💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › bell-hooks-the-oppositional-gaze.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 07:59:51. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: The Oppositional Gaze Author: Bell Hooks Date: 1992 Language: en Topics: The Male Gaze, The Oppositional Gaze, Feminism, Black Feminism, Cinema Source: Black Looks: Race and Representation Notes: The essay that coined the term "the oppositional gaze." Contains discussions of the intersection of the black and female experiences with the theater in the period. How "the gaze" of any given individual holds power.
Bell Hooks, in Black Looks: Race and Representation
Chapter 7
The Oppositional Gaze Black Female Spectators
When thinking about black female spectators, I remember being punished
as a child for staring, for those hard intense direct looks children
would give grown-ups, looks that were seen as confrontational, as
gestures of resistance, challenges to authority. Toe "gaze" has always
been political in my life. Imagine the terror felt by the child who has
come to understand through repeated punishments that one's gaze can be
dangerous. Toe child who has learned so well to look the other way when
necessary-. Yet, when punished, the child is told by parents, "Look at
me when I talk to you." Only, the child is afraid to look. Afraid to
look, but fascinated by the gaze. There is power in looking.
Amazed the first time I read in history classes that white slave owners
(men, women, and children) punished enslaved black people for looking, I
wondered how this traumatic relationship to the gaze had informed black
parenting and black spectatorship. Toe politics of slavery, of
racialized power relations, were such that the slaves were denied their
right to gaze. Connecting this strategy of domination to that used by
grown folks in southern black rural communities where I grew up, I was
pained to think that there was no absolute difference between whites who
had oppressed black people and ourselves. Years later, reading Michel
Foucault, I thought again about these connections, about the ways power
as domination reproduces itself in different locations employing similar
apparatuses, strategies, and mechanisms of control. Since I knew as a
child that the dominating power adults exercised over me and over my
gaze was never so absolute that I did not dare to look, to sneak a peep,
to state dangerously, I knew that the slaves had looked. That all
attempts to repress our/black peoples' right to gaze had produced in us
an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional
gaze. By courageously looking, we defiantly declared: "Not only will I
stare. I want my look to change reality." Even in the worse
circumstances of domination, the ability to manipulate one's gaze in the
face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the
possibility of agency. In much of his work, Michel Foucault insists on
describing domination in terms of "relations of power" as part of an
effort to challenge the assumption that "power is a system of domination
which controls everything and which leaves no room for freedom."
Emphatically stating that in all relations of power "there is
necessarily the possibility of resistance," he invites the critical
thinker to search those margins, gaps, and locations on and through the
body where agency can be found.
Stuart Hall calls for recognition of our agency as black spectators in
his essay "Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation." Speaking
against the construction of white representations of blackness as
totalizing, Hall says of white presence: "The error is not to
conceptualize this 'presence' in terms of power, but to locate that
power as wholly external to us-as extrinsic force, whose influence. can
be thrown off like the serpent sheds its skin. What Franz Fanon reminds
us, in Black Skin, White Masks, is how power is inside as well as
outside:
... the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the Other fixed me
there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I
was indignant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst
apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by another self.
This "look," from-so to speak-the place of the Other, fixes us, not only
in its violence, hostility and aggression, but in the ambivalence of its
desire.
Spaces of agency exist for black people, wherein we can both interrogate
the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming
what we see. The "gaze" has been and is a site of resistance for
colonized black people globally. Subordinates in relations of power
learn experientially that there is a critical gaze, one that "looks" to
document, one that is oppositional. In resistance struggle, the power of
the dominated to assert agency by claiming and cultivating "awareness"
politicizes "looking" relations-one learns to look a certain way in
order to resist.
When most black people in the United States first had the opportunity to
look at film and television, they did so fully aware that mass media was
a system of knowledge and power reproducing and maintaining white
supremacy. To stare at the television, or mainstream movies, to engage
its images, was to engage its negation of black representation. It was
the oppositional black gaze that responded to these looking relations by
developing independent black cinema. Black viewers of mainstream cinema
and television could chart the progress of political movements for
racial equality via the construction of images, and did so. Within my
family's southern black working-class home, located in a racially
segregated neighborhood, watching television was one way to develop
critical spectatorship. Unless you went to work in the white world,
across the tracks, you learned to look at white people by staring at
them on the screen. Black looks, as they were constituted in the context
of social movements for racial uplift, were interrogating gazes. 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. Before racial integration, black viewers of movies and
television eJq>erienced visual pleasure in a context where looking was
also about contestation and confrontation.
