Born, Gloria Jean Watkins, theorist bell hooks is an American author, feminist, and social activist. Her pen name, "bell hooks," stands as an honorific for her maternal great-grandmother, Bell Blair Hooks. Over the course of her career, hooks has focused her study and critique on the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. Her cultural critiques move across the fields of history, education, art, mass media, sexuality, and feminism.
bell hooks
(1952 - 2022)
In her book Reel to Real (hooks, 1996), hooks discusses the effect that movies have on any given individual, with specific emphasis on the black female spectator. She argues that, although we know that movies are not real life, "no matter how sophisticated our strategies of critique and intervention, [we] are usually seduced, at least for a time, by the images we see on the screen. They have power over us, and we have no power over them" (hooks, 1996).
In Reel to Real, hooks describes her experiences growing up watching mainstream movies as well as engaging in the media consumption. Through this observation, hooks arrived at her belief that to engage in film was to engage in the negation of black female media representation. hooks contends that this is a problem for the black community because "Representation is the 'hot' issue right now because it's a major realm of power for any system of domination. We keep coming back to the question of representation because identity is always about representation".
Asserting that for her, the "gaze" and its power have always been political, bell hooks explains how she grew curious as to the influence of black parents, from enslavement, on their children. Considering that as a result of black slaves being punished for looking at their white owners, she wondered how much of the behavior had been absorbed and carried on through the generations to shift parenting. As an extension of the behavior, she wondered if the act of controlled and disciplined looking had an effect on film and media spectatorship, as well. In what hooks describes as an "oppositional gaze", she explains the sometimes overwhelming desire to look as more than simply reactionary. hooks considers the 'oppositional gaze' to be an act of rebellion, and holds that the act of looking declares, "Not only will I stare, I want my look to change reality."
MOTIVATIONS / IDEAS
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hooks actively engages culture as a thriving, living force that responds to pressures of race, sex and multiple gender orientations.
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hooks is a black feminist and does not hesitate to approach negotiations and presentations of gender, sexuality, or blackness through issues of intersectionality.
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hooks holds the notion that the oppositional gaze is overtly political.
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hooks primarily uses women as the wielder of the oppositional gaze, though she believes that it also affects the power of the black male.
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The oppositional gaze that hooks directly postulates as a reclamation of power was developed in response to Laura Mulvey's "masculine gaze." The masculine gaze positions white male power and positioning in the act of looking.
RELATED STUDY TERMS
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Critical race theory -- a theoretical framework in the social sciences that uses critical theory to examine society and culture as they relate to categorizations of race, law, and power.
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Intersectionality -- the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.
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Oppositional gaze -- a form of political rebellion and resistance against the repression of black people's right to look and to own what they see as real; In black film, it is through these looking relations that independent black cinema develops.
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Masculine gaze -- the act of depicting the world and women in the visual arts and literature from a masculine and heterosexual point of view, presenting women as objects of male pleasure (See Laura Mulvey).
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Feminist film theory -- a theoretical film criticism derived from feminist politics and feminist theory. Approaches cinema analysis through film element analysis and theoretical underpinnings.
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Black feminist theory -- considers that sexism, class oppression, gender identity and racism are inextricably bound together.