This trading card of Bell Hooks’s theory is both a study aid and a piece of culture. It’s about the size of a baseball card and has a picture, a short summary of hooks’ main ideas, and some biographical information. It’s the kind of thing you could put in the front pocket of your notebook without giving it a second thought. Most people agree, though, that it is now the most sought-after card in the American academic trading card scene. That’s a unique sentence to write. Also, it’s a really interesting one.
The cards come from a project started by David Gauntlett, a British media professor. Around 2000 and 2001, he started putting out a set of trading cards for theories on his website Theory.org. The idea was simple: take the complicated and sometimes scary world of social and cultural theory and squeeze it into a size that athletes usually use. Each card had a picture of the thinker, a summary of their main ideas, a list of their most important publications, and some biographical information, including, most importantly, their astrological sign. In the first run, twelve cards were released every month. There was Michel Foucault there. And Judith Butler was too. Anthony Giddens was the first card in the series and led the way.
When the bell hooks card came, it seemed to land differently than the others right away. Love as a practice, education as a way to freedom, and the way race, gender, and class work against each other in everyday life are some of the ideas that translate surprisingly well into a short form. She thinks clearly without being cold. That’s what the card shows, or at least it does so convincingly that people want to hold it.
It’s possible that the time is also important. After hooks’ death in December 2021, there was a clear increase in interest in her work. Her ideas about radical pedagogy had already been widely discussed in academic settings that were rethinking how knowledge is taught and shared. Her name kept showing up in reading groups, exhibitions, and syllabi. A physical card, something that could be collected and felt, gave people another way to carry that interest with them.
People from all walks of life seem to be interested in it. It’s not always the same students who are picking up the cards as those who are writing seminar papers about intersectionality. Some people want it because they like her. Some people want it since it looks good. Some, it seems, because the format makes it fun to play a certain kind of game. The original cards were made to be used in a Trump-style game where players could match the strengths and special skills of each theorist. Foucault’s ability to reject old frameworks and come up with new ones is, in theory, the same as someone else’s intellectual range. It’s so silly that hooks herself might have found it at least a little funny.
It says something about where people are with theory right now that an independent academic project from the early 2000s is getting so much new attention. They should move toward it, not away from it, but on their own terms. You can’t read Ain’t I a Woman or All About Love instead of a trading card. No one would really say that it does. It does, however, open a door. It makes a name seem friendly instead of assigned. And at a time when many people are trying to figure out what school is for, seeing hooks’ face on a collectible card seems less like a trick and more like a small, thoughtful way to show appreciation.
It’s really not clear if the trend will continue. Things change quickly in the collecting world, and academic collecting is still a small part of it. But the bell hooks theory trading card keeps showing up right now in used book stores on college campuses, online, and in offices where someone has stuck interesting things to the wall above their monitor. That’s not nothing.