Writing about black looking relations in "Black British Cinema:
Spectatorship and Identity Formation in Territories," Manthia Diawara
identifies the power of the spectator: "Every narration places the
spectator in a position of agency; and race, class and sexual relations
influence the way in which this subjecthood is filled by the spectator."
Of particular concern for him are moments of "rupture" when the
spectator resists "complete identification with the film's discourse."
These ruptures define the relation between black spectators and dominant
cinema prior to racial integration. Then, one's enjoyment of a film
wherein representations of blackness were stereotypically degrading and
dehumanizing co-existed with a critical practice that restored presence
where it was negated. Critical discussion of the film while it was in
progress or at its conclusion maintained the distance between spectator
and the image. Black films were also subject to critical interrogation.
Since they came into being in part as a response to the failure of
white-dominated cinema to represent blackness in a manner that did not
reinforce white supremacy, they too were critiqued to see if images were
seen as complicit with dominant cinematic practices.
Critical, interrogating black looks were mainly concerned with issues of
race and racism, the way racial domination of blacks by whites
overdetermined representation. They were rarely concerned with gender.
As spectators, black men could repudiate the reproduction of racism in
cinema and television, the negation of black presence, even as they
could feel as though they were rebelling against white supremacy by
daring to look, by engaging phallocentric politics of spectatorship.
Given the real life public circumstances wherein black men were
murdered/lynched for looking at white womanhood, where the black male
gaze was always subject to control and/or punishment by the powerful
white Other, the private realm of television screens or dark theaters
could unleash the repressed gaze. There they could "look" at white
womanhood without a structure of domination overseeing the gaze,
interpreting, and punishing. That white supremacist structure that had
murdered Emmet Till after interpreting his look as violation, as "rape"
of white womanhood, could not control black male responses to screen
images. In their role as spectators, black men could enter an
imaginative space of phallocentric power that mediated racial negation.
This gendered relation to looking made the experience of the black male
spectator radically different from that of the black female spectator.
Major early black male independent filmmakers represented black women in
their films as objects of male gaze. Whether looking through the camera
or as spectators watching films, whether mainstream cinema or "race"
movies such as those made by Oscar Micheaux, the black male gaze had a
different scope from that of the black female.
Black women have written little about black female spectatorship, about
our moviegoing practices. A growing body of film theory and criticism by
black women has only begun to emerge. The prolonged silence of black
women as spectators and critics was a response to absence, to cinematic
negation. In "The Technology of Gender," Teresa de Lauretis, drawing on
the work of Monique Wittig, calls attention to "the power of discourses
to 'do violence' to people, a violence which is material and physical,
although produced by abstract and scientific discourses as well as the
discourses of the mass media." With the possible exception of early race
movies, black female spectators have had to develop looking relations
within a cinematic context that constructs our presence as absence, that
denies the "body" of the black female so as to perpetuate white
supremacy and with it a phallocentric spectatorship where the woman to
be looked at and desired is "white." (Recent movies do not conform to
this paradigm but I am turning to the past with the intent to chart the
development of black female spectatorship.)
Talking with black women of all ages and classes, in different areas of
the United States, about their filmic looking relations, I hear again
and again ambivalent responses to cinema. Only a few of the black women
I talked with remembered the pleasure of race movies, and even those who
did, felt that pleasure interrupted and usurped by Hollywood. Most of
the black women I talked with were adamant that they never went to
movies expecting to see compelling representations of black femaleness.
They were all acutely aware of cinematic racismits violent erasure of
black womanhood. In Anne Friedberg's essay "A Denial of Difference:
Theories of Cinematic Identification" she stresses that "identification
can only be made through recognition, and all recognition is itself an
implicit confirmation of the ideology of the status quo." Even when
representations of black women were present in film, our bodies and
being were there to serve--to enhance and maintain white womanhood as
object of the phallocentric gaze.
