The oppositional gaze: black female spectators
Summary
Bell Hooks herself is black, and she introduces the topic to us by sharing
from her own experiences. As a child, she was punished for staring,
because certain looks were seen as confrontational or challenges to
authority. She gives us further background information about how white
slave owners punished enslaved black people for looking. She linked how
this traumatic relationship to the gaze had informed black parenting and
black spectatorship in the modern day. All of these attempts to stop black
people from gazing produced an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious
desire, an oppositional gaze. That is what Bell Hooks’ paper is all about.
The “gaze” has been and is a site of resistance for colonized black people
globally.
When most black people in the United States first had the opportunity to
look at film and television, it was the first time that they could look at white
people without being interrogated. However, watching television at all was
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- Fall '07
- MARTINEZ
- White people
