Communion: The Female Search for Love

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A masterful job . . . Communion is a thinking women’s (and man’s) valentine—more nourishing than candy, more enduring than the floweriest language Hallmark has to offer—and a fitting conclusion to hooks’ groundbreaking work on love in American life.”—Los Angeles Times i loved how she challenged the idea that women innately have more capacity for emotion and are naturally more capable of giving love than men and how this idea influences our relationships and society (and allows us to accept men who are emotionally withholding). “Antipatriarchal thinking, which assumes that both women and men are equally capable of learning how to love, of giving and receiving love, is the only foundation on which to construct sustained, meaningful, mutual love.” Lieben lernen — Alles über Verbundenheit“ von Bell Hooks habe ich wirklich gern gelesen. Die Autorin ist bekennende Feministin und im Original ist das Buch bereits 2002 erschienen. The "romantic friendships" chapter near the end was my favorite part of this whole book. (the chapter on women and aging is good, too, though)Most resonating for me. But it's about "romantic friendships" with other women, but it'd be really interesting to read about having this with men. A bit more complicated, jealousies from the guy friend's partners, women in competition, etc. How to deal? Anybody who identifies as female, um, including very young people. And I do wish I’d read this in college and was when I was first hearing about bell hooks, um, which would have been in like 2006 to 2010 when this book would have been newer. Um, I wish I’d read this book in college. I’m not sure. And she says this too, at the end of the book, she’s not sure if she’d known all this stuff if it really would have affected her path necessarily. Still, she could have gone down her whole path, maybe shortened some of the worst periods, um, a little bit, but, um, kind of gone down at all with kind of a greater awareness of self and her own worth. Um, so I think that’s really powerful. This will definitely be a book that I keep on my bookshelves is like a thing to have my daughter start reading when she’s in her teenage years.

A lot of people react to the statements in this book, and others like it, by yelling things like, "Not all men!" or "We live in a post-feminist world!" or "Don't disrespect people who are into kink!" or "Sex workers are good for society!" and so on and so forth. Lost is the fact that bell hooks, and writers like her, are discussing a power structure, not individual people. I'm still going to give this a decent rating, though, because I feel like hooks made a lot of good points. She challenged the widely-accepted cultural idea that women are innately more loving than men, and highlighted how toxic gender roles are often still performed even within queer relationships. I felt particularly called out by her indictment of "negative body acceptance": The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others. When truth teller and careful writer bell hooks offers a book, I like to be standing at the bookshop when it opens." -Maya AngelouHer discussion of love is wonderful and, I would say, flawless. She discusses attitudes like "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus," their roots in patriarchy, and the unfairness of both sides of the coin: teaching women that love and nurturing are their realm and they should accept that men won't get it, and teaching men that strength and silence and dominance are their realm and showing emotion or communicating on a deeper level are emasculating. Buy Communion: The Female Search for Love (Love Song to the Nation) pdfAdvertising eBooks Buy Communion: The Female Search for Love (Love Song to the Nation) pdf

I’m so glad that, in my opinion, there’s more discourse about elevating friendship in society now, from explicitly naming the oppressive force of amatonormativity to openly discussing relationship anarchy. Throughout Communion and especially in the chapter on romantic friendships, hooks highlights her ability to question the status quo about relationships and to think outside of the box to procure long and lasting love. I’ll end this review with one more passage from that chapter I enjoyed: According to the author, a woman’s search for love, not equality, is at the helm of all things. Freedom only comes when she realizes her value and appreciates herself instead of waiting for substantiation from a man. Affirming our natural beauty before we adorn it in other ways keeps us from developing a dependency on artifice" (p. 119), even though I have this same feeling, I could see where it'd be disagreed with (thinking of Imogen Binnie's chapter on clothes/fashion) Intimate, revealing, provocative, Communion challenges every female to courageously claim the search for love as the heroic journey she must choose to be truly free. Silencing our fears about becoming women who love too much, Communion answers all of our questions about the place of love in a woman’s life.

At the library

Published in 2002, "Communion: The Female Search for Love," by bell hooks/Gloria Watkins, is an excellent nonfiction title by this prolific and deeply insightful author. I mean, I guess that’s what makes a nonfiction book good, right? Is that it’s still storytelling? It still carries you along. So she really nails that. One other piece that I really like is that, of course, it’s entirely focused on women and how women find love and relationships, but she’s talking a lot about the feminist movement and about feminism. Um, and one thing she really gets into towards the end is how damaging patriarchy is for men and how it really cuts off men from having communion and from really having that sense of connectedness and belonging, um, and knowing with others people. I liked this book even though I don’t think it was as groundbreaking or tightly argued as her books The Will to Change or All About Love. For the first 70% of Communion, I felt that bell hooks made several strong and interesting points about women, gender, and relationships: that women are taught to search for love in romantic relationships, that women are also capable of perpetuating sexism and patriarchy, and that men who may advocate for racial justice or even gender equality may still enact sexism in contexts such as sexual relationships. I agree with other reviewers who state that hooks generalizes her points a bit much at times. While I didn’t mind that rhetorical technique when she used it either more accurately or more sparingly in her other books, in Communion it stood out to me more in a negative way, perhaps because I also found that her points blurred together and were a little discursive within chapters at times.

Hooks draws interesting links to the 21st century struggle for love that raises women up instead of oppresses, but at times the anecdotes from the feminist movement of the 70s did not offer much but reminiscence for a time that I didn't live through. One blue shiny thing I did get from this section is that if feminism rejects love outright then people looking for love have no where to find it except in oppressive cultural products, which could probably have been written in one chapter. But many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape. To build community requires vigilant awareness of the work we must continually do to undermine all the socialization that leads us to behave in ways that perpetuate domination.I also liked the way she tore into our culture's devaluation of platonic and queer relationships: In heterosexist, patriarchal culture, the only commitments that are deemed truly acceptable and worthy are those between straight women and men who marry. bell hooks is a feminist theorist and writer and this is part of a group of books she wrote about love. This one examines love from a female perspective, delving deeply into feminist theory, where feminism both succeeded and failed, and the utter importance of learning how to love for everyone (not just women). She discusses the importance of loving yourself before you can love anyone else, and the fact that love cannot exist in patriarchal relationships. She discusses the false idea that women are naturally more loving, showing how this is part of patriarchy, and argues that everyone can (and must) learn to love, optimally beginning in childhood. I breezed through this book in two days, and enjoyed it immensely. bell hooks is full of hard truths, but she presents her thoughts in such a way that her work is uplifting, compassionate, and hopeful. The voice of bell hooks rings with moral rectitude, but it is also a voice that is full of kindness, openness, and wholehearted forgiveness. In this case, the power structure being scrutinized is patriarchy, a power structure that degrades, dehumanizes, mutilates, maims, and destroys the bodies of women, and does so through sexualized violence. Sexualized violence renders violence invisible (a quote from Gail Dines). Which is also to say: sexualized violence renders dehumanization invisible. As Andrea Dworkin consistently points out, regarding rape culture and the patriarchy, the message of sexualized violence, no matter what horrifying thing is being done to any individual woman, is always crystal clear: "She wants it. They all do." The victim is always to blame. "She wants it. They all do."