A Blueprint for Black Girlhood: bell hooks's Homemade Love

Abstract:This article analyzes Homemade Love, a children's picture book by Black feminist writer, theorist, and cultural critic bell hooks. I specifically examine how hooks renders her child protagonist in relation to space. By linking girlhood with the domestic bliss of an intimate Black home, hooks aligns Black childhood with notions of innocence and respatializes Black girlhood, lifting it from real-world invisibility and pejorative notions of Black girlhood. I read Homemade Love in concert with hooks's memoir as well as her other non-fiction essays to reveal a blueprint for her children's book that gestures to the familial homes she encountered in her native Kentucky. Characterized by a love ethic, the quasi-fictional space of Homemade Love provides a kid-friendly theorization of homeplace, grafted onto a child's world. The book expresses hooks's longstanding feminist praxis and issues an unassuming challenge to anti-Blackness and a necessary fictional map of Black girl freedom.