- "She approaches rhetoric from the perspective of how race, class, and gender inform both the production and the reception of rhetorical/cultural products" (Perspective 266).
- She has a complicated relationship with the academy. She expected universities to be institutions of liberation, but found them to repressive and focused toward cultural obedience.
- hooks's rhetorical theory is invested in dismantling an ideology of domination that she believes pervades Western culture. She calls this "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy," which is an amalgamation of inequalities predicated on hierarchies of superiority and inferiority (Perspectives 270).
- hooks's sees culture as complicit in the maintenance of this ideology, both oppressors and oppressed (although she does differentiate between the two).
- hooks offers a culture of love in the place of an ideology of domination, by which she means a political and social turn against dehumanization. It is viewing all subjects as such, rather than as objects.
- hooks positions marginality as a rhetorical position of resistance. It is a stance outside of conventional positions of power. hooks's rhetoric thus is predicated on ethos, the race, gender, class, etc. of the rhetor and his or her position with regard to the rhetorical act.
- Feminism permeates hooks's work. hooks's feminism is equivalent to her notions of cultural love, rather than a feminism that permits women to act as surrogate males. hooks's sees feminism that endorses a female exercise of power as inhabiting the ideology of domination she critiques. hooks's feminism is thus radical in that is seeks a wholesale change of social ideology rather than an equivalent space for women in it.
- hooks's outlines two ways in which rhetoric can enact "Decolonization": critique and invention (Perspectives 275).
- Critique is the means to examine and thus be made aware of the ways ideology operates. hooks in particular looks at representations in media and the metaphors they establish.
- Invention is an active resistance to ideology. for hooks it is how the marginalized can find different modes of living and create different kinds of texts to subvert their involvement in mainstream culture. It is, in essence, opting not to play the expected part in mainstream culture and finding other ways of existing.
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