There is a particular kind of irony in the fact that bell hooks — a woman who spent decades writing about bringing ideas from the margin to the center — spent much of her intellectual life tucked into the margins of academic papers. Literally. A citation. A footnote. A name dropped in the third paragraph of a thesis no one outside a seminar room would read. And then someone put her on a trading card.
It sounds trivial. It sounds like a gimmick, the kind of thing you might find next to tote bags and refrigerator magnets with quotes about empowerment at a museum gift shop. But there’s something worth sitting with here, because the distance between a footnote and a trading card is not just aesthetic. It’s a question of who gets access to an idea, and when, and in what form.
For years, Hooks maintained that knowledge should not be kept in university libraries or behind paywalled journals. Her writing — dense with care, lighter in jargon than most of her peers — was always reaching toward a reader who hadn’t necessarily been trained to receive it. She wrote All About Love not for scholars. She wrote it for people who were in pain at two in the morning in kitchens. She wrote about patriarchy not to win academic arguments but because she genuinely believed men were being damaged by it too, that the system was consuming everyone, and that someone had to say so plainly. That was always the point. The footnote, then, always felt like a kind of betrayal — not of her, necessarily, but of her purpose.
A trading card doesn’t fix structural inequality. Let’s be clear about that. It doesn’t dismantle White supremacist capitalist patriarchy, which was hooks’ own phrase for the interlocking forces she spent her career diagnosing. But it does something a footnote cannot. It lands in the hands of a twelve-year-old who has never heard of Feminism is for Everybody, who flips it over and reads two or three sentences and feels, maybe for the first time, like someone has described something real about their life. That is significant. In actuality, that’s a lot.
This is a story worth considering. A Chicago activist, now in her sixties, once reached out to several well-known Black feminist thinkers on behalf of a domestic abuse survivor who felt she had nowhere to turn. Hooks was the only one who answered. The woman who received that response was still affected by it twenty or so years later. That is what it looks like when someone lives their politics at the human scale — not through position papers, but through the decision to write back. In a tiny way, that same impulse is carried by the trading card. It meets people where they are. It doesn’t ask you to have prerequisites.
hooks herself was critical of feminism as mere identity — the declaration “I am a feminist” versus the harder, more demanding statement “I believe in feminism.” The distinction is important because a belief must be justified, put into practice, and enacted. It needs to travel across the globe. A name buried in a footnote on page 47 of a dissertation is not moving through the world. It is motionless, and Hooks was never interested in motionlessness.
The impact that popular culture can have on a serious thinker can be exaggerated. Reduction is always a risk. Compressed into a slogan, hooks are no longer hooks. However, the alternative is worse: hooks that are only available to those with institutional access and sufficient academic training to understand her. Ending dominance is the essence of politics, she stated plainly. This encompasses the control over who is given an idea and who is not.
A trading card is a beginning, not a conclusion. It is hoped that someone will pick it up, experience something, and eventually come across the books. To the pages where hooks writes about love as not merely feeling but practice, about freedom as something that cannot be partial, about the Earth and what it means to love it as part of loving ourselves.
In the best way possible, she was wonderfully challenging. She deserves readers who also find her challenging, but they must first locate her. And sometimes that begins with a card in your hand rather than a name in a footnote that you nearly ignored.
