The Oppositional Gaze

The Oppositional Gaze

Bell Hooks, Professor of English, City College, New York

Introduction Foucault:The power relationship.

Power as domination, it reproduces itself in different locations and employing similar apparatuses, strategies and mechanisms of control.

In all relations of power there is necessarily the possibility resistance.

The Oppositional GazeThe power of looking as contrast to gaze in general.The gaze has always been political in my life.As confrontational and as a gesture of resistance The gaze can be dangerous and be understood by repeated punishments.Look at me when I talk to you There is power in looking.

The Oppositional GazeThe right to gaze Not only will I stare, I want my look to change the reality.Experientially, a critical gaze and cultivating awareness. It politicizes the looking relations.The looking was also about the contestation and confrontation. Its a site for colonized black people at globally.

The analysis of gazeThe critical investigationTypical race and racism and over-determined representation.Our bodies being were there to serve, to enhance, and maintain white womanhood. As an object of phallocentric gaze Anne Friedberg. (A Denial of Difference). The insertion of violating representation (content, form and language.

The white Supremacy and Conventional RepresentationThe powerful white other.Black men were murdered or lynched for looking at white womanhood.Emmet Till (1955).To be looked as at and desired is white.Denial the body of black female.Compelling representations of black femaleness

The white Supremacy and Conventional RepresentationDo you remember Sapphire (Amos n Andy) ? She was not us.To soften images of black men, to make them seem vulnerable, easygoing, funny and unthreatening to a white audience. Our image visually constructed was ugly and hated black female These screen images could assault the black womanhood, could name us bitches and nags.

Deconstruction and Independent Black Cinema

To develop critical black spectatorship. Looking was also about contestation and confrontation. It mainly focuses on racial equality via the construction of images. These are all one way to protest and to reject navigation.Deconstruction of Women as image and men as bearer .Deconstruction and of reading, against the grain .

Deconstruction and Independent Black Cinema

The pleasure of deconstruction and the womans stake .Julie Dash and Doane.filming female body and pleasure of interrogation.Resisting the imposition of dominant ways of knowing and looking (As Sussan & Hartley John).Inverting the real life power structure and black female representation.

Independent Black CinemaA critical gaze against the conventional racist and sexiest stereotypical, representations of black female bodies. A radical departure. they provide new points of recognition and embodying a vision of critical practice. Camillle Billop, Katheen Collins, Julie Dash, Ayoka Chensira.Daughter of Dust, Passion of Remembrance, Illusions etc.

ConclusionThe identity is constituted not outside but with in representationIt 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 enable us to discover who we are Stuart Halls view on representation.

Conclusion The oppositional gaze is a new framework which offers a critical investigation to rethink a body of feminist film theory and denial of the reality (the objectivity of reality and content forms). Black women must involve ourselves in a process whereby we see our history as counter-memory.

What we need is radical openness ?

Bell Hookss publications

Thank You

By Nagarjuna K12 SCMC 07