I am The Love Theorist: On love and bell hooks

I want to begin with a few comments about myself, and how I came to this topic of love and wanting to build a theory about love. When you might be thinking, well,

• doesn't everybody know what love is? 

• Isn't it important to everybody? 

• But why? Why do we need a conversation on love?

Okay, these might be some of the questions you have. And, you know, I was thinking about that myself, like, what is it about this focus that has got me really passionate and wanting to talk with anyone who will listen, basically. What is it about the idea of love and the practice of love, to be able to practice love in the ways that I think we can expand into as a global citizenry? I think it is really important to dialogue with each other about what love means and to gain a vision of love that includes all of the best of all of us. When I speak about us, I am talking about all sentient beings, including human-beings, non-human animals, and Mother Nature in all her diversity, complexity and agency. To explore the meaning of love and the many ways it can be expressed in our lives. Thus, it is a very big topic. 

I thought maybe one way to organise my ideas would be just to say a little bit about me so you can get a sense of who I am. Then, I'm going to lead with my favourite theorist, bell hooks, and her ideas of love. Hereafter, I will proceed in this way, choosing people who have influenced why I've come to be really passionate about love and want to build a theory of love that may serve the planet at this time. 

Okay, so I'm a social worker and I'm a social worker because of what I observed and thought about when I was a little person. I grew up in a very big family, and was very aware of unfairness and the lack of love at times, even though we were all cared for. But I did not really feel that loved or understood for who I was. There's a lot that happened in my childhood where I started to ask questions such as –

• why doesn't this quite feel right?

• what is it that's missing here?

Becoming a social worker was about the desire borne of this questioning, of wanting to make the world a better place. Being an academic at this point in my career, is very much about a passion for ideas and how ideas can be the way forward to hold a vision in the darkest of times of what we're trying to achieve, even if today we're not achieving it. As an academic now wanting to explore the idea of love it is perplexing that it took me a long time to come to have the courage to use the word love and to be able to say so succinctly, what is at the heart of what I think is important in making the world a better place. 

It was a serendipity moment when I found the key that helped me link the idea of love to my work and teaching. I was teaching social work students, when a student gave me one of bell hooks’ (1994) books very early on, this was back in the 1990s. It was called Teaching to transgress, and in it hooks said that the classroom could be a revolutionary space where people could know democracy and know being respected for their ideas. I found that truly radical because even then academia felt very constrained and very controlled in what was expected of students, even as adult learners. This was my introduction to bell hooks. I have to really thank that social work student from way back for passing me the book, it was one of those career-defining moments. The idea of love has intrigued me ever since. I went on two or three years later to do my doctorate on trying to understand love in an academic setting, and what that meant for how I was as a social work practitioner in academia. 

Here we are, fast forward more than 20 years later, and perhaps most clearly, in the last two or three years, I’ve become very focused on understanding everything that I do being inspired by what bell hooks calls the love ethic. The love ethic or ethic of love is a bundle of values and capacities that inspires me in the darkest of times to pivot toward love, nonviolence, and justice-type actions [see my writing on the love ethic model, Ross, 2020]. 

Let's now have a little bit more detail about bell hooks and why her work is so important. bell hooks is a black American woman who during her lifetime, wrote more than 40 books. She was a professor of English and travelled all over the world giving speeches and presentations and talking with people about issues of racism and how it impacts her people. While hooks was writing from her own lived experience, and speaking predominantly to her own people, her ideas have value for everybody on the planet at this time. She was basically saying that love needs to be understood as more than individual emotions, and more than sexualized ideas or intimacy between people. Rather love is action in the world to make the world a better place. hooks says that where there is love, there will be no violence, there'll be no oppression. She particularly anchored her analysis of what is not okay on the planet, around issues of racism and white supremacy the cause of racism, sexism and patriarchy as the cause of sexism and, and capitalism as the cause of class discrimination. hooks writes that there is a lack of love or a culture of lovelessness, sometimes she calls it a culture of domination, against minority groups or undesirable groups of people. I found that really interesting this idea of practising love as a conscious political action to turn issues of oppression into the spaces and places where we need to do the love work for justice and to bring about a more peaceful, loving planet.