Commenting on Hollywood's characterization of black women in Girls on
Film, Julie Burchill describes this absent presence:
Black women have been mothers without children (Mammies-who can ever
forget the sickening spectacle of Hattie MacDaniels waiting on the
simpering Vivien Leigh hand and foot and enquiring like a ninny, "What's
ma Jamb gonna wear?") ... Lena Home, the first black performer signed to
a long term contract with a major (MGM), looked gutless but was actually
quite spirited. She seethed when Tallulah Bankhead complimented her on
the paleness of her skin and the non-Negroidness of her features.
When black women actresses like Lena Home appeared in mainstream cinema
most white viewers were not aware that they were looking at . black
females unless the film was specifically coded as being about blacks.
Burchill is one of the few white women film critics who has dared to
examine the intersection of race and gender in relation to the
construction of the category "woman" in film as object of the
phallocentric gaze. With characteristic wit she asserts: "What does it
say about racial purity that the best blondes have all been brunettes
(Harlow, Monroe, Bardot)? I think it says that we are not as white as we
think." Burchill could easily have said "we are not as white as we want
to be," for clearly the obsession to have white women film stars be
ultra-white was a cinematic practice that sought to maintain a distance,
a separation between that image and the black female Other; it was a way
to perpetuate white supremacy. Politics of race and gender were
inscribed into mainstream cinematic narrative from Birth of A Nation on.
As a seminal work, this film identified what the place and function of
white womanhood would be in cinema. There was clearly no place for black
women.
Remembering my past in relation to screen images of black womanhood, I
wrote a short essay, "Do you remember Sapphire?" which explored both the
negation of black female representation in cinema and television and our
rejection of these images. Identifying the character of "Sapphire" from
Amos 'n 'Andy as that screen representation of black femaleness I first
saw in childhood, I wrote:
She was even then backdrop, foil. She was bitch-nag. She was there to
soften images of black men, to make them seem vulnerable, easygoing,
funny, and unthreatening to a white audience. She was there as man in
drag, as castrating bitch, as someone to be lied to, someone to be
tricked, someone the white and black audience could hate. Scapegoated on
all sides. She was not us. We laughed with the black men, with the white
people. We laughed at this black woman who was not us. And we did not
even long to be there on the screen. How could we long to be there when
our image, visually constructed, was so ugly. We did not long to be
there. We did not long for her. We did not want our construction to be
this hated black female thing-foil, backdrop. Her black female image was
not the body of desire. There was nothing to see. She was not us.
Grown black women had a different response to Sapphire; they identified
with her frustrations and her woes. They resented the way she was
mocked. They resented the way these screen images could assault black
womanhood, could name us bitches, nags. And in opposition they claimed
Sapphire as their own, as the symbol of that angry part of themselves
white folks and black men could not even begin to understand.
Conventional representations of black women have clone violence to the
image. Responding to this assault, many black women spectators shut out
the image, looked the other way, accorded cinema no importance in their
lives. Then there were those spectators whose gaze was that of desire
and complicity. Assuming a posture of subordination, they submitted to
cinema's capacity to seduce and betray. They were cinematically
"gaslighted." Every black woman I spoke with who was/is an ardent
moviegoer; a lover of the Hollywood film, testified that to experience
fully the pleasure of that cinema they had to close down critique,
analysis; they had to forget racism. And mostly they did not think about
sexism. What was the nature then of this adoring black The Oppositional
Gaze 121 female gaze-this look that could bring pleasure in the midst of
negation? In her first novel, The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison constructs a
portrait of the black female spectator; her gaze is the masochistic look
of victimization. Describing her looking relations, Miss Pauline
Breedlove, a poor working woman, maid in the house of a prosperous white
family, asserts:
The onliest time I be happy seem like was when I was in the picture
show. Every time I got, I went, I'd go early, before the show started.
They's cut off the lights, and everything be black. Then the screen
would light up, and I's move right on in them picture. White men taking
such good care of they women, and they all dressed up in big clean
houses with the bath tubs right in the same room with the toilet. Them
pictures gave me a lot of pleasure.
