Communion: The Female Search for Love

Communion: The Female Search for Love is a 2002 nonfiction feminist philosophy book by author, theorist, educator, and social critic bell hooks (born Gloria Jean Watkins). It is the third book in her Love Trilogy, following her 1999 book All About Love: New Visions, which explores new ways to think about love and self-love, and her 2001 book Salvation: Black People and Love, which examines the role of love in the history and culture of Black communities. In Communion, hooks examines the role love plays in the lives of women and the way the patriarchal and heterosexist culture informs the way women think about and experience love. hooks is renowned for her explorations of the intersections of race, class, and gender, as well as her critiques of systems of oppression and class domination, which feature prominently throughout Communion.

This guide refers to the HarperCollins Kindle eBook Edition of Communion: The Female Search for Love. 

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of gender discrimination, sexual violence and harassment, emotional abuse, and disordered eating.

Summary

In the Preface to the text, titled “The Soul Seeks Communion,” hooks explores the development of women’s experiences with love, from children seeking recognition and affection from their parents, to women feeling pressured to forge heteronormative relationships, to women wondering if love is worthwhile. Throughout the book, hooks promises to examine the female struggle in the journey to find and understand love at every age.

hooks divides the text into 16 chapters—essays that explore aspects of women’s experiences with love. Chapter 1 examines the role of age in women’s experiences with love, challenging the assertion that women can only find love when they’re young. hooks celebrates the beauty of women reaching midlife and realizing that there is still love to be found in a freeing menopausal state without menstrual periods. Chapter 2 discusses hooks’s personal experience with love, from her time growing up in a patriarchal home with emotionally abusive parents who shamed her literary and academic pursuits. hooks rejected patriarchy and left her home for Stanford University. She did not find self-love, but freedom was the first step in her journey to knowing love.

hooks braids her personal experiences with feminist philosophy as she examines her 15-year relationship with a man she met when she was 19. hooks did not understand love during her relationship because she did not have freedom or self-love. She ended the relationship when her partner refused to support her moving to work at an Ivy League university, though hooks was supportive of his professional pursuits. hooks left, which she describes as feeling “life-threatening,” but she also found staying in the relationship “life-threatening” (56). She had to leave to discover her freedom—an essential part of hooks’s framework about the development of love.

hooks then engages in historical analysis regarding the feminist movement’s conceptions of love. As women gained power, they eschewed emotional vulnerability, which patriarchal society stated was a sign of weakness. Love was associated with emotion, so women pulled away from love, and many who wanted love hid this desire, even from other women. hooks encourages women to resist the belief that love and power are mutually exclusive: In order to find success and self-actualization, women must first practice self-love.

Self-love is a key concept in both All About Love and Communion. hooks builds upon the concept of self-love, establishing its importance in the practice of loving while highlighting the complexity and nuance of understanding the cultivation of self-love within patriarchal systems. She also connects self-love to women’s body image, interrogating the metric of thinness in women’s beauty standards. She states that self-love is a conscious choice for women to make along their journey to finding love, as women, contrary to outdated gender stereotypes, are not superior to men at knowing how to love. hooks reiterates that women must learn to love actively and pursue love with intentionality.

hooks examines the role that romantic relationships with both men and women play in women’s love lives. She explains that truly loving relationships must be rooted in mutuality, justice, and equality. She also explores the role of romantic friendships in learning how to love and finding intimacy, as love and intimacy can exist even in relationships without sex.

To conclude the text, hooks addresses her audience, which she explicitly identifies as all women regardless of age, and encourages them to practice engaging in loving communion together, to practice the development of self-love and self-knowledge, and to learn from their elders, who have obtained wisdom in the practice of loving.