Her 2001 book, which is called All about love, is totally inspirational. If you haven't read it yet, I encourage you to get hold of it and read it. Even though it's been around a long time, I think it's a seminal piece of writing. hooks defines love as the combined forces of care, responsibility, knowledge, critical thinking, and compassion. She says that these abilities, sometimes I think of them as values, need to be actions in the world to make the difference. It's kind of interesting, just as an aside comment for the moment, and yet, I absolutely agree with bell hooks that a theory is meaningless unless we are going to make the commitment and action the ideas in practice. bell hooks writes that where love is present, there will be no oppression. Therefore, love is the answer to all types of oppression, and while I find that maybe a very simplistic statement, I do find it inspiring. It does give us a sense in whatever situation we find ourselves in, of what we can do that might make a difference for the better. No matter how constraining, no matter how violent, no matter how devastating the circumstance we find ourselves in, to think –

• what will be a loving action in this situation?

• is so interesting and potentially empowering to lead with love in such situations.

One of the implications of hooks’ idea of love is that there are a few layers to it – firstly, that we need to constantly practice self-love in, not in a narcissistic way, but by genuinely understanding it ourselves, for healing and caring for ourselves. Secondly, for being able and ready to contribute to the world without acting out our trauma or wounding. We need to foster a willingness to love others, including animals and the planet, as part of that whole grouping of what love is about, according to hooks and some of my own writing [see references provided]. What has been significant for me as a social worker, is that love requires us not only to stand with minority groups and places being exploited or abused. It requires us as well to be willing to stand up and challenge the actors, the organizations, managers, government, the big companies, who actually cause the inequalities in society that run along the fracture lines of racism, classism, sexism, disablism, speciesism …..

We need to engage in peaceful, robust dialogue with all the parties who are impacted by matters of injustice in the world. People need to be held accountable when our actions cause harm, we need to make amends, we need to take responsibility. This emphasis on responsibility is part of bell hooks’ definition of love. I really like that. Whose responsibility is it to do what, is one of part of the questions to be asked for love to be realised. And how do you get powerful people who may not see that they've caused harm to the dialogue table? Paulo Freire in his 1970 book Pedagogy of the oppressed, says we need to bring people to the dialogue table to do the negotiating and work through what the justice issue is to bring substantive outcomes for the oppressed people. We can shy away from getting powerful people and organisations to the dialogue table. Or we can tend to underestimate how hard it is to engage powerful people. And without them, we can't get very far with the justice and love work that needs to happen. 

There's another aspect to bell hooks’ definition of love, where she draws on Scott Peck’s (1978) work, The road less traveled. She cites him to describe love as a willingness to extend ourselves, that is to be willing to learn for our personal growth, and our ability and willingness to support others to extend themselves and learn for the good of others. I really like that definition of love. It comes to the heart of how we can't just stand in judgment on what's going on. We have to come into a situation and take an ethical position guided by love and justice, and look to make a contribution where we are willing to learn as well. 

For example, if we're concerned about issues of race, racial inequality, systemic racism, however you think about it, that we are willing to look at our own internal attitudes and beliefs, and how we are in the world to make sure that we are not complicit with colonialism, and all of what that means for minority groups across the planet, not only in Australia. I like hooks’s definition of love as a political concept, not to take away from personal meanings of love and how that feels. But this political definition is adding to and extending the personal idea of love. Love is action in the world to make a difference around matters of oppression. 

A particular conundrum that people may already be kind of thinking through themselves, is one of the implications of hooks’ work. Namely, thinking at an interpersonal level people you know, in your life, if there is abuse, exploitation and violence of any sort happening in a relationship, then she would say, that is not that that is not love. It may be the person being abusive says they love you, but the word and the actions do not align. I probably would want to say that maybe there are very few people who have relationships where there is no violence and no exploitation. I believe that within every relationship it is possible to increase the amount of love and decrease and remove any violence and exploitation that is happening. So I probably would want not to be quite as strident as bell hooks, to say that where there is love there is no oppression. I think it can be much messier than that. People love each other in situations of violence. It doesn’t make the violence morally ok. The two phenomenon – love and violence - can co-exist even though love would be deeply imprinted by the violence, as my personal experience highlights. And certainly in my social work career, I've had to be willing many times to step into situations of extreme unsafety for myself and other people, extreme injustice and violence, to try to make a contribution to bring about more dialogue and more safety and more respect for the people who are being treated unfairly. 

