Imitation of Life
Deconstruction and Disruption
" '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."
Rupture
Coming to Critical Consciousness
"Created a critical space 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 a location that disrupted"
(p. 123).
The Oppositional Gaze
"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" (p. 131)
"When the spectator resists 'complete identification with the film's discourse.' "
"Define the relation between black spectators and dominant cinema prior to racial integration."
"Representations of blackness were stereotypically degrading and dehumanizing" (p. 117).
- demistify whiteness
- less rooted in fantasy/escape
- more realistic depictions of life
- "Unaware black female spectators must 'break out,' no longer be imprisoned by images that enact a drama of our negation" (p. 127).
- "Those black women whose identities were constructed in resistance, by practices that oppose the dominant order, were most inclined to develop and oppositional gaze."
http://www.mingwong.org/index.php?/project/life-of-imitation/
Hattie McDaniel and Vivien Leigh
in Gone with the Wind
Education & Career
Black Female Spectators
- Stanford University, B.A., 1973
- University of Wisconsin, M.A., 1976
- University of California at Santa Cruz, Ph.D., 1983.
- Written many books on cultural criticism, personal memoirs, poetry collections, and children's books.
- Writings cover topics of gender, race, class, spirituality, teaching, and the significance of media in contemporary culture (bellhooksinstitute.com).
- College professor
"Our Gang" and "Amos 'n' Andy"
We are Not as White as We Want to Be
Developed an Oppositional Gaze
- Black women who's perceptions aren't completely colonized can "resist spectatorship."
- Black women who are able to become critical spectators are able to "participate in a broad range of looking relations, contest, resist, revision, interrogate, and invent on multiple levels" (p. 128).
- Black women are more likely to see through the falsity of the white supremacist, patriarchal lens.
Gendered Relation to Looking
"The best blondes have all been brunettes"
by bell hooks
- Feminism and feminist film theory suppressed issues of race which only served to support a patriarchal society.
- Abstraction of women makes them fiction.
- Black women "look against the grain"
"Before racial integration, black viewers of movies and television experienced visual pleasure in a context where looking was also about contestation and confrontation."
bell hooks
- The experience of the black male spectator was radically different from that of black female spectator.
- Black women's prolonged silence was a response to cinematic negation
- Perpetuated white supremacy
- The woman to look at and desire is white
"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."
"Placing ourselves outside that pleasure in looking... one sees clearly why black female spectators not duped by mainstream cinema would develop an oppositional gaze" (p. 122).
Active male (perpetrator) and
passive female (victim)
The Gaze
- Born in 1952 in rural Kentucky as Gloria Jean Watkins
- "bell hooks" is her pen name, derived from her grandmother's name
- 1 of 6 children
- Mother was a maid and father was a janitor
- Her father was “an impressive example of diligence and hard work”
- Her mother and women like her, "resisted by making homes where all black people could strive to be subjects, not objects, where we could be affirmed in our minds and hearts despite poverty, hardship, and deprivation, where we could restore to ourselves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public world.”
- Can be dangerous, resistant, or challenge to authority
- "Afraid to look, but fascinated by the gaze. There is power in looking" (p. 115).
- Slaves were denied their right to gaze and it was a punishable offense.
- Film and t.v. was the 1st chance to look
- Reproduced and maintained white supremacy.
- "Watching television was one way to develop critical spectatorship" (p. 117).
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Bell_Hooks.aspx