In her article "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators," bell hooks argues that black people have a right to look—that there is a power in looking and relates that to how black women specifically relate to cinema. She says that despite a history of cultural oppression and repression, claiming the right to look is important as a way to reclaim power. hooks argues in her essay that looking it in and of itself a rebellious act.
hooks begins her article by discussing the connection between the childhood fear of eye contact—which was seen as a challenge to authority—and the way slaveowners punished their slaves for making eye contact. She says that the child is afraid to look even when told to during a punishment and that "there is power in looking."
When black women specifically gaze at cinema, they create a space to exist, to critique, and to deconstruct the...
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narrative. Doing this creates an oppositional gaze that is the counter to the way black women are dominated in cinema. hooks explains,
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 those looking relations by developing independent black cinema.
She explains that even when black people enjoyed media, they had to look at the representations of black people critically. She also argues that mainstream feminist film criticism doesn't acknowledge "black female spectatorship."
hooks argues that black men have a way to connect with film that women lack because they can relate to male themes in the film that exist across different races. She says that black women lack this same connection and that even when they do appear on screen, they themselves are the object of the male gaze rather than someone in a position of power. She says "even when representations of black women were present in film, our bodies and being were there to serve."
In "The Oppositional Gaze," hooks argues that developing an oppositional gaze is an act of power that will allow black women to create a space for themselves in both film and film theory. Doing so removes the childhood and historical association of the gaze as a bad thing and instead reclaims it as an act of power.