Week 7 Oppositional Gaze

 For this weeks zoom discussion we studied “The Oppositional Gaze” by bell hooks. This is another reading about flaws in cinema, feminist film theory, the power of viewing and “the gaze”. hooks begins by explaining how children are punished for staring when they aren’t supposed to and also punished when looking away when they are supposed to be looking. The human gaze is powerful and can be seen as a sign of respect or disrespect. Slave owners would punish their slaves for looking at them. Slaves were denied the right to gaze. She believes that this repression triggered an overwhelming desire to gaze rebelliously. This is known as the oppositional gaze. 

Media maintains white supremacy by creating cinema that targets a white audience. Even films with black actors are historically white representations of blackness. It is no secret that in movies, and tv shows, cinema portrays a system of inequality. Black neighborhoods aren’t as nice as white neighborhoods, the actors overcome some type of hardship, or they are your stereotypical athlete. (Sometimes all of the above.) Often times black cinema will even shine a light on racism with satire that exaggerates the stereotypes.

 Black females had an absent presence in films, this was clear because the desirable woman in these films had white skin. This contributed to the white supremacy in these films. The function that the black female characters served was not a figure of beauty or desire, like the white female character. The experience of looking is different for white women as apposed to black woman because the white woman feel objectified and the black women feel undesirable. 

I would like to discus hooks essay in comparison to Mulveys essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. Mulvey explains how men are typically given more freedom to visually explore their surroundings than women. In hooks essay the oppositional gaze is a tool that black people use to change the dynamic of power that white cinema uses to exclude and alter blackness in media. Mulvey explains that women are objectified in films and given rolls to please the white male viewer specifically, and hooks explains how the desirable white woman makes a black woman feel undesirable. While the white woman is feeling objectified the black woman is feeling so unimportant that she is not represented. In conclusion to the two essays, cinema is racist and sexist. 

This desire to see white woman over black women has been present in not only films but art work as well. During our zoom discussion we looked at examples of fine art work such as the paintings of women bathing. In these paintings the white women were naked and sexualized and the black woman were clothed and seen as service to the white women rather than sexualized to the male viewer. I have included an example in the image “The Great Bath of Bursa” 

Perhaps the media remains so segregated simply because segregation wasn’t that long ago, there are people alive today that grew up segregated or with racist families and it will take time to change how twisted the world has been. White supremacy unfortunately still exists today. The best thing that we can do is be the change that we want to see, avoid stereotypes, boycott racism, and continue to learn and spread awareness about systematic racism everywhere, including cinema. 

Learning about Bell Hooks oppositional gaze can help us as artists and art historians by giving us the tools to understand what we are seeing in old paintings of black and white people. It can help us create meaningful art work to express equality and beauty in black skin in this day and age, we will be able to go down in history as a period in time when these ideas were challenged and equality was obtained. bell hooks essay was written to create a change in the way that black women are represented in film. This can be attained by using camera angles and stronger, more desirable black women’s rolls in films to change the viewers gaze. 

Source:

Hooks, Bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Routledge, 2015.