Q1’26 Reading guide - Part I

This is the first in a series of posts that comprise the Q1 2026 reading guide - additional parts will follow

The Risk of Truth to Being Loved

bell hooks’ The Will to Change & Michel Foucault’s Discourse and Truth and Parrhesia

You cannot speak the truth without risk.

You cannot sustain that risk without love.

You cannot have love without allowing yourself to be known.

What follows is not an argument for a novel theoretical connection. It is an attempt to examine a set of questions that continue to trouble me and I might expect, you too: what it costs to speak the truth, and whether love can survive it.

I have faced many moments when saying what I thought or felt would put me at odds with someone I loved, or I wanted to love me. Sometimes that love was romantic, sometimes familial, sometimes platonic. The question was rarely whether the truth mattered. It was whether speaking it would damage something I depended on and valued.

The most difficult moments were when the truth involved exposure, saying something raw. Exposure of truths about my behavior, my body, my sexual identity, or other intimate details I had learned to keep quiet. Equally challenging were moments when the truth was about someone I loved and did not want to harm by naming what I knew to be true.

These books, bell hooks’ The Will to Change and Michel Foucault’s Discourse and Truth and Parrhesia, matter to me because they found me at such moments. Moments when performance worked, but I sensed it was beginning to fail.

By performance, I mean the scoreboard and the stage. On one hand, the impulse to monitor achievement, reliability, and admiration for what we do. On the other, the instinct to play roles assigned to us, or those we learned to desire because they were rewarded.

Read together, hooks and Foucault made immediate sense to me. Not as theory, but as pressure. Their work clarified something I had felt but not yet articulated: that speaking the truth about yourself can endanger love just as easily as it can make love possible.

Why Foucault and hooks Belong Together

Foucault and hooks are an unlikely pair. Not only for who they were, but for what they refused.

Foucault refused consolation. He dismantled the comforting belief that speaking the truth is automatically liberating, that speaking about oneself automatically produces freedom. Instead, he was focused on how power structures have defined how we are to speak the truth. He shows that truth-telling can easily reinforce the very power structures it appears to resist.

hooks refused abstraction. She was clear that the forms of domination Foucault describes create emotional wreckage. Systems have the power to hollow out interior lives. Any account of freedom that leaves people emotionally stranded, unable to give or receive love, she argued, has missed what domination does.

Foucault rarely spoke of love. hooks argued it’s the only practice that matters.

So why read them together?

Foucault reveals how power compels performances that obscure the truth to meet expectations and the risk of stopping those performances. hooks demonstrates the power of moving from simple awareness of domination to enacting love and vulnerability. They bridge into one another, describing the conditions and process in which truth-telling leads to real love rather than just admiration.

Without hooks, Foucault can harden into academic distance without an obligation to change. Without Foucault, hooks can be thought of as offering a moral imperative, without a broad view of power’s dangers.

The Problem They Share

Both thinkers put emphasis on a common question: why do people fail to live truthfully, and what does it cost?

They notice the blockage differently, so to see their perspectives clearly, it’s important to distinguish how each identifies the source of untruthfulness.

Foucault observes how we’re trained to speak about ourselves in sanctioned ways. Institutions and practices teach us which versions we can voice and which must stay hidden to remain in good standing with society. The risk to one’s position in society becomes the motivation for avoiding the truth. At the individual level, the larger societal pattern is repeated: stay in line or face rejection.

Agreeing with Foucault on the role of power in producing untruthfulness, hooks goes a step further, elaborating on how this training shapes our internal lives. Patriarchy trains people, especially men, to reject feeling, vulnerability, and care. Instead of living in truth, silence becomes a habit that prohibits that love. And control replaces the risk of intimacy.

One describes the machinery. The other describes the damage.

Sometimes what you truly desire aligns with what’s expected. When saying the truth costs nothing, when desire fits the script, you don’t need these books.

Foucault and hooks connect over truths that disrupt. Admissions, discursive or behavioral, that destabilize belonging. Needs that belie competence and self-sufficiency. Doubts that undermine one’s authority. Desires that don’t fit the roles you’ve learned to play.

Not all truth needs to be radical. But the truths that disrupt rather than confirm, truths that change how you are seen, relied upon, or loved, carry outsized consequences for how freely you live and how deeply you love. This work is for those truths. The ones that matter precisely because they are dangerous.