Hooks - The Oppositional Gaze

loose notes

• gaze is politicized
• slaves punished for gazing, Black men criminalized/lynched for looking at white women
• "awareness" => politicizes who looks/what is looked at
• "power is inside as well as outside" (116): Stuart Hall: white presence cannot be thrown off "like the serpent sheds its skin." Franz Fanon: "the glances of the Other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye...I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by another self."
• "Many black women do not 'see differently' precisely because their perceptions of reality are so profoundly colonized, shaped by dominant ways of knowing." (128)
• resistance
• Foucault "emphatically [states] that in all relations of power 'there is necessarily the possibility for resistance'" (116)
• "identification can only be made through recognition, and all recognition is itself an implicit confirmation of the ideology of the status quo." Anne Frieberg, via 119
• be critical by resisting identification (personal note: me w Shang-Chi, Asian characters)
• Hollywood norm => viewers should be entertained, not critical, not on edge (Adorno & Horkheimer, media shutting down political resistance; Barthes, pleasure conforming to culture)
• oppositional Black gaze long existed - Black spectators of mass media pre-integration viewed it critically as reproducing white supremacy (117)
• Manthia Diawara: "rupture" => "when the spectator resists 'complete identification with the film's discourse'" (117)
• "critical practice that restored presence where it was negated" (117)
• mainstream feminist film criticism fails because it treats women as abstract "psychic" subjects rather than specific historical ones (124)
• thus it ignores race, ignores that it describes only white women, ignores that in practice
• more than resistance
• Hall - "identity is constructed 'not outside but within representation'" (131), film as "that form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us to discover who we are." (131)
• "We do more than resist. We create alternative texts that are not solely reactions. As critical spectators, black women participate in a broad range of looking relations, contest, resist, revision, interrogate, and invent on multiple levels." (128)