To experience pleasure, Miss Pauline sitting in the dark must imagine
herself transformed, turned into the white woman portrayed on the
screen. After watching movies, feeling the pleasure, she says, "But it
made coming home hard."
We come home to ourselves. Not all black women spectators submitted to
that spectacle of regression through identification. Most of the women I
talked with felt that they consciously resisted identification with
films-that this tension made moviegoing less than pleasurable; ~t times
it caused pain. As one black woman put, "I could always get pleasure
from movies as long as I did not look too deep." For black female
spectators who have "looked too deep" the encounter with the screen
hurt. That some of us chose to stop looking was a gesture of resistance,
turning away was one way to protest, to reject negation. My pleasure in
the screen ended abruptly when I and my sisters first watched Imitation
of Life. Writing about this experience in the "Sapphire" piece, I
addressed the movie directly, confessing:
I had until now forgotten you, that screen image seen in adolescence,
those images that made me stop looking. It was there in Imitation of
Life, that comfortable mammy image. There was something familiar about
this hard-working black woman who loved her daughter so much, loved her
in a way that hurt. Indeed, as young southern black girls watching this
film, Peola's mother reminded us of the hardworking, churchgoing, Big
Mamas we knew and loved. Consequently, it was not this image that
captured our gaze; we were fascinated by Peola.
Addressing her, I wrote:
You were different. There was something scary in this image of young
sexual sensual black beauty betrayed-that daughter who did not want to
be confined by blackness, that "tragic mulatton who did not want to be
negated. just let me escape this image forever, n she could have said. I
will always remember that image. I remembered how we cried for her, for
our unrealized desiring selves. She was tragic because there was no
place in the cinema for her, no loving pictures. She too was absent
image. It was better then, that we were absent, for when we were there
it was humiliating, strange, sad. We cried all night for you, for the
cinema that had no place for you. And like you, we stopped thinking it
would one day be different.
When I returned to films as a young woman, after a long period of
silence, I had developed an oppositional gaze. Not only would I not be
hurt by the absence of black female presence, or the insertion of
violating representation, I interrogated the work, cultivated a way to
look past race and gender for aspects of content, form, language.
Foreign films and U.S. independent cinema were the primary locations of
my filmic looking relations, even though I also watched Hollywood films.
From "jump, n black female spectators have gone to films with awareness
of the way in which race and racism determined the visual construction
of gender. Whether it was Birth of A Nation or Shirley Temple shows, we
knew that white womanhood was the racialized sexual difference occupying
the place of stardom in mainstream narrative film. We assumed white
women knew itto. Reading LauraMulvey's provocative essay, "Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, n from a standpoint that acknowledges
race, one sees clearly why black women spectators not duped by
mainstream cinema would develop an oppositional gaze. Placing ourselves
outside that pleasure in looking, Mulvey argues, was determined by a
"split between active/male and passive/female." Black female spectators
actively chose not to identify with the film's imaginary subject because
such identification was disenabling.
Looking at films with ·an oppositional gaze, black women were able to
critically assess the cinema's construction of white womanhood as object
of phallocentric gaze and choose not to identify with either the victim
or the perpetrator. Black female spectators, who refused to identify
with white womanhood, who would not take on the phallocentric gaze of
desire and possession, created a critical space The Oppositional Gaze
123 where the binary opposition Mulvey posits of "woman as image, man as
bearer of the look" was continually deconstructed. As critical
spectators, black women looked from location that disrupted, one akin to
that described by Annette Kuhn in The Power of The Image:
... the acts of analysis, of deconstruction and of reading "against the
grain" offer an additional pleasure--the pleasure of resistance, of
saying "no": not to "unsophisticated" enjoyment, by ourselves and
others, of culturally dominant images, but to the structures of power
which ask us to consume them uncritically and in highly circumscribed
ways.
Mainstream feminist film criticism in no way acknowledges black female
spectatorship. It does not even consider the possibility that women can
construct an oppositional gaze via an understanding and awareness of the
politics of race and racism. Feminist film theory rooted in an
ahistorical psychoanalytic framework that privileges sexual difference
actively suppresses recognition of race, reenacting and mirroring the
erasure of black womanhood that occurs in films, silencing any
discussion of racial difference--of racialized sexual difference.