I think we need to keep working with this idea of love.

I'm really wanting to hear other people's ideas of love. And to keep building on bell hooks’ legacy in this regard – see an article of mine about her legacy [Ross, 2022]. For example, one aspect that we probably tend to underestimate the significance of, is the importance of self-love. Now, I don't mean self-love to be about being self-aggrandizing and narcissistic in the world. I mean, self-love that is willing to do the healing work around our own wounds and trauma. For many of us, most of us, I believe the witnessing of injustices and harm, and concern for what's happening on the planet on so many levels is heartbreaking and can cause trauma. It can cause paralysis, and can cause us to give up hope in a better world. It can also have the effect of us not being so gentle, loving and kind to ourselves. Unless we know how to heal ourselves and love ourselves in the darkest of times, our ability to stand and be with others of all species, of all kinds, all Our Kin, will be limited and unsustainable over the long haul. 

Of course justice work is a long haul project with many, many actors contributing across the lifespan of the struggle. Think about the Black Lives Matter movement as one example. I think hooks’ writing is potentially revolutionary arising from her willingness to put the word love that means so many things to us into a form that links the personal and the political. It's actually quite a contested word in Western cultures, particularly when hooks puts it right there in the middle of what matters. Her close friend Cornel West (2011), who is also significant in the Black Lives Matter movement, in its current form on the planet says, that love is what justice looks like in public. I find that also a very inspiring way to think about love, such that whether it's in public or in private, love is any action that avoids being retaliatory, avoids harming others, that turns from violence or neglect of people and other beings toward love. 

It matters how we act. It always matters how we act, even if it's not in public, but especially when it's in public. We are starved, I think, for good examples of people in public spaces standing up and being accountable for their actions when harm is done. We need to start with ourselves, go gentle on ourselves. I think that's part of the hooks’ legacy, that she was really trying to live these ideas that she was writing about, because she wanted to make that kind of contribution in the world starting with herself and moving outwards with all the people whom she had contact with. 

I do think you'd really like her work. If you haven't seen it before, even just reading whatever you can get your hands on about her would be a good place to start. So you get a feel for how bell hooks writes, which I find in itself to be very inspiring, because she writes in a very accessible way for everyday people to read. This is an example, page 13, in her book All about love (2001):

“to begin by always thinking of love as an action rather than a feeling is one way in which anyone using the word in this manner automatically assumes accountability and responsibility”. 

On page 5, she writes: 

“affection is only one ingredient of love to truly love, we must mix the various ingredients of care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication. Learning faulty definitions of love when we are quite young, makes it difficult to be loving as we grow older. Most of us learn early on to think of love as a feeling”. 

But this idea of love as a feeling can be very limiting for the work that needs to happen and the inspiration and the motivation for the work that needs to happen on the planet at this time. 

In a nutshell, what we've been talking about here are some introductory comments about who I am and why I think this conversation about love needs to happen. I'm looking for an expansive, multi-dimensional way of thinking about love to guide personal healing and justice work. 

Ideas become important to us and then become values and guidelines to our behaviors. And the way we think about these ideas really matters. We explored how bell hooks’ writing invites us to consider the political idea of love as action towards justice and non-violence. 

Love is needed for oppression to be addressed. Just what this requires is not self-evident and it is part of my aim to link the idea of love with actions in the world.

Thus, love is where we are starting and I'm hoping, going forward, to introduce you to some other inspiring authors on love and activists inspired by love.

I do thank you for your time. 

It's been my privilege having a chat with you today and I look forward to any comments you care to leave for me. 

My best love

Dyann

**

References

bell hooks (1994). Teaching to transgress: Education as the practice of freedom. New York: Routledge.

bell hooks (2001). All about love: New visions. New York: William Morrow.

Paulo Freire (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Herder and Herder.

Scott Peck (1978). The road less traveled: A new psychology of love, traditional values and spiritual growth. London: Arrow Books.

Dyann Ross (2020). The revolutionary social worker: The love ethic model. Brisbane: Revolutionaries.

Dyann Ross (2022). “bell hooks’s legacy and social work: A distillation of her key ideas about love and some implications for social work practice”. British Journal of Social Work, bcac127, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcac127

Cornel West (2011). Cornel West: Justice is what love looks like in public”, available at