Bell Hooks 'The Oppositional Gaze'

bell hooks’ examination of black female spectatorship is, as she discusses in the essay ‘The oppositional gaze’, is a comparatively unexplored territory by scholars. She focuses on cinema in its early form as a unique site for a gaze to emerge that opposed the assumed maleness and whiteness of the viewer. Hooks’ main argument stems from the idea that the black women are doubly excluded from the practices of looking as a hierarchical structure continuing to use this in terms of cinema. She argues that the place of black women in the politics of the gaze is subjugated, by their unique location at the intersection between sexism and racism. She argues that the black female as a spectator is a contradictory position as they are not placed within portrayals to even be present as a relatable subject.

The first main point hooks addresses is the idea that the independent black cinema of the time arose from the frustration of black viewers at the nature of the mainstream films of the time to express and reproduce the values of white america. She calls this evolution of independent black cinema as characteristic of a key idea
She argues that the idolisation and eroticisation of the white female body is an unconscious (and sometimes conscious) effort to distance the gap between the image of a ‘normal’ woman and the black woman as the other. The absence of black narrative is a problem in hooks’ eyes, as she points to her experience of viewing black female characters and the way the portrayal of these characters constructed them as unrelatable for the women watching them. In this way she makes the point that mainstream feminist film criticism does not allow and acknowledge the black female as a spectator, just as purely race-related criticisms do not