Bell Hooks and the Untenable Mutual Exclusivity of Domination and Love

In Foss, Foss and Trapp’s presentation, bell hooks’ work militates against domination as a mode of organization that runs through our entire culture and every institution within it. She sets domination up in opposition to love, saying: “There can be no love when there is domination,” (272). Furthermore, hooks notes that in her experience, the male-over-female domination has been primary and points to her and her family’s experience under her father’s domination as the principal example from her own childhood. My question to hooks, then, is: Does she endorse the seeming implication that, if her father was engaged in domination over her, her mother, and her sisters, he must not, then, have loved them? Perhaps, in hooks’ particular case, she would fully endorse this entailment (or perhaps not), but the general argument that any relationship of domination excludes love necessarily and by definition is thoroughly untenable, especially since hooks specifically includes the domination of a parent over a child: "Usually, individuals experience and learn to accept domination, whether the experience is one of domination of parent over child," (271). Unless hooks is playing fast and loose with the meanings of the words ‘domination’ and ‘love’ (which could easily be the case), this argument is demonstrably invalid. Surely the coercion (being a form of domination) a parent deploys to get a recalcitrant child to brush his or her teeth does not rule out the possibility that this parent loves his or her child. In fact, common sense would dictate that it is, in fact, the parent’s love that motivates him or her to coerce the child to care for the health of his or her teeth in the first place. A refinement of hooks' theory that made special exemptions for the domination of a parent over a child could perhaps save her theory. It seems that the reason we countenance the coexistence of domination and love in the case of a parent-child relationship is simply that the child lacks the mental and physical resources to fully care for him or herself. We think this, generally, justifies the parental coercion. In a relationship between adults, however, hooks' claim about the mutual exclusivity of domination and love is not patently false. It is curious, then, what reasoning led her to specifically identify the parent-child relationship as an example of exactly the sort of relation of domination she militates against.