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Bell Hooks
In "The Oppositional Gaze," Bell Hooks frames gender in terms of power. Gender is one aspect of social hierarchy, and represents the social construction of power. The act of gazing, looking someone in the eye, or staring, likewise carries important connotations of power. Culturally specific, the norms regarding gazing determine norms related to relational power. Looking intently at someone is construed as brash, confident, and assertive. Therefore, persons with a low social status, such as children, women, and blacks, are told not to stare. Bell Hooks subverts gender and race disparities by owning her gaze.
Hooks also extends the concept of gazing to other forms of visual representations. Gazing has a political dimension, and that dimension can be seen in the rendition of blacks in the white dominant culture. People in power have entitled themselves to represent blacks, and women, as they see fit. Thus, to watch white representations of women of color can be a confrontational gesture with the power to...
Yet more often than not, there is a "violent erasure" of black womanhood" in Hollywood cinema (Hooks 109). Black female bodies are objectified, so that only the white man is privileged enough to "gaze" at it, and therefore to have power over it and possess it. This is what Hooks calls the "phallocentric gaze": the gaze of white male power that coincides with political and social systems.
The oppositional gaze confronts, questions, and subverts the phallocentric gaze. In terms of cinema, the oppositional gaze is rendered when black females take control of their image and representation on screen. It also entails being aware of the role of spectator in the bi-directional process of looking. When individual women of color assume the confrontational gaze, they can shatter the shackles of their own misappropriation. They can challenge the ways black women are depicted, not just literally and overtly, but also in terms of subtext. Even when the world leers and gazes with a sense of power over the…
Another provocative element of hooks' text is the way that she renders whiteness problematic and alien, while the dominant culture has always done this with blackness. The quest to know what is not 'us' and to know the 'other' she implies, is endemic to all societies (hooks 32). Yet the academy has shown scant interest in how blacks perceive whiteness, only how whites perceive blackness. This renders white people and
Film Theory The canonical model of the purely cinematic (Eisenstein, Kracauer, Bazin) starts disappearing in contemporary theory. Most film theorists since the 1970s (Baudry, Wollen, Mulvey, Stam/Shohat, or Jameson, etc.) Explain in different ways how the textual (content and form, the film text itself) and institutional have merged together. Choose two theorists for whom the institutional issues are integrally connected to the textual ones, and explain their insights about reading
Visual Culture Exam Mobilizing Shame For a very long time now, people have perceived shame as a feeling of embarrassment, inadequacy, or the feeling that prevails after someone has done something, which a given society believes is wrong. However, shame can mean something else; it only depends on the perspective it is viewed. Therefore, shame is brining or exposing something to the public, for the public to critic, and allow social transformation.
She believes in a new identity and a new meaning of whiteness and blackness, which transcends the centuries-old restrictive ideas about race. Senna argues that skin-based identity is the shallowest and most hollow form of identity construction since it can be easily fabricated. Identity on the other hand should be more a matter of who you are internally than how you look. It must be based on various affiliations
The brain while expanding pushes the skull outward in the same perpendicular to the closed structure. This will be marked by the occurrence of 'papilledema' 'pseudoproptosis' as also 'optic atrophy.' (39) This results in the orbital socket being smaller and the eyes getting 'protoposed'. The intercranial pressure is bound to be high. The symptoms in such cases will be optic atrophy, head ache and papilledema. Or in the case