Conference Program

The contribution aims to examine the relationship between feminist claims and pedagogical reflection in bell hooks’ thought, exploring some of the theoretical and epistemological assumptions that inform her engaged pedagogy. Specifically, through a combined historical and theoretical reading, it seeks to foreground hooks’ contribution to expanding the horizons of feminist and anti-racist critique, thus drawing attention to the theoretical frameworks that shaped her conception of teaching as transgression—against and beyond boundaries.

Situating the analysis within the intellectual climate of the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance and in implicit dialogue with Audre Lorde’s thought, the talk will, on the one hand, reconstruct the historical, social, and cultural milieu in which hooks’ early writings—often read as precursors to intersectionality—took shape; on the other, it will show how the cultural and political work of leading figures of Black feminism contributed to redefining the categories of woman, difference, and liberation within the feminist and anti-racist movements that emerged between the 1960s and 1970s. From this perspective, Black feminism can be understood as an epistemic practice—shaped by the “outsider within perspective” (Collins, 1986)—aimed at expanding the traditional boundaries of knowledge, citizenship and democratic participation by interrogating the relations among race, gender, social class and sexuality, thus opening up new possibilities for political imagination.

Against this background, drawing on central motifs in the thought of Lorde and hooks—especially the interplay between experience, language, and action—there emerges a reconceptualization of power as a generative and creative force capable of shaping processes of subjectivation as well as fostering forms of critical reflexivity in both teachers and learners. Within this framework, hooks’ engaged pedagogy appears as a deeply political and relational act (Maddalena, 2025), as the outcome of a broader radical feminist vision aimed at challenging hierarchies while fostering mutual transformation.