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Communion: The Female Search for Love

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When truth teller and careful writer bell hooks offers a book, I like to be standing at the bookshop when it opens." -Maya Angelou

Idea of a "coming out process" to yourself for realizing/believing/identifying yourself as straight, sharing same process as those who had to consciously come out as queer (p. 35) Intimate, revealing, provocative, Communion challenges every woman to courageously claim the search for love as the heroic journey we must all choose to be truly free. In her trademark commanding and lucid language, hooks explores the ways ideas about women and love were changed by the feminist movement, by women's full participation in the workforce, and by the culture of self-help, and reveals how women of all ages can bring love into every aspect of their lives, for all the years of their lives. 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. 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.”

At the library

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 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. 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":

If any female feels she need anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency. It takes courage for women to challenge the seduction of domination, the making of Love synonymous with erotic conflict between the powerful and the powerless." The first act of violence that patriarchy demands of males is not violence toward women. Instead patriarchy demands of all males that they engage in acts of psychic self-mutilation, that they kill off the emotional parts of themselves. If an individual is not successful in emotionally crippling himself, he can count on patriarchal men to enact rituals of power that will assault his self-esteem. The one person who will never leave us, whom we will never lose, is ourself. Learning to love our female selves is where our search for love must begin. COMMITMENT IS THE GROUND OF OUR BEING THAT LETS US MAKE MISTAKES, BE FORGIVEN, AND TRY AGAIN (p. 216)Ich bin recht unvoreingenommen an dieses Buch gegangen, da es für mich das erste Buch von bell hooks war. I would have abandoned Communion at the first chapter if it weren't for a book club I wanted to attend. I'm glad I finished it even though I didn't really enjoy it. A lot of generalizing statements in here. I'm not interested in her use of "most women" and "we." bell hooks will be like, "MOST WOMEN had fathers who left them which is why WE seek out men who are emotionally unavailable." This happens throughout the book. Here's another one: "Lesbians, like all women, come from families where dysfunctional behavior. . .were the norm" (p. 203). Lol, whenever she mentions lesbians, it feels like a polite afterthought. D/c. She just nails clarity. She doesn’t get bogged down in any details. She doesn’t have to spend a lot of time doing any definitions or anything. It’s just also rooted in her own experience. Um, that even though it’s nonfiction, it is storytelling. And

bell hooks'un okuduğum ikinci kitabı. ilki "feminizm herkes içindir" idi. ilkinde gözlemlediğim meseleyi basit anlatma tavrı bunda da geçerli. 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. Den Text bzw. die Aussagen von bell hooks sind sehr pauschalisiert. Sie provozieren. Aber genau diesen Aussagen konnte ich nicht zustimmen, sie nicht teilen, mich nicht mit ihnen identifizieren. Ein möglicher Gedanke, weshalb ich mich mit einigen Aussagen nicht so recht identifizieren konnte könnte sein, dass das Original bereits 2002 erschienen ist und aufgrund dessen eventuell die eine oder andere Aussage überholt ist.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. 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: Intimacy and the notion of love are discovered in Bell Hooks’ third sequel in her love series. “Communion: The Female Search for Love” challenges everything that we thought we knew about feminism. Have women indeed championed all things concerning equally? Are they really on the road to total wellness, or are we all just living in the delusion of gender equality being on the horizon? Bell Hooks has answers to some of the most challenging questions. she did bash on patriarchal men a lot (love) but she never blamed men or suggested that women were the victim. she empowered women to take accountability and to put in the work to find and create meaningful, mutual love. i love how she wrapped the book up by talking about the importance of all love - self love, romantic friendships, and romantic love and how we need all of them to live a fulfilled life, and that giving and receiving love from yourself and close friends is what enriches romantic relationships. They, of course, are women, and the girls who will one day become women. Girls and women who are all, truly, whores. Whores who must be policed by the violence that men dish out to them, to keep them in line.

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