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Representation and Difference

bell hooks: “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators”

hooks essay responds to the limitations of feminist film theory and theorists of black cinema.

She draws on both these traditions to argue for a more complex discourse on how identity is constituted through the practices of viewing, interpreting and creating representations.

hooks: history and defiant looks

Looks can be a form of resistance to authority In slavery black looking was regulated hooks notes the replication of this trauma in black parenting and

spectatorship. She is offering a historical understanding of spectatorship rather than a psychic one.

Michel Foucault offers a model for the was in which power reproduces itself through similar strategies and mechanisms of control

hooks: against a totalizing gaze

The cinema was recognized by blacks as a form through which white values were represented and reproduced.

There was always an understanding of critical spectatorship--defiant forms of looking.

The cinema and television were a private space in which blacks could look back

hooks cites Stuart Hall and Franz Fanon to assert that white representations of blackness are not totalizing. There are always spaces of black agency.

Complex and Conflicted Relationships to Dominant Visual Culture“We laughed at television shows like Our Gang and Amos ’n’ Andy, at

these white representations of blackness, but we also looked at them critically.” --hooks

In his documentary, Color Adjustment (1992), Marlin Riggs (dir, Tongues United) presents the history of black representations on Television from the 1940s-1980s, contextualized through interviews with viewers, actors, directors and other professionals.

Riggs conveys how the active relationship of viewers was varied and involved negotiating multiple readings, related to the specific possibilities of their historical context.

The film suggest that the notion of providing more positive images brings with it a new set of more subtle, but insidious problems.

bell hooks:

Black women’s spectatorship was different from black men’s (and white women). Black men could take up the phallocentric position of looking at white women as objects of desire.

Citing Mary Ann Doan, hooks notes the problem of a generalized concept of “women” as object in classical film: It is complicit with the dominant patriarchal culture, in that is doesn’t allow the possibility of articulating what is repressed in classical cinema. (a totalizing view that doesn’t account for opposition)

bell hooks:

hooks pushes us to consider the multiple functions of women in film.

hooks describes black women viewers varied responses to mainstream film. Though they share the same conflicted relationship to their absence or subordinate positions on screen. Some resist the pleasure of identification, others participate but expressed the difficult conflicts it required.

Multiple forms of Opposition

hooks proposes that oppositional spectatorship is more than resisting. More than reactive it is creative and involves a range of looking relations that:

Contest Resist Revision Interrogate Invent

Illusions, Julie Dash, 1982 (dir., of Daughters of the Dust)Set in a Hollywood studio during WWII, the period of “the

Woman’s Film.” Mignon, the main protagonist, is an executive in a studio who passes for white and uses her power within the studio to support Esther Jeeter, a young black woman who provides vocal dubs for white actresses.

hooks notes how the film offers spectators representations that challenge dominant notions of ‘racial’ identity.

The film portrays the complex dynamics of passing apparent only to Mignon and Esther, throwing into question the white male gaze and it’s capacity to know and define.

It address the simultaneous absence and presence of black women in mainstream cinema.

New Formulations of Identity

hooks draws on British cultural studies theorist, Stuart Hall, to suggest that:1. Identity is not reflected in representations, but constituted through

them. 2. An alternative cinema can participate in constructing cultural identity,

not just a more accurate or complex image of reality than provided by stereotypes

3. Processes of looking that are counter-memory (an intervention in collective memory) are a way to know the present and imagine the future differently.

4. Not simply offering diverse, “realistic,” or positive representations. “Offer points of radical departure.”

New Formulations of Identity

Certainly these ideas are applicable to a range of representations and positions of spectatorship.

There are many examples of alternative films negotiating and envisioning complexity of cultural identity:

Bush Mama, Haile Gerima, 1974 Killer of Sheep, Charles Burnett, 1976 Chan is Missing, Wayne Wang, 1982 Smoke Signals, Chris Eyre, 1998

bell hooks on Spike Lee

bell hooks on youtube discusses Spike Lee