On this episode of “Inspired Belonging” on Writing Re:mix, hosts Dan Dissinger and Stephanie Renée Payne talk with Dr. M. Shadee Malaklou, the Founder and Director of the bell hooks Center at Berea College. Back in the summer of 2023, Dan & Stephanie had the honor of bringing their “Inspired Belonging” workshop to the first-ever bell hooks Symposium, and ever since then it was their mission to have Dr. Malaklou on the podcast. Dr. Malaklou opens up about her friendship with the late great bell hooks, the role of the bell hooks Center on the Berea campus, and rural living in Kentucky. The conversation also covers the impact of feminism, identity and belonging, the role of theory, and radical vulnerability, which Dr. Malaklou, Dan, and Stephanie courageously practice by sharing personal stories about mental, physical, and emotional health journeys. This is one of those episodes that teaches, invites, and lovingly cracks you open.
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Approximate Show Notes
00:00 Introduction and Excitement for the Episode
00:54 Introducing Dr. M Shadee Malaklou
01:51 bell hooks’ Influence and Legacy
03:50 Personal Stories and Connections with bell hooks
04:37 The bell hooks Symposium and Community Impact
06:58 Reflections on Belonging and Land
08:58 bell hooks’ Radical Vulnerability and Critique
16:26 Navigating Institutional Challenges
18:16 Personal Anecdotes and bell hooks’ Wisdom
19:39 The Intersection of Theory and Personal Experience
24:59 Feminism, Love, and Cancel Culture
26:28 Whiteness, Belonging, and Ancestry
29:24 Experiences of Respect and Judgment
30:34 The Impact of bell hooks’ Work
32:55 Struggles with Mental Health
34:45 Radical Vulnerability and Empathy
40:25 The Role of Educators and Institutions
51:37 Healthcare Challenges and Personal Reflections
57:00 Conclusion and Call to Action
M. Shadee Malaklou (she/they) is Founder and Inaugural Director of the bell hooks center at Berea College, as well as Chair and Associate Professor of the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Prior to joining Berea’s faculty in 2019, Malaklou served as Assistant Professor (2016-2019) and Acting Chair (2018-2019) of Critical Identity Studies at Beloit College, where she was also a Mellon Faculty Fellow for the Associated Colleges of the Midwest (2016-2018) and faculty curator of Beloit College’s Wright Museum of Art (2017-2018).
A critical, trans-disciplinary scholar of race/ism, gender, and sexuality (and their intersections), Malaklou approaches questions of identity and difference from a problem-oriented perspective, wanting to make sense of our world in real time. She publishes widely in academic journals and regularly writes think pieces; for example, on topics like Beyoncé and Jay-Z, BLM and DAPL, the sports-media complex, women’s freedom movements, and animal rights. Likewise, Malaklou contributes to academic and popular culture podcasts. Wanting to intervene not in politics but in the operations of power — wanting all life (rather than ‘all lives’) to matter — Malaklou’s academic work is informed by prior career experience in journalism/communications and non-profit organizing and advocacy. She received her PhD in Culture and Theory and graduate certificates in Critical Theory and Feminist Studies from the University of California, Irvine in 2016; and her BA in Cultural Anthropology and Women’s Studies (now, Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies) from Duke University in 2007.
People, Texts & Podcasts Mentioned in the Episode
Belonging: A Culture of Place by bell hooks
“Touching The Earth” by bell hooks
Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks
The Will To Change by bell hooks
We Real Cool by bell hooks
Too Much (Netflix Show)
“We were guided by bell’s arguments that feminism is for everybody, and patriarchy has no gender.”
-Dr. Malaklou
“[bell] often said that she learned her dissident feminism [...] that she describes as a talking back and gesture of defiance, those are her terms, that she learned this kind of being in the world from quote, the hillbilly country folks who were her ancestors and kin, not from the liberal annals of academia.”
-Dr. Malaklou
“The way people felt held at that conference [...] especially when they entered the space of the center [...] that’s what I wanted when I created that space, for you to feel like the weight of the world that is held as an invisible backpack or any other weight, that that comes off for a minute.”
-Dr. Malaklou
“A quote [bell hooks] has from Tasting the Earth that I love is ‘when we love the earth, we are able to love ourselves more fully.’”
-Dr. Malaklou
“In the conversation with a colleague of mine he said something interesting, which is bell was more accessible as a thinker, and maybe that’s why she paid the price of her radical vulnerability.”
-Dr. Malaklou
“And so, in that way, I thought, I wanna understand this world through theory, but what bell taught me is I have to understand and be brave enough to look at myself, to look at my country, to look at my family, to look at the land that I step on.”
-Dr. Malaklou
“bell describes love as a spiritual practice, a spiritual practice of reckless abandon.”
-Dr. Malaklou
“I actually call myself a recovering Afro-pessimist in so far as I think giggling with bell disabused me of some of my pessimism.”
-Dr. Malaklou
“Figure out your shit so it doesn’t become someone else’s shit, or, you know, more commonly hurt people hurt people.”
-Dr. Malaklou
“One of the most important lessons of Black feminism is [...] the data lives, you don’t need numbers, the data lives in the flesh.”
-Dr. Malaklou
The theme song is “4 am” by Makaih Beats. You can follow the podcast & all social media: Linktree, join the newsletter/Follow Dan’s Medium or Writing Remix Substack for “A Note From Dan”, episode-specific writing prompts, and book recommendations.
