The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators PDF

Chapter Title: ‘THE OPPOSITIONAL GAZE: BLACK FEMALE SPECTATORS’ Chapter Author(s): bell hooks Book Title: Feminist Postcolonial Theory Book Subtitle: A Reader Book Editor(s): Reina Lewis and Sara Mills Published by: Edinburgh University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.3366/j.ctvxc...

Chapter Title: ‘THE OPPOSITIONAL GAZE: BLACK FEMALE SPECTATORS’ Chapter Author(s): bell hooks Book Title: Feminist Postcolonial Theory Book Subtitle: A Reader Book Editor(s): Reina Lewis and Sara Mills Published by: Edinburgh University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.3366/j.ctvxcr9q0.14 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Edinburgh University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Feminist Postcolonial Theory This content downloaded from 205.234.53.82 on Thu, 06 Aug 2020 04:56:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  2.5 THE OPPOSITIONAL GAZE: BLACK FEMALE SPECTATORS’ bell hooks When thinking about black female spectators, I remember being punished as a child for staring, for those hard intense direct looks children would give grown­ ups, looks that were seen as confrontational, as gestures of resistance, chal­ lenges to authority. The ‘gaze’ has always been political in my life. Imagine the terror felt by the child who has come to understand through repeated punish­ ments that one’s gaze can be dangerous. The child who has learned so well to look the other way when necessary. Yet, when punished, the child is told by parents, ‘Look at me when I talk to you.’ Only, the child is afraid to look. Afraid to look, but fascinated by the gaze. There is power in looking. Amazed the first time I read in history classes that white slave-owners (men, women, and children) punished enslaved black people for looking, I wondered how this traumatic relationship to the gaze had informed black parenting and black spectatorship. The politics of slavery, of racialized power relations, were such that the slaves were denied their right to gaze. Connecting this strategy of domination to that used by grown folks in southern black rural communities where I grew up, I was pained to think that there was no absolute difference between whites who had oppressed black people and ourselves. Years later, reading Michel Foucault, I thought again about these connections, about the ways power as domination reproduces itself in different locations employing similar apparatuses, strategies, and mechanisms of control. Since I knew as a child that the dominating power adults exercised over me and over my gaze was From: bell hooks (1992), ‘The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators’, pp. 115-31, in bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (London: Turnaround (PSL) Ltd). 207 This content downloaded from 205.234.53.82 on Thu, 06 Aug 2020 04:56:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms BELL HOOKS never so absolute that I did not dare to look, to sneak a peep, to stare danger­ ously, I knew that the slaves had looked. That all attempts to repress our/black people’s right to gaze had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze. By courageously looking, we defiantly declared: ‘Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality.’ Even in the worse circumstances of domination, the ability to manipulate one’s gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency. In much of his work, Michel Foucault insists on describing domina­ tion in terms of ‘relations of power’ as part of an effort to challenge the assump­ tion that ‘power is a system of domination which controls everything and which leaves no room for freedom’. Emphatically stating that in all relations of power ‘there is necessarily the possibility of resistance’, he invites the critical thinker to search those margins, gaps and locations on and through the body where agency can be found. Stuart Hall calls for recognition of our agency as black spectators in his essay ‘Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation’. Speaking against the con­ struction of white representations of blackness as totalizing, Hall says of white presence: ‘The error is not to conceptualize this “presence” in terms of power, but to locate that power as wholly external to us - as extrinsic force, whose influence can be thrown off like the serpent sheds its skin.’ What Franz Fanon reminds us, in Black Skin, White M asks, is how power is inside as well as outside:... the movements, the attitudes, the glances of the Other fixed me there, in the sense in which a chemical solution is fixed by a dye. I was indig­ nant; I demanded an explanation. Nothing happened. I burst apart. Now the fragments have been put together again by another self. This ‘look’ from - so to speak - the place of the Other, fixes us, not only in its vio­ lence, hostility and aggression, but in the ambivalence of its desire.1 Spaces of agency exist for black people, wherein we can both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what we see. The ‘gaze’ has been and is a site of resistance for colonized black people glo­ bally. Subordinates in relations of power learn experientially that there is a crit­ ical gaze, one that ‘looks’ to document, one that is oppositional. In resistance struggle, the power of the dominated to assert agency by claiming and cultivat­ ing ‘awareness’ politicizes ‘looking’ relations - one learns to look a certain way in order to resist. When most black people in the United States first had the opportunity to look at film and television, they did so fully aware that mass media was a system of knowledge and power reproducing and maintaining white supremacy. To stare at the television, or mainstream movies, to engage its images, was to engage its negation of black representation. It was the oppositional black gaze that