more controversial in her speak and her talk about the Catholic Church than Mary Daly. But from day 1, I loved her matter-of-fact ness, her way of spelling it all out, laying it on the table, telling it like it is. I thought she was pretty badass back then, just by reading her stuff. Then she came to speak at Central Michigan University, and in a small group discussion at the United Methodist campus ministry, a professor (Dr. Michael Stemmeler) asked her this: "If there are so many problems with the Bible itself, should we just do away with it all together?" Obviously the question made an impression on me. I still remember it. Who was this woman that elicited people to ask such questions? At a Christian Lesbians Out Together conference, I had a quick chance to get to know Mary a little better. I was struck by her ability to look at a problem and offer such a well thought out systematic solution that is unfailingly true to her beliefs. She's such a great thinker, and I think the way she takes on the Catholic church is also measured and well thought out. Someday, I hope she's successful (with a host of other women) in creating change in the Catholic Church. When I met her, though, what I was most impressed with was her down to earth nature, her approachable demeanor. When I was struggling in seminary with a professor who spent a whole class session talking about holy blood and never mentioning women once in any way, I emailed Mary a few times for help. That connection at that time was invaluable to me. She's an amazing woman, still a badass. Her recent article on the Catholic Church's war on women is here: http://www.religiondispatches.org/archive/politics/5908/we_are_all_nuns/ Here's her bio:Mary E. Hunt, Ph.D., is a feminist theologian who is co-founder and co-director of the Women's Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual (WATER) in Silver Spring, Maryland, USA. A Catholic active in the women-church movement, she lectures and writes on theology and ethics with particular attention to social justice concerns. Dr. Hunt received her Ph.D. from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. She also received the Masters in Divinity degree from the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley and the Masters in Theological Studies from Harvard Divinity School. Her undergraduate degree in Theology and Philosophy is from Marquette University. She completed Clinical Pastoral Education and is fluent in Spanish. She spent several years teaching and working on women's issues and human rights in Argentina as a participant in the Frontier Internship in Mission Program. She continues that work through WATER's project, "Women Crossing Worlds," an ongoing exchange with Latin American women. Dr. Hunt was Adjunct Assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at Georgetown University for five years. She has lectured and taught at numerous institutions. For the 2000-2001 academic year she was at Harvard Divinity School as a Research Fellow at the Center for the Study of Values in Public Life. She has taught in summer programs at Iliff School of Theology, Pacific School of Religion, and Lancaster Theological Seminary. She is the editor of A Guide for Women in Religion: Making Your Way from A to Z (Palgrave, 2004) and co-editor, with Patricia Beattie Jung and Radhika Balakrishnan, of Good Sex: Feminist Perspectives from the World’s Religions (Rutgers University Press, 2001). She is the author of Fierce Tenderness: A Feminist Theology of Friendship (Crossroad Publishing Company, 1991), which was awarded the Crossroad Women's Studies Prize. She edited From Woman-Pain to Woman-Vision: Writings in Feminist Theology (Fortress Press, 1989) by Anne McGrew Bennett. Among her many publications are articles in the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Concilium, Conscience, ReligionDispatches.org, and Mandragora. She has published chapters in books such as Feminist Theologies: Legacy and Prospect (ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether), Heterosexism in Contemporary World Religion: Problem and Prospect (ed. Marvin M. Ellison and Judith Plaskow), God Forbid (ed. Kathleen Sands), Sexuality and the Sacred (ed. James Nelson and Sandra Longfellow), Feminist Theological Ethics (ed. Lois Daly), Sexual Diversity and Catholicism (ed. Patricia Beattie Jung), and Women’s Voices and Visions of the Church: Reflections from North America (ed. Letty M. Russell, Aruna Gnanadason, and J. Shannon Clarkson), as well as entries in the Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America (ed. Rosemary Skinner Keller and Rosemary Radford Ruether). Mary is a member of the Society for Christian Ethics and the American Academy of Religion where she co-chaired the Women and Religion Section. She is an advisor to the Women's Ordination Conference. She is a member of the Editorial Board of I.B. Taurus. She lives in Silver Spring, Maryland, with her partner, Diann L. Neu, and their daughter, Catherine Fei Min Hunt-Neu.
