bell hooks tells Hall "I found a big difference between myself and many of my white feminist peers from privileged class backgrounds who via psychoanalysis and psychotherapy actually had something in their lives that valorized speaking outside the family about intimate matters in the family. I was saying that as a working class person, and I find this to cut across race often, there was no valorization of speaking about things inside the family outside. There was nothing" (84). She then notes sharing the class aspect in US talks resulted in push-back from the audience and states her belief that "white feminists from privileged class backgrounds were able to employ the confessional in a catalytic way for political consciousness raising precisely because many of them had had long traditions in therapy of utilizing the confessional as a point of transformation" (84). To me, this seems to be a fascinating insight and I wonder how it might apply today (considering geographic and temporal differences). I fear that this class component persists, especially in the capitalist health marketplace in the US.
I enjoyed bell hooks and Stuart Hall closing their discussion with a reflection on the nature of the conversation and the "accessibility" of the format. In addition to describing the conversation like "jazz", bell hooks states that "part of the intervention that the conversation makes is to counter the hegemony of the critical essay. The loss of a popular pedagogical model was through the academicization that led to the linking of tenure to the writing of a certain kind of academic text that therefore has no relation to the notion that we actually serve the masses, that we don’t just serve the students who can pay to come to our classes" (121). bell and Stuart further discuss the conversation format and I think they make a compelling case. Between podcasts often occupying more "informal" discussions of scholarship and journals housing the "formal" discussions, is there any room for edited conversations such as these in public facing scholarly work?
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