Despite feminist critical interventions aimed at deconstructing the
category "woman" which highlight the significance of race, many feminist
film critics continue to structure their discourse as though it speaks
about "women" when in actuality it speaks only about white women. It
seems ironic that the cover of the recent anthology Feminism and Film
Tbeory edited by Constance Penley has a graphic that is a reproduction
of the photo of white actresses Rosalind Russell and Dorothy Arzner on
the 1936 set of the film Craig'.s Wife yet there is no acknowledgment in
any essay in this collection that the woman "subject" under discussion
is always white. Even though there are photos of black women from films
reproduced in the text, there is no acknowledgment of racial difference.
It would be too simplistic to interpret this failure of insight solely
as a gesture of racism. Importantly, it also speaks to the problem of
structuring feminist film theory around a totalizing narrative of woman
as object whose image functions solely to reaffirm and reinscribe
patriarchy. Mary Ann Doane addresses this issue in the essay
"Remembering Women: Psychical and Historical Construction in Film
Theory":
This attachment to the figure of a degeneralizible Woman as the product
of the apparatus indicates why, for many, feminist film theory seems to
have reached an impasse, a certain blockage in its theorization ... In
focusing upon the task of delineating in great detail the attributes of
woman as effect of the apparatus, feminist film theory participates in
the abstraction of women.
The concept "Woman" effaces the difference between women in specific
socio-historical contexts, between women defined precisely as historical
subjects rather than as a psychic subject (or non-subject). Though Doane
does not focus on race, her comments speak directly to the problem of
its erasure. For it is only as one imagines "woman" in the abstract,
when woman becomes fiction or fantasy, can race not be seen as
significant. Are we really to imagine that feminist theorists writing
only about images of white women, who subsume this specific historical
subject under the totalizing category "woman," do not "see" the
whiteness of the image? It may very well be that they engage in a
process of denial that eliminates the necessity of revisioning
conventional ways of thinking about psychoanalysis as a paradigm of
analysis and the need to rethink a body of feminist film theory that is
firmly rooted in a denial of the reality that sex/sexuality may not be
the primary and/or exclusive signifier of difference. Doane's essay
appears in a very recent anthology, Psychoanalysis and Cinema edited by
E. Ann Kaplan, where, once again, none,of the theory presented
acknowledges or discusses racial difference, with the exception of one
essay, "Not Speaking with Language, Speaking with No Language," which
problematizes notions of orientalism in its examination of Leslie
Thornton's film Adynata. Yet in most of the essays, the theories
espoused are rendered problematic if one includes race as a category of
analysis.
Constructing feminist film theory along these lines enables the
production of a discursive practice that need never theorize any aspect
of black female representation or spectatorship. Yet the existence of
black women within white supremacist culture problematizes, and makes
complex, the overall issue of female identity, representation, and
spectatorship. If, as Friedberg suggests, "identification is a process
which commands the subject to be displaced by an other; it is a
procedure which breeches the separation between self and other, and, in
this way, replicates the very structure of patriarchy." If
identification "demands- sameness, necessitates similarity, disallows
difference"must we then surmise that many feminist film critics who are
"overidentified" with the mainstream cinematic apparatus produce
theories that replicate its totalizing agenda? Why is it that feminist
film criticism, which has most claimecthl e terrain of woman's identity,
representation, and subjectivity as its field of analysis, remains
aggressively silent on the subject of blackness and specifically
representations of black womanThe Oppositional Gaze 125 hood? Just as
mainstream cinema has historically forced aware black female spectators
not to look, much feminist film criticism disallows the possibility of a
theoretical dialogue that might include black women's voices. It is
difficult to talk when you feel no one is listening, when you feel as
though a special jargon or narrative has been created that only the
chosen can understand. No wonder then that black women have for the most
part confined our critical commentary on film to conversations. And it
must be reiterated that this gesture is a strategy that protects us from
the violence perpetuated and advocated by discourses of mass media. A
new focus on issues of race and representation in the field of film
theory could critically intervene on the historical repression .
reproduced in some arenas of contemporary critical practice, making a
discursive space for discussion of black female spectatorship possible.