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Gloria Jean Watkins (born September 25, 1952), better known by her pen name bell hooks (intentionally uncapitalized),] is an American author, feminist, and social activist. She took her nom de plume from her maternal great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks. Her writing has focused on the interconnectivity of race, capitalism, and gender and what she describes as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She has published over thirty books and numerous scholarly and mainstream articles, appeared in several documentary films and participated in various public lectures. Primarily through a postmodern perspective, hooks has addressed race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality, mass media and feminism. She was my first introduction to the intersection of race/gender/sexuality. What a wake up call she was to me, a very young white girl from a very small town. I found her fascinating. She was born on September 25, 1952 in Hopkinsville, Kentucky. She grew up in a working class family with five sisters and one brother. Her father, Veodis Watkins, was a custodian and her mother, Rosa Bell Watkins, was a homemaker. Throughout her childhood, she was an avid reader. Her early education took place in racially segregated public schools, and she wrote of great adversities when making the transition to an integrated school, where teachers and students were predominantly white. She graduated from Hopkinsville High School in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, earned her B.A. in English from Stanford University in 1973, and earned her M.A. in English from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1976. In 1983, after several years of teaching and writing, she completed her doctorate in the literature department from the University of California, Santa Cruz with a dissertation on author Toni Morrison. She also taught at Yale. Her teaching career began in 1976 as an English professor and senior lecturer in Ethnic Studies at the University of Southern California. During her three years there, Golemics (Los Angeles) released her first published work, a chapbook of poems titled "And There We Wept" (1978), written under her pen name, "bell hooks". She adopted her grandmother's name as her pen name because her grandmother "was known for her snappy and bold tongue, which [she] greatly admired." She put the name in lowercase letters "to distinguish [herself] from her grandmother." Her name's unconventional lowercasing signifies what is most important in her works: the "substance of books, not who I am." She taught at several post-secondary institutions in the early 1980s, including the University of California, Santa Cruz and San Francisco State University. South End Press (Boston) published her first major work, Ain’t I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism in 1981, though it was written years earlier, while she was an undergraduate student. In the decades since its publication, Ain't I a Woman? has gained widespread recognition as an influential contribution to postmodern feminist thought. Ain’t I a Woman? examines several recurring themes in her later work: the historical impact of sexism and racism on black women, devaluation of black womanhood, media roles and portrayal, the education system, the idea of a white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy, the marginalization of black women, and the disregard for issues of race and class within feminism. Since the publication of Ain’t I a Woman?, she has become eminent as a leftist and postmodern political thinker and cultural critic. She targets and appeals to a broad audience by presenting her work in a variety of media using various writing and speaking styles. As well as having written books, she has published in numerous scholarly and mainstream magazines, lectures at widely accessible venues, and appears in various documentaries. She is frequently cited by feminists as having provided the best solution to the difficulty of defining something as diverse as "feminism", addressing the problem that if feminism can mean everything, it means nothing. She asserts an answer to the question "what is feminism?" that she says is "rooted in neither fear nor fantasy... 'Feminism is a movement to end sexism, sexist exploitation and oppression'". She has published more than 30 books, ranging in topics from black men, patriarchy and masculinity to self-help, engaged pedagogy to personal memoirs, and sexuality (in regards to feminism and politics of aesthetic/visual culture). A prevalent theme in her most recent writing is the community and communion, the ability of loving communities to overcome race, class, and gender inequalities. In three conventional books and four children's books, she suggests that communication and literacy (the ability to read, write, and think critically) are crucial to developing healthy communities and relationships that are not marred by race, class, or gender inequalities. She has held positions as Professor of African and African-American Studies and English at Yale University, Associate Professor of Women’s Studies and American Literature at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, and as Distinguished Lecturer of English Literature at the City College of New York. A commencement speech hooks gave in 2002 at Southwestern University was considered controversial. Eschewing the congratulatory mode of traditional commencement speeches, she spoke against what she saw as government-sanctioned violence and oppression, and admonished students who she believed went along with such practices. Many in the audience booed the speech, though "several graduates passed over the provost to shake her hand or give her a hug." In 2004 she joined forces with Berea College in Berea, Kentucky as Distinguished Professor in Residence, where she participated in a weekly feminist discussion group, "Monday Night Feminism", a luncheon lecture series, "Peanut Butter and Gender" and a seminar, "Building Beloved Community: The Practice of Impartial Love".Her most recent book is entitled belonging: a culture of place, which includes a very candid interview with author Wendell Berry as well as a discussion of her move back to Kentucky.In her book Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, hooks investigated the classroom as a source of constraint but also a potential source of liberation. She argued that teachers' use of control and power over students dulls the students' enthusiasm and teaches obedience to authority, "confin[ing] each pupil to a rote, assembly-line approach to learning.”She advocated that universities encourage students and teachers to transgress, and sought ways to use collaboration to make learning more relaxing and exciting. She described teaching as “a catalyst that calls everyone to become more and more engaged”.She has attracted a measure of criticism, often from conservative writers. Peter Schweizer has accused her of hypocrisy in sexual politics. Writer David Horowitz has specifically objected to a passage in the first chapter of Killing Rage, in which hooks states that she is "sitting beside an anonymous white male that [she] long[s] to murder" because he was complicit in a boarding pass misunderstanding that resulted in the harassment of her black, female friend. Of these kind of "irrational, violent impulses," hooks states, "My irrational impulse to want to kill people who bore me or whose ideas are not very complex clearly has to do with an exaggerated response to situations where I feel powerless." |
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