responded to these looking relations by developing independent black cinema. Black viewers of mainstream cinema and television could chart the progress of 208 This content downloaded from 205.234.53.82 on Thu, 06 Aug 2020 04:56:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  The O p p o s it io n a l Gaze: B la c k F e m a l e Spectators’ political movements for racial equality via the construction of images, and did so. Within my family’s southern black working-class home, located in a racially segregated neighborhood, watching television was one way to develop critical spectatorship. Unless you went to work in the white world, across the tracks, you learned to look at white people by staring at them on the screen. Black looks, as they were constituted in the context of social movements for racial uplift, were interrogating gazes. We laughed at television shows like Our Gang and Amos fnJ Andy, at these white representations of blackness, but we also looked at them critically. Before racial integration, black viewers of movies and television experienced visual pleasure in a context where looking was also about contestation and confrontation. Writing about black looking relations in ‘Black British Cinema: Specta­ torship and Identity Formation in Territories’, Manthia Diawara identifies the power of the spectator: ‘Every narration places the spectator in a position of agency; and race, class and sexual relations influence the way in which this sub- jecthood is filled by the spectator.’ Of particular concern for him are moments of ‘rupture’ when the spectator resists ‘complete identification with the film’s discourse’. These ruptures define the relation between black spectators and dominant cinema prior to racial integration. Then, one’s enjoyment of a film wherein representations of blackness were stereotypically degrading and dehu­ manizing co-existed with a critical practice that restored presence where it was negated. Critical discussion of the film while it was in progress or at its conclu­ sion maintained the distance between spectator and the image. Black films were also subject to critical interrogation. Since they came into being in part as a response to the failure of white-dominated cinema to represent blackness in a manner that did not reinforce white supremacy, they too were critiqued to see if images were seen as complicit with dominant cinematic practices. Critical, interrogating black looks were mainly concerned with issues of race and racism, the way racial domination of blacks by whites overdetermined rep­ resentation. They were rarely concerned with gender. As spectators, black men could repudiate the reproduction of racism in cinema and television, the nega­ tion of black presence, even as they could feel as though they were rebelling against white supremacy by daring to look, by engaging phallocentric politics of spectatorship. Given the real life public circumstances wherein black men were murdered/lynched for looking at white womanhood, where the black male gaze was always subject to control and/or punishment by the powerful white Other, the private realm of television screens or dark theaters could unleash the repressed gaze. There they could ‘look’ at white womanhood without a structure of domination overseeing the gaze, interpreting, and pun­ ishing. That white supremacist structure that had murdered Emmet Till after interpreting his look as violation, as ‘rape’ of white womanhood, could not control black male responses to screen images. In their role as spectators, black men could enter an imaginative space of phallocentric power that mediated racial negation. This gendered relation to looking made the experience of the 209 This content downloaded from 205.234.53.82 on Thu, 06 Aug 2020 04:56:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms BELL HOOKS black male spectator radically different from that of the black female spectator. Major early black male independent filmmakers represented black women in their films as objects of male gaze. Whether looking through the camera or as spectators watching films, whether mainstream cinema or “race” movies such as those made by Oscar Micheaux, the black male gaze had a different scope from that of the black female. Black women have written little about black female spectatorship, about our moviegoing practices. A growing body of film theory and criticism by black women has only begun to emerge. The prolonged silence of black women as spectators and critics was a response to absence, to cinematic negation. In ‘The Technology of Gender’, Teresa de Lauretis, drawing on the work of Monique Wittig, calls attention to ‘the power of discourses to “ do violence” to people, a violence which is material and physical, although produced by abstract and sci­ entific discourses as well as the discourses of the mass media’.2 With the pos­ sible exception of early race movies, black female spectators have had to develop looking relations within a cinematic context that constructs our pres­ ence as absence, that denies the ‘body’ of the black female so as to perpetuate white supremacy and with it a phallocentric spectatorship where the woman to be looked at and desired is ‘white’. (Recent movies do not conform to this par­ adigm but I am turning to the past with the intent to chart the development of black female spectatorship.) Talking with black women of all ages and classes, in different areas of the United States, about their filmic looking relations, I hear again and again ambiv­ alent responses to cinema. Only a few of the black women I talked with remem­ bered the pleasure of race movies, and even those who did, felt that pleasure interrupted and usurped by Hollywood. Most of the black women I talked with were adamant that they never went to movies expecting to see compelling repre­ sentations of black femaleness. They were all acutely aware of cinematic racism - its violent erasure of black womanhood. In Anne Friedberg’s essay ‘A Denial of Difference: Theories of Cinematic Identification’ she stresses that ‘identifica­ tion 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. Commenting on Hollywood’s characterization of black women in Girls on Film, Julie Burchill describes this absent presence: Black women have been mothers without children (Mammies - who can ever forget the sickening spectacle of Hattie MacDaniels waiting on the simpering Vivien Leigh hand and foot and enquiring like a ninny, ‘What’s ma lamb gonna wear?’)