When I asked a black woman in her twenties, an obsessive moviegoer, why
she thought we had not written about black female spectatorship, she
commented: "We are afraid to talk about ourselves as spectators because
we have been so abused by 'the g;tze'." An aspect of that abuse was the
imposition of the assumption that black female looking relations were
not important enough to theorize. Film theory as a critical "turf” in
the United States has been and continues to be influenced by and
reflective of white racial domination. Since feminist . film criticism
was initially rooted in a women's liberation movement informed by racist
practices, it did not open up the discursive terrain and make it more
inclusive. Recently, even those white film theorists who include an
analysis of race show no interest in black female spectatorship. In her
introduction to the collection of essays Visual and Other Pleasures,
Laura Mulvey describes her initial romantic absorption in Hollywood
cinema, stating:
<quote>Although this great, previously unquestioned and unanalyzed love
was put in crisis by the impact of feminism on my thought in the early
1970s, it also had an enormous influence on the development of my
critical work and ideas and the debate within film culture with which I
became preoccupied over the next fifteen years or so. Watched through
eyes that were affected by the changing climate of consciousness, the
movies lost their magic.</quote>
Watching movies from a feminist perspective, Mulvey arrived at that
location of disaffection that is the starting point for many black women
approaching cinema within the lived harsh reality of racism. Yet her
account of being a part of a film culture whose roots rest on a founding
relationship of adoration and love indicates how difficult it would have
126 BLACK LOOKS been to enter that world from "jump" as a critical
spectator whose gaze had been formed in opposition.
Given the context of class exploitation, and racist and sexist
domination, it has only been through resistance, struggle, reading, and
looking "against the grain," that black women have been able to value
our process of looking enough to publicly name it. Centrally, those
black female spectators who attest to the oppositionality of their gaze
deconstruct theories of female spectatorship that have relied heavily on
the assumption that, as Doane suggests in her essay, "Woman's Stake:
Filming the Female Body," "woman can only mimic man's relation to
language, that is assume a position defined by the penis-phallus as the
supreme arbiter oflack." Identifying with neither the phallocentric gaze
nor the construction of white womanhood as lack, critical black female
spectators construct a theory of looking relations where cinematic
visual delight is the pleasure of interrogation. Every black woman
spectator I talked to, with rare exception, spoke of being "on guard" at
the movies. Talking about the way being a critical spectator of
Hollywood films influenced her, black woman filmmaker Julie Dash
exclaims, "I make films because I was such a spectator!" Looking at
Hollywood cinema from a distance, from that critical politicized
standpoint that did not want to be seduced by narratives reproducing her
negation, Dash watched mainstream movies over and over again for the
pleasure of deconstructing them. And of course there is that added
delight if one happens, in the process of interrogation, to come across
a narrative that invites the black female spectator to engage the text .
with no threat of violation.
Significantly, I began to write film criticism in response to the first
Spike Lee movie, She's Gotta Have It, contesting Lee's replication of
mainstream patriarchal cinematic practices that explicitly represents
woman (in this instance black woman) as the object of a phallocentric
gaze. Lee's investment in patriarchal filmic practices that mirror
dominant patterns makes him the perfect black candidate for entrance to
the Hollywood canon. His work mimics the cinematic construction of white
womanhood as object, replacing her body as text on which to write male
desire with the black female body. It is transference without
transformation. Entering the discourse of film criticism from the
politicized location of resistance,· of not wanting, as a working-class
black woman I interviewed stated, "to see black women in the position
white women have occupied in film forever," I began to think critically
about black female spectatorship.
For years I went to independent and/or foreign films where I was the
only black female present in the theater. I often imagined that in every
theater in the United States there was another black woman watching the
same film wondering why she was the only visible black female spectator.
I remember trying to share with one of my five sisters the cinema I
liked so much. She was "enraged" that I brought her to a theater where
she would have to read subtitles. To her it was a violation of Hollywood
notions of spectatorship, of coming to the movies to be entertained.
