Theory and Methods Week Seven Discussion
This week in Art Theory and Methods, we read “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female
Spectators” by bell hooks, which details and explains the “oppositional gaze”, what that
means and explains how black women are represented and treated in the media, and how
that affects how black women are able to enjoy or criticize
media. During slavery, white slaveowners would punish black people for looking, whether
back at them or in a way that they perceived was defiant and disobedient. Hooks ties
this into how as children, we are told not to look back defiantly at our parents, and not
to glare or give them a mean look, but when we are punished we are told to look at
them when they are speaking. The oppositional gaze is the defiant gaze, the gaze that
refuses to stay silent, the gaze that looks at the tormentor head on as a way of saying,
“not only will I stare, I want my look to change reality.”(1). Resistance is crucial for change.
The only way to bring about change is to let the world know that you are fed up with the
current situations, and that you will not be silenced by it and shoved into a box in order
to accept the circumstances. The oppositional gaze became a weapon for people who
are oppressed, and as a result, they learned to look at the devices of their oppression
with critical eyes. The author ties this into mass media, where mass media was a tool
used to continue to execute its negation of black representation, all while maintaining
white supremacy. This led to black people being required to be critical of the media
that dehumanized and degraded them in order to enjoy it if they at all could.
How can one relate to a piece of media that dehumanizes and degrades their
culture? This was true of black women as well, who had more intersectionalities being
black and being a woman that integrated more discrimination against them on the big
screen. Black women were sexualized, degraded, and stereotyped within cinema. Black
women in media were used to make the white women more attractive, more desirable,
or they were used to be the villain, and be the person to blame everything on. Within the
article, hooks says, “black female spectators have had to develop looking relations within
a cinematic context that constructs our presence 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."(2) Black women had to completely
remove themselves from how they were portrayed on screen, unable to relate and connect
with the characters that were meant to represent them as they represented them in a
harmful, derogatory way, and in a way that only perpetuated white supremacy and white
centralized beauty standards.
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In the movie Fantasia, in the segment within the movie
called, “The Pastoral Symphony” that was released in theaters in 1940, it depicts
a black centaur named Sunflower with racist features waiting on different
centaurs who are modeled with white eurocentric beauty standards. Later,
Sunflower is seen waiting on the king. This is blatantly racist, and exceedingly harmful by
perpetuating degrading and dehumanizing stereotypes against black women. Later within
the movie, two black centaurs with the legs of zebras are seen alongside the king waiting
on him as well, and these centaurs are more mature and sexualized. This further is
harmful because again, it is degrading and contributing to stereotypes against black women.
Since its release, the scenes depicting the smaller black centaurs have been removed and
edited, but the centaurs waiting on the king remain. Mass media today has gotten better in terms
of appropriate and helpful black representation, but there is still a long ways to go.
Sources:
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