... Lena Horne, the first black performer signed to a long term contract with a major (MGM), looked gutless but was actu­ ally quite spirited. She seethed when Tallulah Bankhead complimented her on the paleness of her skin and the non-Negroidness of her features.3 2 10 This content downloaded from 205.234.53.82 on Thu, 06 Aug 2020 04:56:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  ‘T he O ppo sitio nal G a z e : B la ck F emale Spectators ’ When black women actresses like Lena Horne appeared in mainstream cinema most white viewers were not aware that they were looking at black females unless the film was specifically coded as being about blacks. Burchill is one of the few white women film critics who has dared to examine the intersection of race and gender in relation to the construction of the category ‘woman’ in film as object of the phallocentric gaze. With characteristic wit she asserts: ‘What does it say about racial purity that the best blondes have all been brunettes (Harrow, Monroe, Bardot) ? I think it says that we are not as white as we think.’ Burchill could easily have said ‘we are not as white as we want to be’, for clearly the obsession to have white women film stars be ultra-white was a cinematic practice that sought to maintain a distance, a separation between that image and the black female Other; it was a way to perpetuate white supremacy. Politics of race and gender were inscribed into mainstream cinematic narrative from Birth o f A Nation on. As a seminal work, this film identified what the place and function of white womanhood would be in cinema. There was clearly no place for black women. Remembering my past in relation to screen images of black womanhood, I wrote a short essay, ‘Do you remember Sapphire?’ which explored both the negation of black female representation in cinema and television and our rejec­ tion of these images. Identifying the character of ‘Sapphire’ from Amos V Andy as that screen representation of black femaleness I first saw in childhood, I wrote: She was even then backdrop, foil. She was bitch - nag. She was there to soften images of black men, to make them seem vulnerable, easygoing, funny, and unthreatening to a white audience. She was there as man in drag, as castrating bitch, as someone to be lied to, someone to be tricked, someone the white and black audience could hate. Scapegoated on all sides. She was not us. We laughed with the black men, with the white people. We laughed at this black woman who was not us. And we did not even long to be there on the screen. How could we long to be there when our image, visually constructed, was so ugly. We did not long to be there. We did not long for her. We did not want our construction to be this hated black female thing - foil, backdrop. Her black female image was not the body of desire. There was nothing to see. She was not us.4 Grown black women had a different response to Sapphire; they identified with her frustrations and her woes. They resented the way she was mocked. They resented the way these screen images could assault black womanhood, could name us bitches, nags. And in opposition they claimed Sapphire as their own, as the symbol of that angry part of themselves white folks and black men could not even begin to understand. Conventional representations of black women have done violence to the image. Responding to this assault, many black women spectators shut out the image, looked the other way, accorded cinema no importance in their lives. 211 This content downloaded from 205.234.53.82 on Thu, 06 Aug 2020 04:56:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms BELL HOOKS Then there were those spectators whose gaze was that of desire and complicity. Assuming a posture of subordination, they submitted to cinema’s capacity to seduce and betray. They were cinematically ‘gaslighted’. Every black woman I spoke with who was/is an ardent moviegoer, fia lover of the Hollywood film, testified that to experience fully the pleasure of that cinema they had to close down critique, analysis; they had to forget racism. And mostly they did not think about sexism. What was the nature then of this adoring black female gaze - this look that could bring pleasure in the midst of negation? In her first novel, The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison constructs a portrait of the black female spec­ tator; her gaze is the masochistic look of victimization. Describing her looking relations, Miss Pauline Breedlove, a poor working woman, maid in the house of a prosperous white family, asserts: The onliest time I be happy seem like was when I was in the picture show. Every time I got, I went, I’d go early, before the show started. They’s cut off the lights, and everything be black. Then the screen would light up, and Fs move right on in them picture. White men taking such good care of they women, and they all dressed up in big clean houses with the bath tubs right in the same room with the toilet. Them pictures gave me a lot of pleasure.5 To experience pleasure, Miss Pauline sitting in the dark must imagine herself transformed, turned into the white woman portrayed on the screen. After watching movies, feeling the pleasure, she says, ‘But it made coming home hard.’ We come home to ourselves. Not all black women spectators submitted to that spectacle of regression through identification. Most of the women I talked with felt that they consciously resisted identification with films - that this tension made moviegoing less than pleasurable; at times it caused pain. As one black woman put, ‘I could always get pleasure from movies as long as I did not look too deep.’ For black female spectators who have ‘looked too deep’ the encounter with the screen hurt. That some of us chose to stop looking was a gesture of resistance, turning away was one way to protest, to reject negation. My pleasure in the screen ended abruptly when I and my sisters first watched Imitation o f Life. Writing about this experience in the ‘Sapphire’ piece, I addressed the movie directly, confessing: I had until now forgotten you, that screen image seen in adolescence, those images that made me stop looking. It was there in Imitation o f Life, that comfortable mammy image. There was something familiar about this hard-working black woman who loved her daughter so much, loved her in a way that hurt. Indeed, as young southern black girls watching this film, Peola’s mother reminded us of the hardworking, churchgoing, Big Mamas we knew and loved. Consequently, it was not this image that cap­ tured our gaze; we were fascinated by Peola.6 212 This content downloaded from 205.234.53.82 on Thu, 06 Aug 2020 04:56:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  T he O ppo sitio nal G a z e : B la ck F emale Spectators ’ Addressing her, I wrote: You were different. There was something scary in this image of young sexual sensual black beauty betrayed - that daughter who did not want to be confined by blackness, that ‘tragic mulatto’ who did not want to be negated. ‘Just let me escape this image forever,’ she could have said. I will always remember that image. I remembered how we cried for her, for our unrealized desiring selves. She was tragic because there was no place in the cinema for her, no loving pictures. She too was absent image. It was better then, that we were absent, for when we were there it was humiliat­ ing, strange, sad. We cried all night for you, for the cinema that had no place for you. And like you, we stopped thinking it would one day be dif­ ferent.7 When I returned to films as a young woman, after a long period of silence, I had developed an oppositional gaze. 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. Foreign films and US independent cinema were the primary locations of my filmic looking relations, even though I also watched Hollywood films. From ‘jump’, black female spectators have gone to films with awareness of the way in which race and racism determined the visual construction of gender. Whether it was Birth o f A Nation or Shirley Temple shows, we knew that white womanhood was the racialized sexual difference occupying the place of stardom in mainstream narrative film. We assumed white women knew it too. Reading Laura Mulvey’s provocative essay, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, from a standpoint that acknowledges race, one sees clearly why black women spectators not duped by mainstream cinema would develop an opposi­ tional gaze. Placing ourselves outside that pleasure in looking, Mulvey argues, was determined by a ‘split between active/male and passive/female’. Black female spectators actively chose not to identify with the film’s imaginary subject because such identification was disenabling. Looking at films with an oppositional gaze, black women were able to criti­ cally assess the cinema’s construction of white womanhood as object of phal­ locentric gaze and choose not to identify with either the victim or the perpetrator. Black female spectators, who refused to identify with white wom­ anhood, who would not take on the phallocentric gaze of desire and posses­ sion, 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, one akin to that described by Annette Kuhn in The Power o f The Image:... the acts of analysis, of deconstruction and of reading ‘against the grain’ offer an additional pleasure - the pleasure of resistance, of saying 213 This content downloaded from 205.234.53.82 on Thu, 06 Aug 2020 04:56:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms BELL HOOKS ‘no’ not to ‘unsophisticated’ enjoyment, by ourselves and others, of cul­ turally dominant images, but to the structures of power which ask us to consume them uncritically and in highly circumscribed ways.8 Mainstream feminist film criticism in no way acknowledges black female spectatorship. It does not even consider the possibility that women can con­ struct an oppositional gaze via an understanding and awareness of the politics of race and racism. Feminist film theory rooted in an ahistorical psychoanalytic framework that privileges sexual difference actively suppresses recognition of race, reenacting and mirroring the erasure of black womanhood that occurs in films, silencing any discussion of racial difference - of racialized sexual differ­ ence. Despite feminist critical interventions aimed at deconstructing the cate­ gory ‘woman’ which highlight the significance of race, many feminist film critics continue to structure their discourse as though it speaks about ‘women’ when in actuality it speaks only about white women. It seems ironic that the cover of the recent anthology Feminism and Film Theory edited by Constance Penley has a graphic that is a reproduction of the photo of white actresses Rosalind Russell and Dorothy Arzner on the 1936 set of the film Craig's Wife yet there is no acknowledgment in any essay in this collection that the woman ‘subject’ under discussion is always white. Even though there are photos of black women from films reproduced in the text, there is no acknowledgment of racial differ­ ence. It would be too simplistic to interpret this failure of insight solely as a gesture of racism. Importantly, it also speaks