Her father worked as a janitor and her mother worked as a maid in the homes of white families. Watkins was one of six children born to Rosa Bell Watkins ( née Oldham) and Veodis Watkins. Gloria Jean Watkins was born on September 25, 1952, to a working-class African-American family, in Hopkinsville, a small, segregated town in Kentucky. On December 15, 2021, bell hooks died from kidney failure at her home in Berea, Kentucky, aged 69. Her pen name was borrowed from her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. In 2014, hooks also founded the bell hooks Institute at Berea College. She later taught at several institutions including Stanford University, Yale University, and The City College of New York, before joining Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, in 2004.

She began her academic career in 1976 teaching English and ethnic studies at the University of Southern California. Her work addressed love, race, class, gender, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism. She published numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. She published around 40 books, including works that ranged from essays, poetry, and children's books. The focus of hooks' writing was to explore the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she described as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She is best known for her writings on race, feminism, and class.

Gloria Jean Watkins (September 25, 1952 – December 15, 2021), better known by her pen name bell hooks, was an American author, theorist, educator, and social critic who was a Distinguished Professor in Residence at Berea College. We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (2004).Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984).Ain't I a Woman?: Black Women and Feminism (1981).The Reading Lab is an informal gathering open to all anyone interested, reading the set text is the only requirement for attendance. Since November 2014, the TLI has hosted a regular reading and discussion group to encourage scholars to read and think beyond their discrete disciplinary interests.

The Reading Lab is the perfect companion to the Transnational Law LLM module, Legal Feminism. Through the books selected, the Reading Lab will be a forum for an energetic and expansive discussion of the interplay between gender and the law. Some of the works selected are contextual, some are imaginative, whilst others are provocative. This year’s Reading Lab reflects on gender and the law through literature, memoir and scholarship.

Hooks feminism is for everybody