A Place for Intimacy: bell hooks on Language and Desire

“Words are events, they do things, change things… transform both speaker and hearer… feed energy back and forth and amplify it… feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it,” Ursula K. Le Guin wrote in her magnificent meditation on how we tell ourselves to the world and each other two centuries after Mary Shelley prophesied that “words have more power than any one can guess; it is by words that the world’s great fight, now in these civilized times, is carried on.” I have been thinking lately about words, the power of them and the prison of them,… read article