to the problem of structuring feminist film theory around a totalizing narrative of woman as object whose image functions solely to reaffirm and reinscribe patriarchy. Mary Ann Doane addresses this issue in the essay ‘Remembering Women: Psychical and Historical Construction in Film Theory’: This attachment to the figure of a degeneralizible Woman as the product of the apparatus indicates why, for many, feminist film theory seems to have reached an impasse, a certain blockage in its theorization... In focusing upon the task of delineating in great detail the attributes of woman as effect of the apparatus, feminist film theory participates in the abstraction of women.9 The concept ‘Woman’ effaces the difference between women in specific socio- historical contexts, between women defined precisely as historical subjects rather than as a psychic subject (or non-subject). Though Doane does not focus on race, her comments speak directly to the problem of its erasure. For it is only as one imagines ‘woman’ in the abstract, when woman becomes fiction or fantasy, can race not be seen as significant. Are we really to imagine that femi­ nist theorists writing only about images of white women, who subsume this specific historical subject under the totalizing category ‘woman’ do not ‘see’ the whiteness of the image? It may very well be that they engage in a process of 214 This content downloaded from 205.234.53.82 on Thu, 06 Aug 2020 04:56:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  ‘T he O ppo sitio na l G a z e : Bl a c k F emale Spectators ’ denial that eliminates the necessity of revisioning conventional ways of think­ ing about psychoanalysis as a paradigm of analysis and the need to rethink a body of feminist film theory that is firmly rooted in a denial of the reality that sex/sexuality may not be the primary and/or exclusive signifier of difference. Doane’s essay appears in the anthology, Psychoanalysis and Cinema edited by E. Ann Kaplan, where, once again, none of the theory presented acknowledges or discusses racial difference, with the exception of one essay, ‘Not Speaking with Language, Speaking with No Language’, which problematizes notions of orientalism in its examination of Leslie Thornton’s film Adynata. Yet in most of the essays, the theories espoused are rendered problematic if one includes race as a category of analysis. Constructing feminist film theory along these lines enables the production of a discursive practice that need never theorize any aspect of black female repre­ sentation or spectatorship. Yet the existence of black women within white supremacist culture problematizes, and makes complex, the overall issue of female identity, representation, and spectatorship. If, as Friedberg suggests, ‘identification is a process which commands the subject to be displaced by an other; it is a procedure which breeches the separation between self and other, and, in this way, replicates the very structure of patriarchy’. If identification ‘demands sameness, necessitates similarity, disallows difference - must we then surmise that many feminist film critics who are ‘over-identified’ with the main­ stream cinematic apparatus produce theories that replicate its totalizing agenda? Why is it that feminist film criticism, which has most claimed the terrain of woman’s identity, representation, and subjectivity as its field of anal­ ysis, remains aggressively silent on the subject of blackness and specifically rep­ resentations of black womanhood? Just as mainstream cinema has historically forced aware black female spectators not to look, much feminist film criticism disallows the possibility of a theoretical dialogue that might include black women’s voices. It is difficult to talk when you feel no one is listening, when you feel as though a special jargon or narrative has been created that only the chosen can understand. No wonder then that black women have for the most part confined our critical commentary on film to conversations. And it must be reiterated that this gesture is a strategy that protects us from the violence per­ petuated and advocated by discourses of mass media. A new focus on issues of race and representation in the field of film theory could critically intervene on the historical repression reproduced in some arenas of contemporary critical practice, making a discursive space for discussion of black female spectatorship possible. When I asked a black woman in her twenties, an obsessive moviegoer, why she thought we had not written about black female spectatorship, she com­ mented: ‘We are afraid to talk about ourselves as spectators because we have been so abused by ‘the gaze’. An aspect of that abuse was the imposition of the assumption that black female looking relations were not important enough to theorize. Film theory as a critical ‘turf’ in the United States has been and 215 This content downloaded from 205.234.53.82 on Thu, 06 Aug 2020 04:56:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms BELL HOOKS continues to be influenced by and reflective of white racial domination. Since feminist film criticism was initially rooted in a women’s liberation movement informed by racist practices, it did not open up the discursive terrain and make it more inclusive. Recently, even those white film theorists who include an anal­ ysis of race show no interest in black female spectator ship. In her introduction to the collection of essays Visual and Other Pleasures, Laura Mulvey describes her initial romantic absorption in Hollywood cinema, stating: Although this great, previously unquestioned and unanalyzed love was put in crisis by the impact of feminism on my thought in the early 1970s, it also had an enormous influence on the development of my critical work and ideas and the debate within film culture with which I became preoc­ cupied over the next fifteen years or so. Watched through