bell hooks traces "talking back" to her childhood in the South, where it was considered not merely transgressive but an unacceptable and punishable act. Girls were especially not supposed to "talk back" or challenge authority, and hooks uses this biographical aspect to explore the role of speaking out as it relates more largely to oppressed groups. In the very first chapter she defines talking back as an "act of resistance" and "political gesture": a way of speaking truth to power (authority). It is also a means of creating a language of one's own; defining oneself in and through the act of refusing silence. Talking back in this sense is an enactment of authenticity and healing. She defines "talking back" in adulthood as the articulation of pain, as truth-telling.

She also links the struggle against silence as it pertains to scholarly language or discourse—the academic language she was required to learn during her graduate studies—and the difficulty of being able to use institutional language to express her identity. She ultimately champions “talking back” as a means of creating a language outside of institutions, and uses the rest of the book's chapters to investigate how moving from silence into speech is at the core of the ongoing struggles of the oppressed to maintain their voice.

Hooks explores the Black feminist movement and its navigation of race, class, and gender through a series of essays on her own personal understandings. Her first several essays describe her own childhood growing up in the South. Hooks’ childhood was dominated by her Father’s masculine control and the segregated schools she attended. She recounts how she came to develop her sense of self through writing in predominantly white universities. The second set of essays considers the women’s movement at large. She explains how the movement is influenced by White supremacy and fails to incorporate Black women’s experiences. Hooks writes to provide space for those experiences that are so often ignored and to challenge the status quo. She says:

I write these words to bear witness to the primacy of resistance and struggle in any situation of domination (even within family life); to the strength and power that emerges from sustained resistance and the profound conviction that these forces can be healing, can protect us from dehumanization and despair.

Hooks' writing has been criticized for its repetitive nature and lack of convincing voice. However, Black women have thanked Hooks for her ability to put into words what so many feel.

It is a little difficult to give a cogent summary of Hooks' Taking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black because the volume is a collect of 23 thematically disparate essays reflecting Hooks' Marxist literary ideology. The essays in Talking Back cover themes as diverse as teaching women's literature to racists feminists and political attitudes at Yale.

While praised for her intellect and perspective, critics pronounced the volume to be ineffectual, unconvincing and not reflective of Hooks' own literary voice. However, Hooks' African American readers speak of the debt they owe her (whose real name is Gloria Watts) for helping them to perceive their own personal experiences within a broad context that does allow for recreating perceptions, recreating expressions of self and community that deviate from traditional perceptions and expressions otherness.

Bell Hooks, which she writes as bell hooks, writes in a casual tone. She states in the Chapter 1 of Talking Back that her aim in writing is to bring exposure to the "private places," where domination can germinate, and connect it to the "public places" of experience.

It has been a political struggle for me to hold to the belief that there is much [that black people] must speak about, much that is private that must be openly shared, if we are to heal our wounds ... (Chapter 1) ... To speak when not spoken to was a courageous act--an act of risk and daring (Chapter 2).