The Oppositional Gaze

“slaves were denied their right to gaze” (270).

“power as domination reproduces itself in different locations employing similar apparatuses, strategies, and mechanisms of control” (270).

The “oppositional gaze” is the “overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire” (270).

“the ability to manipulate one’s gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency” (270).

“one learns to look a certain way in order to resist” (271).

“mass media was a system of knowledge and power reproducing and maintaining white supremacy” (271).

“Unless you went to work in the white world, across the tracks, you learned to look at white people by staring at them on the screen” (271).

“Before racial integration, black viewers of movies and television experienced visual pleasure in a context where looking was also about conte station and confrontation” (271).

“In their role as spectators, black men could enter an imaginative space of phallocentric power that mediated racial negation” (272).

But black women are not a part of this phallocentric gaze. They are themselves excluded from critique and resistance.

“white womanhood was the racial idea sexual difference occupying the place of stardom in mainstream narrative film” (275).

Responding to Mulvey: “Black female spectators actively chose not to identify with the film’s imagine subject because such identification was disenabling” (275).

“structuring feminist film theory around a totalizing narrative of woman as object whose image functions solely to reaffirm and reinscribe patriarchy” ignores the question of race (276).

“If identification “demands sameness, necessitates similarity, disallows difference”—must we then surmise that many feminist film critics who are “over-identified” with the mainstream cinematic apparatus produce theories that replicate its totalizing agenda?” (277).

“Identifying with neither be phallocentric gaze nor the construction of white womanhood as lack, critical black female spectators construct a theory of looking relations where cinematic visual delight is the pleasure of interrogation” (278).

Spike Lee’s work “mimics the cinematic construction of white womanhood as object, replacing her body as text on which to write make desire with the black female body. It is transference without transformation” (278).

“Critical black female spectatorship emerges as a site of resistance only when individual black women actively resist the imposition of dominant ways of knowing and looking” (279).

“the power of black women to make films will be threatened and undermined by that white male gaze that seeks to reinscribe the black female body in a narrative of voyeuristic pleasure where the only relevant opposition is male/female, and the only location for the female is as a victim” (280).

“the impact of racism and sexism so over-determine spectatorship—not only what we look at but who we identify with—that viewers who are not black females find it hard to emphasize with the central characters in the movie. They are adrift without a white presence in the film” (281).

“Looking and looking back, black women involve ourselves in the process whereby we see our history as counter-memory, using it as a way to know the present and invent the future” (282).