When I interviewed her to ask what had changed her mind over the years,
led her to embrace this cinema, she connected it to coming to critical
consciousness, saying, "I learned that there was more to looking than I
had been exposed to in ordinary (Hollywood) movies." I shared that
though most of the films I loved were all white, I could engage them
because they did not have in their deep structure a subtext reproducing
the narrative of white supremacy. Her response was to say that these
films demystified "whiteness," since the lives they depicted seemed less
rooted in fantasies of escape. They were, she suggested, more like "what
we knew life to be, the deeper side of life as well." Always more
seduced and enchanted with Hollywood cinema than me, she stressed that
unaware black female spectators must "break out," no longer be
imprisoned by images that enact a drama of our negation. Though she
still sees Hollywood films, because "they are a major influence in the
culture"-she no longer feels duped or victimized.
Talking with black female spectators, looking at written discussions
either in fiction or academic essays about black women, I noted the
connection made between the realm of representation in mass media and
the capacity of black women to construct ourselves as subjects in daily
life. The extent to which black women feel devalued, objectified,
dehumanized in this society determines the scope and texture of their
looking relations. Those black women whose identities were constructed
in resistance, by practices that oppose the dominant order, were most
inclined to develop an oppositional gaze. Now that there is a growing
interest in films produced by black women and those films have become
more accessible to viewers, it is possible to talk about black female
spectatorship in relation to that work. So far, most discussions of
black spectatorship that I have come across focus on men. In "Black
Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance" Manthia
Diawara suggests that "the components of 'difference'" among elements of
sex, gender, and sexuality give rise to different readings of the same
material, adding that these conditions produce a "resisting" spectator.
He focuses his critical discussion on black masculinity.
The recent publication of the anthology The Female Gaze: Women as
Viewers of Popular Culture excited me, especially as it included an
essay, "Black Looks," by Jacqui Roach and Petal Felix that attempts to
address black female spectatorship. The essay posed provocative
questions that were not answered: Is there a black female gaze? How do
black women relate to the gender politics of representation? Concluding,
the authors assert that black females have "our own reality, our own
history, our own gaze-one which the sees the world rather differently
from 'anyone else.'" Yet, they do not name/describe this experience of
seeing "rather differently." The absence of definition and explanation
suggests they are assuming an essentialist stance wherein it is presumed
that black women, as victims of race and gender oppression, have an
inherently different field of vision. Many black women do not "see
differently" precisely because their perceptions of reality are so
profoundly colonized, shaped by dominant ways of knowing. As Trinh T.
Minh-ha points out in "Outside In, Inside Out": "Subjectivity does not
merely consist of talking about oneself ... be this talking indulgent or
critical."
Critical black female spectatorship emerges as a site of resistance only
when individual black women actively resist the imposition of dominant
ways of knowing and looking. While every black woman I talked to was
aware of racism, that awareness did not automatically correspond with
politicization, the development of an oppositional gaze. When it did,
individual black women consciously named the process. Manthia Diawara's
"resisting spectatorship" is a term that does not adequa~ely describe
the terrain of black female spectatorship. 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, revisjon, interrogate, and invent on
multiple levels. Certainly when I watch the work of black women
filmmakers Camille Billops, Kathleen Collins, Julie Dash, Ayoka
Chenzira, Zeinabu Davis, I do not need to "resist" the images even as I
still choose to watch their work with a critical eye.
Black female critical thinkers concerned with creating space for the
construction of radical black female subjectivity, and the way cultural
production informs this possibility, fully acknowledge the importance of
mass media, film in particular, as a powerful site for critical
intervention. Certainly Julie Dash's film Illusions identifies the
terrain of Hollywood cinema as a space of knowledge production that The
Oppositional Gaze 129 has enormous power. Yet, she also creates a filmic
narrative wherein the black female protagonist subversively claims that
space. Inverting the "real-life" power structure, she offers the black
female spectator representations that challenge stereotypical notions
that place us outside the realm of filmic discursive practices. Within
the film she uses the strategy of Hollywood suspense films to undermine
those cinematic practices that deny black women a place in this
structure. Problematizing the question of "racial" identity by depicting
passing, suddenly it is the white male's capacity to gaze, define, and
know that is called into question.