eyes that were affected by the changing climate of consciousness, the movies lost their magic.10 Watching movies from a feminist perspective, Mulvey arrived at that location of disaffection that is the starting point for many black women approaching cinema within the lived harsh reality of racism. Yet her account of being a part of a film culture whose roots rest on a founding relationship of adoration and love indicates how difficult it would have been to enter that world from ‘jump’ as a critical spectator whose gaze had been formed in opposition. Given the context of class exploitation, and racist and sexist domination, it has only been through resistance, struggle, reading, and looking ‘against the grain’, that black women have been able to value our process of looking enough to publicly name it. Centrally, those black female spectators who attest to the oppositionality of their gaze deconstruct theories of female spectatorship that have relied heavily on the assumption that, as Doane suggests in her essay, ‘Woman’s Stake: Filming the Female Body’, ‘woman can only mimic man’s rela­ tion to language, that is assume a position defined by the penis-phallus as the supreme arbiter of lack’.11 Identifying with neither the phallocentric gaze nor the construction of white womanhood as lack, critical black female spectators construct a theory of looking relations where cinematic visual delight is the pleasure of interrogation. Every black woman spectator I talked to, with rare exception, spoke of being ‘on guard’ at the movies. Talking about the way being a critical spectator of Hollywood films influenced her, black woman film-maker Julie Dash exclaims, ‘I make films because I was such a spectator!’ Looking at Hollywood cinema from a distance, from that critical politicized standpoint that did not want to be seduced by narratives reproducing her negation, Dash watched mainstream movies over and over again for the pleasure of decon­ structing them. And of course there is that added delight if one happens, in the process of interrogation, to come across a narrative that invites the black female spectator to engage the text with no threat of violation. Significantly, I began to write film criticism in response to the first Spike Lee movie, She's Gotta Have It, contesting Lee’s replication of mainstream patriar- 2 16 This content downloaded from 205.234.53.82 on Thu, 06 Aug 2020 04:56:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  T he O ppo sitio na l G a z e : B la c k F emale Spectators ’ dial cinematic practices that explicitly represents woman (in this instance black woman) as the object of a phallocentric gaze. Lee’s investment in patriarchal filmic practices that mirror dominant patterns makes him the perfect black can­ didate for entrance to the Hollywood canon. His work mimics the cinematic construction of white womanhood as object, replacing her body as text on which to write male desire with the black female body. It is transference without transformation. Entering the discourse of film criticism from the politicized location of resistance, of not wanting, as a working-class black woman I inter­ viewed stated, ‘to see black women in the position white women have occupied in film forever’, I began to think critically about black female spectatorship. For years I went to independent and/or foreign films where I was the only black female present in the theater. I often imagined that in every theater in the United States there was another black woman watching the same film wonder­ ing why she was the only visible black female spectator. I remember trying to share with one of my five sisters the cinema I liked so much. She was ‘enraged’ that I brought her to a theater where she would have to read subtitles. To her it was a violation of Hollywood notions of spectatorship, of coming to the movies to be entertained. When I interviewed her to ask what had changed her mind over the years, led her to embrace this cinema, she connected it to coming to critical consciousness, saying, ‘I learned that there was more to looking than I had been exposed to in ordinary (Hollywood) movies’. I shared that though most of the films I loved were all white, I could engage them because they did not have in their deep structure a subtext reproducing the narrative of white supremacy. Her response was to say that these films demystified ‘whiteness’, since the lives they depicted seemed less rooted in fantasies of escape. They were, she suggested, more like ‘what we knew life to be, the deeper side of life as well’. Always more seduced and enchanted with Hollywood cinema than me, she stressed that unaware black female spectators must ‘break out’, no longer be imprisoned by images that enact a drama of our negation. Though she still sees Hollywood films, because ‘they are a major influence in the culture’ - she no longer feels duped or victimized. Talking with black female spectators, looking at written discussions either in fiction or academic essays about black women, I noted the connection made between the realm of representation in mass media and the capacity of black women to construct ourselves as subjects in daily life. The extent to which black women feel devalued, objectified, dehumanized in this society determines the scope and texture of their looking relations. Those black women whose iden­ tities were constructed in resistance, by practices that oppose the dominant order, were most inclined to develop an oppositional gaze. Now that there is a growing interest in films produced by black women and those films have become more accessible to viewers, it is possible to talk about black female spectatorship in relation to that work. So far, most discussions of black spec­ tatorship that I have come across focus on men. In ‘Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance’ Manthia Diawara suggests that ‘the 217 This