“Looking and looking back”:bell hooks’ “Oppositional

Gaze”

By Dr. Kay Picart

Key Terms/Concepts• ‘The Gaze” –

• “Rupture” –

• “Woman” -

Imitation of LifeDouglas Sirk, 1959

Responding to the Film

• How is the character of Sarah Jane “humiliating, strange, [and] sad?”

• How or why does Hollywood cinema have “no place” for the black woman?

Group Discussion• For hooks, what does the black female spectator need to

do while watching a movie - how can she develop a critical eye?

• Black women filmmakers like the ones mentioned by hooks (Billops, Collins, Dash, Chenzira, & Davis) have to work outside of the “mainstream,” outside of Hollywood. Why?

• Why is hooks, and eventually her sister, more attracted to “foreign” films than Hollywood films?

• Does Hollywood cinema continue to produce films that negate or violate the black woman and the black female spectator? How does Hollywood handle race or racism in general? How about gender? Sexuality?

• Hooks concludes that black women spectators must “see our history as countermemory” by “looking and looking back” and “using it as a way to know the present and invent the future” (158-59). Does this essay accomplish such a task? How?

Works Cited

hooks, bell. “The Oppositional Gaze.” Feminism and Tradition in Aesthetics. Eds. Peggy Zeglin Brand and Carolyn Korsmeyer. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1995. 142-159.

Imitation of Life. 1959. Dir. Douglas Sirk. Universal, 2002.