What is oppositional gaze?
Conclusion
- Power in looking
- Media acts as tool of maintaining white supremacy
- Rebellious nature of black male gaze
- find agency in this gaze
- Unequal viewing experience between black females and black males
- Due to phallocentric nature of mainstream films
- Looking relations is affected by the portrayal of black females (or absence)
- Development of oppositional gaze
- "cinematic visual delight is the pleasure of interrogation"
- Hooks discusses the evolution of the black female spectator in relations to film and cinema
- Black women have been forced to resist and be critical in order to derive pleasure
- not only directed at the male gaze, and the idea of women as "less"
- gained pleasure in interrogation and deconstruction.
- Black women who were subjected to dehumanizing representation were most inclined to develop an oppositional gaze and give them a place in society where they did not have before.
Radical Departures in Film Industry
- Black women do more than just resist
- 'create alternative texts that are not solely reactions'
- films that use classic Hollywood strategies to identify stereotypes and use it as a site of "critical intervention"
- Illusions (1983)
- Daughters of the Dust (1991)
- Passion of Remembrance (1986)
The Oppositional Gaze