bell hooks and spectatorial position

In "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators", bell hooks uses a combination of analytical tools to examine the position of the spectator. In her introductory section, hooks connects her own experiences a viewer to the politics of repression, desire, and opposition in THE GAZE: "The 'gaze' has always been political in my life"; "Connecting this strategy of domination [racialized power relations] to that used by grown folks in southern black rural communities where I grew up"

This initial strategy can be read as both intensely subjective and slyly misleading. hooks leads the reader into opposition by making strong claims, and then twists that opposition into a questioning of one's own position as a reader of her text: "Even in the worst circumstances of domination, the ability to manipulate one's gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency."

At this early and critical juncture in the essay, hooks moves from what seems like almost entirely subjective opinion into a more or less traditional review of the previous literature on subjectivity and agency. Compare her parallel construction of oppositional rhetoric and authoritative citations of Foucault, Stuart Hall, and Frantz Fanon with Judith Butler's parallel concepts of "performativity" and "citationality".

By the time hooks has introduced a block quote, she has prepared her reader to identify with her regardless of their own subjective identity, regardless of her uses of the first person (singular or plural) pronouns. "Spaces of agency exist for black people, wherein we can both interrogate the gaze of the Other but also look back, and at one another, naming what we see." (emphasis added)

The terms "critical spectatorship", "black looks", "interrogating gazes", "looking relations", and especially "oppositional" or "resistant" beg the question: against what "dominant" or "dominating" structures do such looks resist?

Remember the Culture Industry, and the Ideological State Apparati? Their most insidious power to dominate came from their constant and consistent (non-)position with which their subjects were IDENTIFIED. The oppositional gaze is against nothing more and nothing less than identification with that which one sees.

To pursue a spatial metaphor, compare this differential space for agency, this grounds-apart on (or in or from or or or) which the oppositional looker establishes their perspective, with the dominant/normative "cinematic context that constructs [black women's] presence as absence", the space where "[t]here was clearly no place for black women."

The oppositional gaze, a resistance against conventional representations of black women, poses an interesting dilemma. Can there be a unity among the various oppositional spectators, a black female spectatorial identity, if such an identity is constructed only by difference from the mainstream? The social/political extension of this dilemma is the uncertainty around a coherent movement, that is, a GOAL to a theory of black women's spectatorship.

hooks's answer to this issue of collective identity/agency is manifold. First, she posits the break to which she alluded to earlier in her essay, via her deployment of childhood memories, between childhood and adulthood, linking the repression of black women's images on screen to repression of memories (eg, of adolescent spectatorship) brought to light by mature, critical reflection. The process of maturation involves, among other things, a movement from idealism to pragmatism. In terms of spectatorship, this is the difference between (or movement between) the ideal spectator and the embodied spectator: after the movie, "we come home to ourselves."

Second, the links between race, gender, and class are so strong that to invoke a position within one category is to imply an invocation of a related position in the others: for example, the invocation of blackness is also the implication of poverty, and the invocation of femininity is also the implication of whiteness (not to mention middle-class-ness). This is why hooks declares, "Mainstream feminist film criticism in no way acknowledges black female spectatorship."

Those who occupy the opposition are linked not necessarily by a common goal, but by the shared experiences of exclusion, repression, and differentiation. What is at stake, socio-politically, in hooks's formulation of the black female spectator, is not a homogeneous and univocal mass counter-culture. Not every identity need suffer from over-identification. Rather, what hooks posits through the oppositional gaze is a position of agency which is NOT determined by identification with either the apparatus or the object of the gaze itself. This is what is meant by "new transgressive possibilities for the formulation of identity".