Communion: The Female Search for Love

Love is the most important concept in bell hooks’s Communion. The culmination of her Love Trilogy, Communion seeks to place love within the context of gender, specifically in the context of women and their journey towards finding love. hooks works towards a redefinition of love within a feminist framework, evaluating the role of patriarchal society in shaping women’s experiences with love. She begins by illustrating the patriarchal conception of love, which is rooted in the false belief that love, and the emotional vulnerability that love requires, is a sign of weakness. In earlier iterations of feminism during the second wave, hooks illustrates that women believed that they needed to prioritize power over love in order to find success in a patriarchal world, acting “as though power was more important than love” (59). However, hooks disagrees with this prioritization, arguing that feminists must “place love on the agenda again—and insist that there has to be a balance between work and love” (59). hooks wants to place love at the heart of feminism, to put love in its “proper place,” as she establishes in Chapter 2.

In this reframing, hooks pushes back against the assumption that love and ambition are mutually exclusive, offering a nuanced feminist

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