On bell hooks's definition of being in the margin

Author: Doctor Terence Rajivan Edward
Abstract. This paper evaluates bell hooks's definition of being in the margin in the preface to her book Feminist Theory: from margin to center: "To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body."
Draft version: Version 3 (2nd October 2026 see also Popova added, v2 25th May 2023, "that he is part?", appendix)
PDF available at: https://www.academia.edu/102363748/On_bell_hookss_definition_of_being_in_the_margin

	The preface to bell hooks's book Feminist Theory: from margin to center opens in a striking way, to me at least:
    "To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body." (1984)
I am assuming this is intended as a definition. Something is in the margin if and only if these conditions are met: (i) it is part of the whole; (ii) it is outside the main body of the whole. "Something" covers someone as well, my apologies to some sensibilities. Each condition is necessary for being in the margin and meeting both is sufficient. Is this a good definition? I look into this matter below.

One of the questions it gives rise to is "What whole?" An answer is: "If you take any whole thing and the two conditions are met regarding that whole, then something is in the margin of that whole. For example, if you take a whole piece of paper and some writing is part of the whole paper but outside the main body of the paper, then it is in the margin." I shall work with this answer. I am not sure that this definition, clarified in this way, succeeds.

Counterexample 1: moth in mat. Imagine a rectangular mat, with a line drawn on it (with chalk say) marking out a thin section of the mat at an edge. A moth lands on this thin section. "The moth is in the margin of the mat," I suppose it makes sense to say. But is condition (i) met? Is the moth part of the mat? Given our commonsense outlook: the mat is one thing, the moth which is on it another and furthermore not part of the mat, "merely" on the mat.
(Does "in it" sound as if it entered beneath the surface of the mat? Well, does "The moth is in the bed with us" sound so subterranean? Anyway, let it go beneath the surface of the margin of the mat through a hole. Still, is it part of the mat? My intuition at least is no.)

 Counterexample 2: social structure. "hooks is not interested in cats and mats, or moths and mats; she is interested in social structure," I anticipate someone's saying, or fear them saying. Okay, another counterexample then! A teaching assistant called Jones is in the margins of a university social structure, let's say. But is condition (i) met? I shall present a challenge to the view that it is: that he is part of the social structure. If one tries to represent the university's social structure, with lecturers, professors, administrators, building attendants, teaching assistants, and probably more, the name Jones does not appear. The job role "Teaching assistant" appears, but from that alone one cannot infer anything about Jones. Others could be in that role. So why think Jones is part of the social structure?
 
What is a social structure? A simple way of thinking about it, which I won't go beyond here, is that it is a set of roles and relationships between roles, such as one role being of a higher rank than another. Jones occupies one of these roles, its place allowing us to say that he is in the margins (or the margin), but he is not himself a role or a relationship between roles.

Appendix
A notable theorist of social structure, A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, writes:
"When we use the term structure we are referring to some sort of ordered arrangement of parts or components. A musical composition has a structure, and so does a sentence. A building has a structure, so does a molecule or an animal. The components or units of social structure are persons?" (1952: 9)
But later he emphasizes how different people can occupy a role in a social structure, with the structure itself remaining:
"In the political structure of the United States there must always be a President; at one time it is Herbert Hoover, at another time Franklin Roosevelt, but the structure as an arrangement remains continuous." (1952: 9)
I think the clarification of structure which I offer better serves Radcliffe-Brown's overall vision.  A social structure is not composed of persons, rather roles and relationships between them.


References
hooks, b. 1984. Feminist Theory: from margin to center. Boston: The South End Press.
Radcliffe-Brown, A.R. 1952. Introduction to Structure and Function in Primitive Society. Glencoe, Illinois: The Free Press.

See also
Popova, Maria. 2026. bell hooks on the Power of Being in the Margins. The Marginalian 18 May 2026. Available at:
https://www.themarginalian.org/2026/05/18/bell-hooks-margins/
[Says, "the people whose lives and work have most moved me and fed me, consoled me and inspirited me, were people who existed in the margins of their time and place." "We are so accustomed to speaking of privilege as the unearned advantage of floating effortlessly atop the glittering surface of the mainstream, but we think little of the unlikely advantage that comes from this strange freedom of the margins." Then presents bell hooks as capturing this with a long quote from hooks, incorporating the definition discussed and declaring from her standpoint she attended to both margin and centre. We are told to complement hooks with Hannah Arendt on the power of being an outsider, with a link to Popova on Arendt on Men in Dark Times.