Thoughts on bell hooks

Hooks opens her essay by demonstrating the power of the gaze. During slavery, slaves were almost constantly under the gazes of their white overseers and owners. The gaze was used to keep black slaves in control and in submission. Fearing the punishment that any rebellious behavior would receive, slaves became self-regulating and self-policing, even denouncing other slaves in order to be blameless and advance themselves with their white oppressors. To look a white overseer in the eye was to challenge his authority. But hooks notes that “the slaves had looked,” using their gaze to challenge authority, to resist, to assert their presence (208). On the other hand, Hooks also points out how children are ordered by their parents to look at them while they are being scolded. Here, the children are required to look at and acknowledge the authority of their parents and accept their punishment. To look away is to rebel, to challenge power by denying it. In either respect, the resistance to power is power.

Using these structures, hooks discusses how black females look and are looked at in the cinematic arena. Early in cinema, black females gazed at white women and how they were constructed as objects of desire. As there were no representations of black womanhood, the African-American woman image was compromised. Black women were just as absent in film as they were in the patriarchal society. As film progressed and “branched out,” black female characters appeared but only as carefully constructed characters that served the white supremacy, and black womanhood was forced to deal with this “image.” Acceptable roles were the antebellum nanny characters who pampered rich white girls (Mammy on Gone With the Wind) or the “backdrop, foil” who “soften[ed] images of black men, to make them seem vulnerable, easygoing, funny, and unthreatening to a white audience” and white authority (hooks identifies Sapphire from Amos’n’Andy) (211). Again, the African-American female “presence” was negation, absence. Neither recognizing nor identifying with these roles, most black women chose to “stop looking [as] a gesture of resistance” (212). In refusing to look at their constructed images, black females rebelled against the supremacist system and asserted their own identities but could no longer enjoy movies. Again, they had to compromise. In order to “enjoy” film once more, they had to consciously “not look too deep” and deny their own abilities to critically assess a film and participate in feminist film theory (212).

In “The Oppositional Gaze,” hooks identifies in how black womanhood has been absent from mainstream film. In order to reject negation, black women “absent” themselves from movie-going or only view movies with a “blind” eye. As a result, hooks notes that just as African-American females are absent in film, they are also absent from mainstream feminist film theory and criticism.

New film about Simone de Beauvoir

Johnny Depp and his wife are getting ready to star in a movie about Simone de Beauvoir's life, called My American Lover. You can check out the story here.

Questions to Get You Started

Here is a list of suggested questions (from Literary Criticism: An Intro to Theory and Practice) for a feminist analysis. I thought it might be a useful starting point for anyone who wants to read a part of "I Stand Here Ironing" through a feminist lens. Don't feel like you have to do a comprehensive reading: a section/element of the story will do.

Is the author male or female?

Is the text narrated by a male or female?

What types of roles do women have in the text?

Are the female characters the protagonists or secondary, minor characters?

Do any stereotypical characterizations of women appear?

What are the attitudes toward women held by the male characters?

What is the author's attitude toward women in society?

How does the author's culture influence her/his attitude?

Is feminine imagery used? If so, what is the significance of such imagery?

Do the female characters speak differently from the male characters [Here I might add a consideration of interior dialogue and ask, do the female characters think differently than the male characters. This question isn't to get to an essential difference between the sexes--I promise, Delphy--but to understand per Bartky how power might have become internalized]?

Some questions in relation to our readings in particular:

Does the story present the protagonist's characteristics/temperament/labor role as a result of her biology or are their traces of culture in her speech/thought/work?

How does power work in the world of the novel? Do characters regulate themselves and/or others, and if so, how?

How does the experience of motherhood change the world the protagonist inhabits?

These should get you started! Now I promise to shut up (for a little bit) and let you speak.

Delphy Summary

Christine Delphy, “Rethinking Sex and Gender,” Summary

Delphy argues that the belief that sex is natural and thus comes before gender, which is social, is holding us back.

First Delphy takes us through a history of feminist thought focused on the theme of division/hierarchy. Her point will ultimately be that we treated differences without understanding the way they were positioned with a hierarchy. And we never questioned sex. We always assumed it was the natural given, the primary division or container to which we assigned contents. Instead, Delphy proposes we ask some difficult questions:

Why should sex give rise to any sort of social classification (gender)? Is gender independent of sex? The Presupposition that sex causes gender comes from two assumptions the Delphy works to debunk:

1) The different sexes’ functions of procreation create some kind of division of labor.
a. Delphy argues that these theories never explore how nature creates these divisions of labor and why that division of labor extends beyond procreative practices (since procreative roles is their reason for gender division).
2) Biological sex is destined to receive classifications (gender traits). Human beings need classifications and they need to base these classifications on physical traits.
a. Delphy argues that this school never explains why the physical traits of sex become the means of classification when there are other physical traits just as prominent (things like height or weight, say). She also wonders why physical traits other than sex don’t create dichotomies (two sets of mutually exclusive traits) and don’t determine hierarchal roles. Delphy is returning to her opening distinction between division and hierarchy.
b. Delphy critiques the application of Derrida’s differance to social hierarchies because she argues that social differentiations can be multiple (Here she uses the vegetable example). Since we can no longer say that we necessarily socially organize in two dichotomous categories that have a hierarchy to create meaning, we can no longer argue that gender comes from the nature of social classification.

Thus, Delphy posits her thesis: Gender comes BEFORE sex. Sex marks a social division. It “allows social recognition and identification of those who are dominants and those who are dominated” (63). In other words, hierarchy comes first—dominants and dominated—and society chooses the symbol of the penis and the vagina (sex markers) to explain the hierarchy.

To explain this conclusion, Delphy cites that the various organs and “indicators” involved in sex get reduced to one trait for each, a penis and a vagina (sorry Meg). She asks us to think about all the other physical traits involved in sex. By reducing sex to these two symbols, we create an easy dichotomy.

Delphy argues then that sex—because we reduce it down to two symbols, which itself is a social act—is also social. Thus, we can’t say nature leads to social because they’re both constructs of sorts. “Sex is applied to divisions and distinctions which are social.” The belief in sex as natural is one of the “truths” Delphy asks us to question.

“Very few indeed are happy to contemplate there being simply anatomically sexual differences which are not given any social significance or symbolic value.” In other words, most people still find it unthinkable to imagine a world without sex, even though we’re eager to think of a world without gender or a world where gender traits get all mixed up. We want to keep the sexual divisions for various reasons Delphy cites, but she understands these divisions to be a social act that creates the hierarchy of gender and sex roles. Delphy concludes with a dream: “We do not know what the values, individual personality traits, and culture of a non-hierarchical society would be like… But to imagine it we must think that it is possible” (67). In the end, she sounds a lot like bell hooks.

Hey everybody! This blog is a great idea. I thought I'd throw out the inaugural post which is an article I was reading Monday from Guernica magazine.

Writers, Plain and Simple