Analysis
Hood Feminism was published in 2020 and is Mikki Kendall’s second book, her first being Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists: A Graphic History of Women's Fight for their Rights, which appeared in 2019. The book is a collection of essays, all of which are both personal and political, a genre in which she had already written and published widely for several years before Hood Feminism was released.
It is immediately apparent that, while the book draws on critical race theory and, to a lesser extent, on feminist theory, it is not intended as an academic text but as a handbook for revolutionaries. The author notes in the introduction that she is known for being forceful to the point of rudeness:
I’m the feminist people call when being sweet isn’t enough, when saying things kindly, repeatedly, is not working. I’m the feminist who walks into a meeting and says, “Hey, you’re fucking up and here’s how.”
This note of anger pervades the book until the last essay, in which Kendall tells readers directly that they ought to be angry, too. If someone is not angry at the terrible injustices suffered by marginalized people, then they have not been paying attention and will never become a good ally, let alone an accomplice who, by centering the needs of the oppressed, becomes part of the solution.
The author tackles the stereotype of the “Angry Black Woman” and is unapologetic about her own anger, saying that this is what gives her writing its energy. Her rhetoric, focused as it is on arousing similar anger and energy in the reader, has the quality of a street protest, with short punchy slogans and frequent use of alliteration. The titles of the essays are often cases in point: “Missing and Murdered,” “Fear and Feminism,” “Allies, Anger, and Accomplices.” Sometimes, she will select a single evocative word: “Education” or “Hunger.”
The prose style of the essays is plain, simple, and often aphoristic. Although intersectionality is one of the main topics of the book, and Kendall mentions both the term and its originator, Professor Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, such technical language is reduced to a minimum. When a term that may be unfamiliar to many readers, such as “carceral feminism” or “colorism,” is central to Kendall’s argument, she explains the meaning within the text when it is first used (there are no footnotes, and only a few pages of sources at the end of the book) and repeats the term frequently in subsequent essays, building up a small working vocabulary of specialist language.
Internally, the essays are organized using a simple rhetorical pattern, repeated so that the reader knows what to expect. The opening usually contains an anecdote from Kendall’s own experience, and these become more intimate and shocking as the book progresses, reaching a peak of trauma with the account of an emergency abortion in the piece “Reproductive Justice, Eugenics, and Maternal Mortality.” The author will then spend the main part of the essay on expository writing about the social and political situation illustrated by her own story. This always makes the point that the author herself is one of the lucky ones and that what has been an inconvenience or an irritation for her is a tragedy for many less privileged people. This admission of her own privilege in relation to other marginalized groups, as well as poorer and less well-educated (or even darker-skinned) people of color, is an invitation to the reader to recognize their own privilege and reflect on how it may be causing bias of which they were not previously aware.
The final few pages of...
(This entire section contains 901 words.)
Unlock this Study Guide Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
each essay are a call to action, which begins with self-knowledge and self-development. Although Kendall is writing for a wide audience, she addresses herself primarily to relatively privileged white mainstream feminists, and the final sections of her essays are explicitly devoted to telling them how they should be reforming themselves and their movement. For feminists who feel themselves to be in a virtuous position with respect to patriarchal oppression, these pages are intended to be uncomfortable reading. Kendall repeatedly makes the point that the history of mainstream feminism is bound up with that of white supremacy and says that, for people of color, it may be no less oppressive than patriarchy. She asks white feminist readers to stop seeing themselves as oppressed and reframe their view to regard themselves as being only one or two rungs below white men on a ladder defined by the intersection of patriarchy and white supremacy.
Kendall’s unapologetic anger is a sign of the pride she feels is appropriate for survivors of oppression. She repeatedly makes the point that the hood is a dangerous place not because bad people live there, but because it is starved of resources and respect by a system that centers whiteness. She indignantly repudiates stereotypes of the hood as a place from which one must escape, and this attitude is nowhere more apparent than in her calls for action, activism, and self-knowledge on the part of white feminists. The hood, she says, is already playing its part. Marginalized people are organizing themselves and showing that they have the right priorities. It is not for the hood to do the work of reforming mainstream feminism, but mainstream feminists can look to the hood for an instructive example of how to reform themselves and their movement.
