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  • A Conversation with Laverne Cox
  • Bell Hooks (bio) and Laverne Cox

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bell hooks and Laverne Cox

photo by Ebony C. Motley

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Earlier this spring, bell hooks invited the award-winning actress, producer, and advocate Laverne Cox to speak at the private opening of The bell hooks Institute, a new center in Berea dedicated to critical thinking and contemplating the intersectional issues of race, gender, and class. The choice of Cox as the institute’s inaugural speaker was no accident. A native of Alabama, she leapt to [End Page 25] worldwide fame in 2013 as the hairdresser convict Sophia Burset on the hit Netflix show Orange is the New Black, making Cox the first transgender woman of color in a leading role on a mainstream scripted television show. An Emmy nomination and the cover of Time followed, and Cox soon realized that her newfound success and fame also brought great responsibility. Since then, her work has expanded beyond the small screen to college campuses across the country, where she brings an empowering message of transgender equality and living authentically.

When they met in New York, both hooks and Cox sensed an instant connection. Cox had long appreciated hooks’s work, which she had studied and applied to her life and craft since college. For her part, hooks had admired Cox’s “humane” portrayal of Sophia on Orange, as well as her fierce advocacy and embrace of intersectionality. After an onstage conversation at The New School, hooks decided to bring Cox to Appalachia.

What follows is an edited version of their lively conversation at The bell hooks Institute, which covered subjects ranging from the power of language and images to fame and fearing corruption.

BELL HOOKS:

When I [heard about] Orange is the New Black, I was like, “Ah, I see some problems with it.” But there’s only one character I really love, and that is Laverne Cox. And I felt that the relationship between the Sophia [Cox’s character] and her wife was one of the most humane couplings—the way they dealt with conflict, the way they talked things out. And I thought, “This is something we don’t normally see on television.” And so to me—despite all its other things I could [End Page 26] rap about…I felt like this was a magnificent intervention. [looks at Cox and grins] Hey, Laverne Cox.

LAVERNE COX:

Hey, bell hooks. So I don’t know bell well. We just met for the first time last fall…but we all are here because we have a relationship with the work—this work that has truly transformed so many of our lives. It certainly has transformed mine. There’s so many moments in your work where you talk about being transformed, about being made over in more liberatory ways. I think it’s in All About Love that you write “the heart of justice is truth-telling.” And telling the truth has been a hallmark of what you’ve done for over thirty years...I’ve been doing a college lecture tour for over two years now. It’s called Ain’t I a Woman. And of course I talk about your work every time I stand up before college students, and talk about how you talked about intersectionality so many years ago, and how it’s really crucial to understand how these systems [of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and transphobia] work with each other, and how we can begin to move beyond those systems.

I discovered your work when I was a college student, through my brother…Black Looks was the first book I read, and then this was the second one, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics…And this particular paragraph, this repeated phrase stayed with me for so many years. bell writes:

Often when the radical voice speaks about domination we are speaking to those who dominate. Their presence changes the nature and direction of our words. Language is also a place of struggle. I was just a girl, coming slowly into womanhood, when I read Adrienne Rich’s words: ‘This is the oppressor’s language, yet I...

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