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.