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Representation and Difference
bell hooks: “The Oppositional
Gaze: Black Female Spectators”
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hooks essay responds to the limitations of feminist film theory
and theorists of black cinema.
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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
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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
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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
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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:
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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.
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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:
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hooks pushes us to consider the multiple functions of women in
film.
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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:
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Identity is not reflected in representations, but constituted through
them.
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An alternative cinema can participate in constructing cultural identity,
not just a more accurate or complex image of reality than provided by
stereotypes
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Processes of looking that are counter-memory (an intervention in
collective memory) are a way to know the present and imagine the
future differently.
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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:
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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
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bell hooks on youtube discusses Spike Lee