The Proletariat Experiences of Black Womanhood

This chapter defines “the proletariat experiences of black womanhood,” as central to hooks’ view of capitalism, beginning in Ain’t I a Woman, and as instrumental to the way that hooks thinks Marxist thought. Placing hooks’ view of capitalism as conversant with a variety of articulations of capitalism, this chapter situates hooks’ view of capitalism as predicated on hooks’ Marxist theory of ideology, which, in itself, becomes conversant with a variety of conceptualizations of ideology, as a way of contextualizing the class-consciousness of the proletariat experiences of black womanhood. From here, this chapter explains how, for hooks, black womanhood’s class-consciousness and their proletariat experience are tied to a palpable economic situation. The capitalist significance of this, through a Marxian lens, allows hooks, in one sense, to think through systems of domination and racial imperialism, but in another sense, it allows for a Marxian conversation with intersectionality’s intellectual history and Angela Y. Davis.