Communion: The Female Search for Love: 2 (Love Song to the Nation, 2)

Product Information

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."

In the exciting world of women I was raised in — an extended family with lots of great-grandmothers, grandmothers, great-aunts, aunts, daughters, and their children — learned early that aging would be full of delight. Women around us talked about the prime of their life as though it was indeed the promised land. Like beautiful snakes, they were going to reach their prime, boldly shed their skin, and acquire another — this one more powerful and beautiful than all the rest. Something in them was going to be resurrected. They were going to be born again and have another chance. These were poor women born into a world without adequate birth control, a world where having an abortion could end one's life, psychologically or physically. They were women who saw menopause as a rite of passage in which they would move from slavery to freedom. Until then they often felt trapped. This feeling of being trapped was one they shared with women across class. Even women who were solitary, celibate, and quite able to manage economically lived with the ever-present fearful possibility that all that could be changed by sexual coercion. In their world, once a woman was no longer able to bear children, she was just freer-midlife, the magic time. 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.

The Sociological Review

I think hooks' writing suffers from a lot of the same pitfalls as her previous work, All About Love: New Visions: hooks made clear that men’s pain, insecurities, fears, and inability to connect with others emotionally are all connected to men’s allegiance to patriarchy. She is sort of saying, “The call is coming from inside the house!” As women have changed our minds about aging, no longer seeing it as negative, we have begun to think differently about the meaning of love in midlife. Beth Benatovich's collection of interviews What We Know So Far: Wisdom Among Women, offers powerful testimony affirming this fact. With prophetic insight, writer Erica Jong declares, "I believe that this is a moment of history in which we are engaged in a kind of spiritual revolution — the kind of revolution that creates pathfinders....Older women are again being accorded their ancient role as prophetesses and advisors....That's the great transformation that's happening again in our time. In looking to things other than the body beautiful for inspiration, we're being forced to redefine the second half of our lives, to become pathfinders." Difficulties still abound for aging women. What's most changed is the constructive way women of all ages, classes, and ethnicities cope with these difficulties. Open, honest conversations about the myriad ways empty-nest syndrome, the death of parents or a spouse, and/or the deeply tragic death of a child all create psychological havoc in our lives have helped. Our talk of this suffering would be stale and commonplace, were it not for all the creative ways women are attending to the issue of aging both in midlife and in the postsixty years. The courage to choose adventure is the ingredient that exists in women's lives today that was there for most women before the contemporary feminist movement. Contrast the women who suffered breast cancer silently with the women today who speak out, who proudly and lovingly claim their bodies intact, whole, and beautiful after surgical removals. Poet Deena Metzger boldly proclaims the beauty of the one-breasted woman on a poster. Theorist Zillah Eisenstein tells all about breast cancer, her personal story, in Man-made Breast Cancers. In these ways women in midlife are changing the world. What has the feminist movement done for relationships? Sure, the civil uprising has led to more respect for women in the workplace. What, though, has feminism done to help women suffering from intimacy deficiency in the bedroom? Bell Hooks seeks to answer these questions and more in her book.

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. Um, But then it also talks about friendship. So females, women finding, um, intense, lasting connecting friendship, um, and also kind of cross-generational relationships. So kind of every aspect of, um, of finding love and connection. And the title really says it all: communion it’s about, um, she could have equally as well, I think said connection, but that doesn’t imply the sort of deep level of connection that she really means kind of really knowing a whole person and feel known and seen as a whole person. And so she’s talking about how women find that. And, of course, the whole thing is colored by patriarchy. So her whole message is how women find communion with other people or fail to find communion with other people in our patriarchal culture. So these are, think of them as essays, I guess, although they do flow together, they’re not standalone, but they do kind of feel like essays. In "Outliers," Malcolm Gladwell argues that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice become an expert at something. hooks says that most women only start to really excel at the art of love in midlife, and this has been my experience; only now am I really learning to love myself, and to approach all relationships with an open heart and a deep commitment to acting at all times with care, respect, and responsibility. I am only now beginning to love myself and others with deep knowledge of what it means to be human.I realized that every time I quoted this book during the reading of it, every friend would be like — yo, can I read that after you? All the conversations I’ve had with women and my female friends, so many insights were given into those conversations at a much higher level here. I’ve officially become the friend on some: ~well, bell hooks says..~ LOL! PLACEHOLDER ANXIETY between women who are "romantic friends", when possibly, eventually, one of them finds a partner and leaves the other "behind" OR both find partners and leave each other a little bit I once met bell hooks, at her dark, barely lit apartment at an undisclosed and mysterious downtown Manhattan location. She was hungry and wanted to go to eat. As we did, she sized up and tested me to determine how authentic and genuine I was about my work against gender violence. Masterful. A thinking women’s (and man’s) valentine, a fitting conclusion to hooks’ groundbreaking work on love in American life. |Los Angeles Times

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? Personal integrity is the foundation of self-love. Women who are honest with themselves and others do not fear being vulnerable. We do not fear that another woman can unmask or expose us. We need not fear annihilation, for we know no one can destroy our integrity as women who love." She named herself after her great-grandmother Bell Blair Hooks but spelt her pen name in lower case to point direction towards her ideas rather than her identity. Masterful. A thinking women’s (and man’s) valentine, a fitting conclusion to hooks’ groundbreaking work on love in American life. Los Angeles Times bell’s reminder, in Teaching to Transgress, that “no education is politically neutral” have been my anchor and guiding light as a teacher, mentor and scholar. So much of my professional identity, which bleeds into my whole self, I owe to the work, ideas and writings of bell hooks. I envision her now, IN GLORY, on the ancestral plane wondering over the beloved community she helped to create and inspire. Gloria SteinemDen 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. bell hooks'un okuduğum ikinci kitabı. ilki "feminizm herkes içindir" idi. ilkinde gözlemlediğim meseleyi basit anlatma tavrı bunda da geçerli. I don't know a whole lot about feminist theory, but what I learned about it here I found fascinating. hooks' treatise on love is passionate and positive, and goes a long way to build up strength and determination in readers. 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. this book was written almost 25 years ago and although there were a few times where i was like hmmmm ya okay this book is as old as i am, so much of it was still so relevant.