content downloaded from 205.234.53.82 on Thu, 06 Aug 2020 04:56:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms BELL HOOKS components of “ difference” ’ among elements of sex, gender, and sexuality give rise to different readings of the same material, adding that these conditions produce a ‘resisting’ spectator. He focuses his critical discussion on black mas­ culinity.12 The recent publication of the anthology The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture excited me, especially as it included an essay, ‘Black Looks’, by Jacqui Roach and Petal Felix that attempts to address black female spectatorship. The essay posed provocative questions that were not answered: Is there a black female gaze?13 How do black women relate to the gender pol­ itics of representation? Concluding, the authors assert that black females have ‘our own reality, our own history, our own gaze - one which the sees the world rather differently from “ anyone else” ’. Yet, they do not name/describe this experience of seeing ‘rather differently’. The absence of definition and explana­ tion suggests they are assuming an essentialist stance wherein it is presumed that black women, as victims of race and gender oppression, have an inherently different field of vision. Many black women do not ‘see differently’ precisely because their perceptions of reality are so profoundly colonized, shaped by dominant ways of knowing. As Trinh T. Minh-ha points out in ‘Outside In, Inside Out’: ‘Subjectivity does not merely consist of talking about oneself... be this talking indulgent or critical.’14 Critical black female spectatorship emerges as a site of resistance only when individual black women actively resist the imposition of dominant ways of knowing and looking. While every black woman I talked to was aware of racism, that awareness did not automatically correspond with politicization, the development of an oppositional gaze. When it did, individual black women consciously named the process. Manthia Diawara’s ‘resisting spectatorship’ is a term that does not adequately describe the terrain of black female spectator­ ship. We do more than resist. We create alternative texts that are not solely reac­ tions. As critical spectators, black women participate in a broad range of looking relations, contest, resist, revision, interrogate, and invent on multiple levels. Certainly when I watch the work of the black women film-makers, Camille Billops, Kathleen Collins, Julie Dash, Ayoka Chenzira, Zeinabu Davis, I do not need to ‘resist’ the images even as I still choose to watch their work with a critical eye. Black female critical thinkers concerned with creating space for the construc­ tion of radical black female subjectivity, and the way cultural production informs this possibility, fully acknowledge the importance of mass media, film in particular, as a powerful site for critical intervention. Certainly Julie Dash’s film Illusions identifies the terrain of Hollywood cinema as a space of knowl­ edge production that has enormous power. Yet, she also creates a filmic narra­ tive wherein the black female protagonist subversively claims that space. Inverting the ‘real-life’ power structure, she offers the black female spectator representations that challenge stereotypical notions that place us outside the realm of filmic discursive practices. Within the film she uses the strategy of 218 This content downloaded from 205.234.53.82 on Thu, 06 Aug 2020 04:56:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  T h e O ppo sitio na l G a z e : B la ck F emale Spectators ’ Hollywood suspense films to undermine those cinematic practices that deny black women a place in this structure. Problematizing the question of ‘racial’ identity by depicting passing, suddenly it is the white male’s capacity to gaze, define and know that is called into question. When Mary Ann Doane describes in ‘Woman’s Stake: Filming the Female Body’ the way in which feminist film-making practice can elaborate ‘a special syntax for a different articulation of the female body’, she names a critical process that ‘undoes the structure of the classical narrative through an insistence upon its repressions’.15 An eloquent description, this precisely names Dash’s strategy in Illusions, even though the film is not unproblematic and works within certain conventions that are not successfully challenged. For example, the film does not indicate whether the character Mignon will make Hollywood films that subvert and transform the genre or whether she will simply assimilate and perpetuate the norm. Still, subversively, Illusions problematizes the issue of race and spectatorship. White people in the film are unable to ‘see’ that race informs their looking relations. Though she is passing to gain access to the machinery of cultural production represented by film, Mignon continually asserts her ties to black community. The bond between her and the young black woman singer Esther Jeeter is affirmed by caring gestures of affirmation, often expressed by eye-to-eye contact, the direct unmediated gaze of recognition. Ironically, it is the desiring objectifying sexualized white male gaze that threatens to penetrate her ‘secrets’ and disrupt her process. Metaphorically, Dash suggests the power of black women to make films will be threatened and undermined by that white male gaze that seeks to reinscribe the black female body in a narrative of voy­ euristic pleasure where the only relevant opposition is male/female, and the only location for the female is as a victim. These tensions are not resolved by the nar­ rative. It is not at all evident that Mignon will triumph over the white suprem­ acist capitalist imperialist dominating ‘gaze’. Throughout Illusions, Mignon’s power is affirmed by her contact with the younger black woman whom she nurtures and protects. It is this process of mir­ rored recognition that