When Mary Ann Doane describes in "Woman's Stake: Filming the Female
Body" the way in which feminist filmmaking practice can elaborate "a
special syntax for a different articulation of the female body," she
names a critical process that "undoes the structure of the classical
narrative through an insistence upon its repressions." An eloquent
description, this precisely names Dash's strategy in mustons, even
though the film is not unproblematic and works within certain
conventions that are not successfully challenged. For example, the film
does not indicate whether the character Mignon will make Hollywood films
that subvert and transform the genre or whether she will simply
assimilate and perpetuate the norm. Still, subversively, Illusions
problematizes the issue of race and spectatorship. White people in the
film are unable to "see" that race informs their looking relations.
Though she is passing to gain access to the machinery of cultural
production represented by film, Mignon continually asserts her ties to
black community. The bond between her and the young black woman singer
Esther Jeeter is affirmed by caring gestures of affirmation, often
expressed by eye-to-eye contact, the direct unmediated gaze of
recognition. Ironically, it is the desiring objectifying sexualized
white male gaze that threatens to penetrate her "secrets" and disrupt
her process. Metaphorically, Dash suggests the power of black women to
make films will be threatened and undermined by that white male gaze
that seeks to reinscribe the black female body in a narrative of
voyeuristic pleasure where the only relevant opposition is male/female,
and the only location for the female is as a victim. These tensions are
not resolved by the narrative. It is not at all evident that Mignon will
triumph over the white supremacist capitalist imperialist dominating
"gaze."
Throughout Illusions, Mignon's power is affirmed by her contact with the
younger black woman whom she nurtures and protects. It is this process
of mirrored recognition that enables both black women to define their
reality, apart from the reality imposed upon them by structures of
domination. The shared gaze of the two women reinforces their
solidarity. As the younger subject, Esther represents a potential
audience for films that Mignon might produce, films wherein black
females will be the narrative focus. Julie Dash's recent feature-length
film Daughters of the Dust dares to place black females at the center of
its narrative. This focus caused critics (especially white males) to
critique the film negatively orto express many reservations. Clearly,
the impact of racism and sexism so over-determine spectatorship--not
only what we look at but who we identify with-that viewers who are not
black females find it hard to empathize with the central characters in
the movie. They are adrift without a white presence in the film.
Another representation of black females nurturing one another via
recognition of their common struggle for subjectivity is depicted in
Sankofa 's collective work Passion of Remembrance. In the film, two
black women friends, Louise and Maggie, are from the onset of the
narrative struggling with the issue of subjectivity, of their place in
progressive black liberation movements that have been sexist. They
challenge old nonns and want to replace them with new understandings of
the complexity of black identity, and the need for liberation struggles
that address that complexity. Dressing to go to a party, Louise and
Maggie claim the "gaze." Looking at one another, staring in mirrors,
they appear completely focused on their encounter with black femaleness.
How they see themselves is most important, not how they will be stared
at by others. Dancing to the tune "Let's get Loose," they display their
bodies not for a voyeuristic colonizing gaze but for that look of
recognition that affirms their subjectivity-that constitutes them as
spectators. Mutually empowered they eagerly leave the privatized domain
to confront the public. Disrupting conventional racist and sexist
stereotypical representations of black female bodies, these scenes
invite the audience to look differently. They act to critically
intervene and transform conventional filmic practices, changing notions
of spectatorship. Jausions, Daughters of the Dust, and A Passion of
Remembrance employ a deconstructive filmic practice to undermine
existing grand cinematic narratives even as they retheorize subjectivity
in the realm of the visual. Without providing "realistic'' positive
representations that emerge only as a response to the totalizing nature
of existing narratives, they offer points of radical departure. Opening
up a space for the assertion of a critical black female spectatorship,
they do not simply offer diverse representations, they imagine new
transgressive possibilities for the formulation of identity.
In this sense they make explicit a critical practice that provides us
with different ways to think about black female subjectivity and black
female spectatorship. Cinematically, they provide new points of
recognition, embodying Stuart Hall's vision of a critical practice that
acknowledges that identity is constituted "not outside but within
representation," and invites us to see film "not as a second-order
mirror held up to reflect what already exists, but 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." It is this critical
practice that enables production of feminist film theory that theorizes
black female spectatorship. Looking and looking back, black women
involve ourselves in a process whereby we see our history as
counter-memory, using it as a way to know the present and invent the
future.