enables both black women to define their reality, apart from the reality imposed upon them by structures of domination. The shared gaze of the two women reinforces their solidarity. As the younger subject, Esther represents a potential audience for films that Mignon might produce, films wherein black females will be the narrative focus. Julie Dash’s recent feature-length film Daughters o f the Dust dares to place black females at the center of its narrative. This focus caused critics (especially white males) to cri­ tique the film negatively or to express many reservations. Clearly, the impact of racism and sexism so over-determine spectatorship - not only what we look at but who we identify with - that viewers who are not black females find it hard to empathize with the central characters in the movie. They are adrift without a white presence in the film. Another representation of black females nurturing one another via recogni­ tion of their common struggle for subjectivity is depicted in Sankofa’s collective 219 This content downloaded from 205.234.53.82 on Thu, 06 Aug 2020 04:56:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms BELL HOOKS work Passion o f Remembrance. In the film, two black women friends, Louise and Maggie, are from the onset of the narrative struggling with the issue of sub­ jectivity, of their place in progressive black liberation movements that have been sexist. They challenge old norms and want to replace them with new under­ standings of the complexity of black identity, and the need for liberation strug­ gles that address that complexity. Dressing to go to a party, Louise and Maggie claim the ‘gaze’. Looking at one another, staring in mirrors, they appear com­ pletely focused on their encounter with black femaleness. How they see them­ selves is most important, not how they will be stared at by others. Dancing to the tune ‘Let’s get Loose’, they display their bodies not for a voyeuristic colo­ nizing gaze but for that look of recognition that affirms their subjectivity - that constitutes them as spectators. Mutually empowered they eagerly leave the pri­ vatized domain to confront the public. Disrupting conventional racist and sexist stereotypical representations of black female bodies, these scenes invite the audience to look differently. They act to critically intervene and transform conventional filmic practices, changing notions of spectatorship. Illusions, Daughters o f the Dust, and A Passion o f Remembrance employ a deconstruc- tive filmic practice to undermine existing grand cinematic narratives even as they retheorize subjectivity in the realm of the visual. Without providing ‘real­ istic’ positive representations that emerge only as a response to the totalizing nature of existing narratives, they offer points of radical departure. Opening up a space for the assertion of a critical black female spectatorship, they do not simply offer diverse representations, they imagine new transgressive possibil­ ities for the formulation of identity. In this sense they make explicit a critical practice that provides us with dif­ ferent ways to think about black female subjectivity and black female spectat­ orship. Cinematically, they provide new points of recognition, embodying Stuart Hall’s vision of a critical practice that acknowledges that identity is con­ stituted ‘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’.16 It is this critical practice that enables production of feminist film theory that theorizes black female spectat­ orship. Looking and looking back, black women involve ourselves in a process whereby we see our history as counter-memory, using it as a way to know the present and invent the future. N o tes 1. Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (London: Pluto, 1986 ). 2. Teresa de Lauretis, The Technology of Gender: Essays on theory, film and fiction (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987). 3. Julie Burchill, Girls on Film (New York: Pantheon, 1986). 4. bell hooks, unspecified publication. 5. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970). 6. bell hooks, unspecified publication. 220 This content downloaded from 205.234.53.82 on Thu, 06 Aug 2020 04:56:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms  ‘T he O ppo sitio nal G a z e : B l a c k F emale Spectators ’ 7. bell hooks, unspecified publication. 8. Annette Kuhn, The Power of the Image: Essays on representation and sexuality (New York: Routledge, 1985). 9. Mary Ann Doane, 'Remembering Women: Psychical and historical constructions in film theory’, in E. Ann Kaplan (ed.), Psychoanalysis and Cinema (London: Routledge, 1990). 10. Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1989). 11. Mary Ann Doane, ‘Woman’s Stake: Filming the female body’, in Constance Penley (ed.), Feminism and Film Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988) 12. Manthia Diawara, ‘Black Spectatorship: Problems of identification and resistance’, in Screen, Fall 1988, vol. 29, no. 4. 13. Jacqui Roach and Petal Felix, ‘Black Looks’, in Lorraine Gammon and Margaret Marshment (eds), The Female Gaze: Women as Viewers of Popular Culture (London: Women’s Press, 1988). 14. Trinh T. Minh-ha, ‘Outside In, Inside Out’, in Jim Pines (ed.), Questions of Third World Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 1989). 15. Doane, ‘Woman’s Stake’. 16. Stuart Hall, unspecified publication. F il m o g r a p h y Arzner, D., Craig's Wife (US, 1936). Blackwood, Maureen and Isaac Julien, The Passion of Remembrance (US, 1986). Dash, J. Daughters of the Dust (US, 1991). Dash, J., Illusions (US, 1983). Griffith, D. W., Birth of a Nation (US, 1915). Lee, S, She’s Gotta Have It (US, 1986). Stahl, J. M., Imitation of Life (US, 1934). Thornton, L., Adynata (US, 1983). 221 This content downloaded from 205.234.53.82 on Thu, 06 Aug 2020 04:56:48 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms