The notions of identity much like those of the feminine experience have historically been limited to totalizing categories. These categories had a monolithic effect of the identity of the person being recognized by those categories. The problem is that in today’s world often hailed as the global village categorization is a negative thing when expressed by individuals who are not the other. However, to each other everyone is not us and everyone is the other. The traditional categories of race, gender, ethnicity and age help to build social identity but they also help to single out differences that can be used as means of marginalization by bigger or more powerful social groups. This is often the case of immigrant populations as is clearly depicted in the film Head On. The main protagonist struggles with among other things the complex issues of being an immigrant, having a socially deviant sexuality and being unemployed from a working class family. The thing about identity is that it requires the affirmation of other members of the same community or the recognition of said identity by ‘other’ communities “identities are not simply given, but emerge as complex and conflicted acts of self identification and identification by others” (Noble, 877:2009). The friction arises out of misrecognition either of the self or with the significant others. In the case of Ari, I would say he had an identity crisis especially in the scene where he screams out racial slurs at the other minority group because in that instance he recognizes himself to be part of the larger dominant group instead of what he really is which is a part of the immigrant population. His main problems stem from the inability to reconcile social identity with personal identity.
However, the categories serve as appoint of reference for determining interaction among groups and individuals “These are the ones that frame our everyday perceptions of others” (Noble, 877:2009). The categories however focus too much on the differences instead of the similarities and then the differences become agents of social expulsion. Such differences are seen in the social constructions of masculinity which when faced with a different kind of masculinity become destructive. Examples of this are seen the world over in the vehement opposition to same sex relationships or anything that is not heteronormative. Interesting is the fact that these ‘other’ identities reinforce or serve to uphold the very identities which the dominant or mainstream groups claim to be protecting by quelling all others. The fact is that all societies are comprised of some measure of otherness even if it is not based on typical categories. Others can be vegetarians in a racially hegemonic community or Goths in a mainstream teenage society. Often what happens is that one person becomes the symbol for his or her entire social group and takes on the crimes of the entire group if any “individuals become bearers of collective ethnic identities” (Noble, 878:2009).
The process of making visible those who are different is meant to be seen as a good thing as a means of maintaining cultural heritage in the case of immigrant populations. For the host population it is a window to the rest of the world of broadening of perspectives and understandings of the world through embracing the different groups. In reality however what really happens is either the group is engulfed by the dominant group or expelled “The politics of recognition often assumes that the goal of multiculturalism is to make visible the differences of others in order that we appreciate them. It has also assumed that invisibility is tantamount to social death” (Noble, 883:2009). Again in the film Head On we see that Ari’s denial of his sexuality and desire to distance himself from his migrant identity leaves him in a place where his identity is unknown because he does not identify with what he is and he is not what he wants to be. Earlier this year the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, conceded to the fact that in Germany multicultural integration has failed and as a result of her statement caused neighboring European states such as Slovakia, Britain, the Netherlands and Poland to reconsider the structure of their current immigration policies. Acknowledging the failures of society and the problems that stem from it enables a space for the possibility of social change. The polar opposite is seen in the case of Uganda where the existence of another form of sexuality other than the mainstream heterosexual relations has been dealt with in a manner which is reminiscent of ethnic cleansing. The process of globalization has made issues of masculinity and identity very complex in that the way in which this aspects of individual identity are perceived the world over are now known to all. This creates conflict in areas where maybe the tolerance of social difference would be seen as an imported notion that could mess with the identity of the nation as a whole. However, the identity of the nation as a whole is messed with because they are then condemned for the inability to grant the “other” groups their basic human rights and freedoms as stipulate in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights. It has often been said that the need of sub cultural groups for attention is their undoing in that it draws attention to their difference and instead of making their situation better worsens it by enlarging their capacity for victimization.
Consequently what the negation between the multiple aspects of identity is about is not really even about the people who embody the identities. I feel that more and more identity becomes the means that justifies more tangible ends. Identity would not matter if for example dominant groups didn’t feel as though migrant groups take away jobs or if heterosexual men didn’t feel as though the existence of gay sexual relations didn’t challenge their masculinity. In a world that has become borderless and accessible to all one would think notions of identity would become irrelevant in the face of more pressing issues like world hunger and global warming.
Wednesday, March 16, 2011
Women- What They Watch and What They Do
One of the major complaints women have is that of being seen as objects to be watched knowingly or voyeuristically but always on display. It is a well known and accepted societal norm that women are looked at by men and other women but for varying reasons. Men admire the beauty of women where as women look at the beauty of another in comparison to themselves. The act of women looking at other women in this way does not position the looking and the women doing it as lesbian because of the purpose and intent of the act. Interestingly enough the comparison arises out of the need to look good for the external gaze and hence the performance of maintaining aesthetic appearance reproduces itself not only through men but through women themselves. Females have appropriated the male gaze and in a way regulate themselves with the same tool they vehemently object when used by men.
However, this is not the only instance when women take up the act of looking from men as a study reveals through the consumption of Anime Manga. In this case the gaze is subverted and women are the voyeurs of men or boys in the animated sexual films. The film genre is one where there often is no real story line and the entire thing is just an excuse for the viewing of animated sex. The twist is that the sexual acts are not heterosexual which is why the films are appropriately nick named boy love essentially male same sex intimacy. The films work on the fringes of three societal deviances or ethical principles, the first being that often the characters involved in the sexual acts are children or at least one is under age, secondly it can be viewed as porn and the lastly is that of the same sex sexual intercourse. The predominant consumers of the material are surprisingly Western females so the question is why? Why are non pedophile non lesbian women interested in watching same sex children having sex? It has been theorized as being a subversion of the male voyeuristic gaze and narrows down to the relations of power.
There exist several contradictions in this theory because of the nature of the relationships between the animated protagonists. The first one is that although the romantic or sexual relations are same sex and there is a clear masculine identity in the one character and a clear feminization of the other character. Additionally the masculine character is the dominant character and the one who ‘does’ the sex to the other who has the sex ‘done’ to him. This reflects the heteronormative relations of pursuer seme and pursued uke “It is not merely the unlikely superimposition of a heterosexual model onto a same-sex relationship” (Zanghellini, 285:2009). This statement is contradictory because the uke is given characteristics that are associated with femininity “Display traits traditionally associated with femininity” (Zanghellini, 256:2009). It is said that the film genre arouse as a result of frustration that women felt with conventional romance stories where women were portrayed as weaklings existing purely to be pursued by men. Women wanted to see a female character that was strong and independent. Ironically the only way such a woman could exist was as a male because seemingly women are incapable of existing independently of male strength and perusal “Young female fans feel more able to imagine and depict idealized strong free characters if they are male” (Zanghellini, 279:2009). What does this say about who the female fans are identifying with? To be strong and free they feel you need to be male but at the same time the act of voyeurism is an act of rebellion to male gazing and authority. The same strong free male character they identify with is feminized and is a being that embodies both male and female but is neither. This feeds into Freud’s theory of penis envy, the women envy the freedom and strength that is afforded to men but detest them for imprisoning them in roles of dependency and subordination. At the same time in order to identify with the uke certain characteristics of femininity need to be ascribed to the uke in order for the female fans to identify themselves in the uke. The uke is performing gender bending androgyny in order for the matrix to be successful but that also points to the wider notion that all gender is performed. The other contradiction is that fans of BL claim that what draws them in is the fact that the voyeurism is about them but then the findings show that women watch because the stories semiotic core is about the ideal male lover, which centers the entire practice on the very thing it sought to escape.
The Exhibition: L’Orient des femmes vu par Christian Lacroix is a good example of voyeuristic subjugation of women that BL fans seek to escape. The Orient women exhibition was centered on the dress of the women of those societies. The dress represented them and symbolized femininity. In my opinion the dresses were repetitive which is clear even in the introductory presentation of the exhibit with a dress shaped like a colorful “T”. In fact all the dresses had the same shape the difference being the patterns on the T’s. This to me felt as though the women did not have very much more to them but the dresses. I also thought they had lots of time on their hands because of the intricacy of the designs on the dresses which meant that they did not have much to do in the society as a whole which afforded them this time. It also signified to me the importance of external appearance of women even then. Representations of the women themselves were absent except in the televised films of the society of the time. The film only depicted them in the dresses and head garments dancing and singing reducing them to mere entertainers there to be watched. These kinds of relations are the very ones that BL fans strive to detach themselves from but end up reproducing them in the ways in which they need a relationship to be present between a powerful and powerless individual.
However, this is not the only instance when women take up the act of looking from men as a study reveals through the consumption of Anime Manga. In this case the gaze is subverted and women are the voyeurs of men or boys in the animated sexual films. The film genre is one where there often is no real story line and the entire thing is just an excuse for the viewing of animated sex. The twist is that the sexual acts are not heterosexual which is why the films are appropriately nick named boy love essentially male same sex intimacy. The films work on the fringes of three societal deviances or ethical principles, the first being that often the characters involved in the sexual acts are children or at least one is under age, secondly it can be viewed as porn and the lastly is that of the same sex sexual intercourse. The predominant consumers of the material are surprisingly Western females so the question is why? Why are non pedophile non lesbian women interested in watching same sex children having sex? It has been theorized as being a subversion of the male voyeuristic gaze and narrows down to the relations of power.
There exist several contradictions in this theory because of the nature of the relationships between the animated protagonists. The first one is that although the romantic or sexual relations are same sex and there is a clear masculine identity in the one character and a clear feminization of the other character. Additionally the masculine character is the dominant character and the one who ‘does’ the sex to the other who has the sex ‘done’ to him. This reflects the heteronormative relations of pursuer seme and pursued uke “It is not merely the unlikely superimposition of a heterosexual model onto a same-sex relationship” (Zanghellini, 285:2009). This statement is contradictory because the uke is given characteristics that are associated with femininity “Display traits traditionally associated with femininity” (Zanghellini, 256:2009). It is said that the film genre arouse as a result of frustration that women felt with conventional romance stories where women were portrayed as weaklings existing purely to be pursued by men. Women wanted to see a female character that was strong and independent. Ironically the only way such a woman could exist was as a male because seemingly women are incapable of existing independently of male strength and perusal “Young female fans feel more able to imagine and depict idealized strong free characters if they are male” (Zanghellini, 279:2009). What does this say about who the female fans are identifying with? To be strong and free they feel you need to be male but at the same time the act of voyeurism is an act of rebellion to male gazing and authority. The same strong free male character they identify with is feminized and is a being that embodies both male and female but is neither. This feeds into Freud’s theory of penis envy, the women envy the freedom and strength that is afforded to men but detest them for imprisoning them in roles of dependency and subordination. At the same time in order to identify with the uke certain characteristics of femininity need to be ascribed to the uke in order for the female fans to identify themselves in the uke. The uke is performing gender bending androgyny in order for the matrix to be successful but that also points to the wider notion that all gender is performed. The other contradiction is that fans of BL claim that what draws them in is the fact that the voyeurism is about them but then the findings show that women watch because the stories semiotic core is about the ideal male lover, which centers the entire practice on the very thing it sought to escape.
The Exhibition: L’Orient des femmes vu par Christian Lacroix is a good example of voyeuristic subjugation of women that BL fans seek to escape. The Orient women exhibition was centered on the dress of the women of those societies. The dress represented them and symbolized femininity. In my opinion the dresses were repetitive which is clear even in the introductory presentation of the exhibit with a dress shaped like a colorful “T”. In fact all the dresses had the same shape the difference being the patterns on the T’s. This to me felt as though the women did not have very much more to them but the dresses. I also thought they had lots of time on their hands because of the intricacy of the designs on the dresses which meant that they did not have much to do in the society as a whole which afforded them this time. It also signified to me the importance of external appearance of women even then. Representations of the women themselves were absent except in the televised films of the society of the time. The film only depicted them in the dresses and head garments dancing and singing reducing them to mere entertainers there to be watched. These kinds of relations are the very ones that BL fans strive to detach themselves from but end up reproducing them in the ways in which they need a relationship to be present between a powerful and powerless individual.
Beauty= Girl Power or Consumer Feminism?
In today’s modern world anyone can be omnipresent through the use of satellites and the internet. Hence the ideologies of feminism and gender have permeated most societies and have caused a dialogue about the things that feminism entails. Most notably the discourse has moved from being one of social change and liberation to being something of the past which most people have become desensitized to in what is now referred to as the post feminist era. The supposition is that feminism as a movement has achieved all it set out to in the way of bringing about equality for women and the current struggles for the feminist movement is considered to be complaining for the sake of complaining. Out of the movement there was an emergence of successful women in the same arenas as men which was considered to be proof of the success of the movement. Feminism has become unpopular “By means of the tropes of freedom and choice which are now inextricable connected with the category of ‘young women’, feminism is decisively aged and made to seem redundant” (McRobbie, 255:2004)
However, these notions of success are elusive “Female achievement predicated not on feminism, but on ‘female individualism’” (McRobbie, 258:2004). In addition companies have used this as a strategy to subvert the ostensible progress that feminism provided women by enslaving them to consumerism and once again centralizing the site of feminist power as being purely physical. The new world has reinvented the wheel of commodifying female sexuality by guising it as women being in control of their beauty and being able to convert beauty into a tool of agency for attaining success in a male dominated world. Ironically despite the fact that feminism is said to have brought all these freedoms and leveled the playing field for men and women, it is acknowledged as being a fallacy through the very idea of being able to take control in a male world. This point to the fact that we all know it is still a man’s world and that women still need to prove themselves as equals or compete in it. Feminism drew too much attention to itself and thus has become it’s own undoing in that men in large consumerist corporations have taken the tools of feminism and are using them to reshape their campaigns essentially using feminism to feed into their economies of attention enabling them to maintain their positions of social and financial power. This is illustrated in the Wonderbra commercial “At the same time the advertisement expects to provoke feminist condemnation as a means of generating publicity” (McRobbie, 259:2004). What is the response of women to all of this? Silence, at the risk of seeming complacent because it is better than being perceived as fanatic Women’s Libers (The new female subject is, despite her freedom, called upon to be silent, to withhold critique, to count as a modern sophisticated girl, or indeed this withholding of critique is a condition of her freedom” (McRobbie, 260:2004).
This represents an internal gaze. This is an unlikely possibility because the media teach women how to be beautiful through prescribing and constructing image management. Women are through various mediations as though they have inverted the male gaze and that the performance of aesthetic beauty is for the female self. Female sexuality has become embedded and embroiled in popular culture through the use of the female body as a site of consumerism. Commodity feminism is the term used to describe this phenomenon “the complex and clever assimilation of fragments of feminist /post feminist discourse in social advertising” (Lazar, 507:2007). Such examples of this are clearly seen the Dove Real Beauty adverts where a model comes in for a photo shoot. The model is made up and photographed. Afterwards the photo is then digitally altered so that it fits with what is now considered the standard of beauty. The photo of the model no longer is the model it is a a perfect possibly even different woman in the advert. The tagline reads: no wonder our perception of beauty is distorted. This links to a social responsibility organization called the Dove Self Esteem for Girls Fund. Dove is playing on the fact that what is mediated as true beauty is all fabricated and through the use of their product women can be beautiful naturally as themselves without the aid of technology and make up specialists. However, the underlining point is the same, that left to their own devices women are not beautiful and that beauty is as a result of the use of some product. Thus beauty exists as an object independent of the barer. The advert informs us that the product industry continues to shape perceptions of female bodies and acknowledges the social damage it causes “The incorporation makes critique of the ads harder as the message of consumption is threaded together with voices of social consciousness” (Lazar, 507:2006).
The question then is what has really changed from the days pre-feminism to now in the post feminist era. Feminism was about empowerment and now advertising makes the same argument through presenting products of consumption as agents of empowerment. However the empowerment is based upon the old social norms of women as being objects whose quality related directly to their aesthetic value. The other way in which women overcome inequality is to perform of do masculinity as is the case of Agent Olivia Dunam and agent of the FBI Fringe Division in the popular serial Fringe. She shows no emotion, and always wears a suite (with pants) and flat shoes with hair hair drearily drawn into a neat pony tail. Her appearance makes no effort to do feminine beauty and therefore she is considered serious and is able to be the best agent in the division. Her ability to be like a man makes her a successful woman.
In order for feminism to be considered a real success structures of patriarchal social order would have to change and the existing gender binary would have to provide a space for negotiation where both genders could submit to each other in a mutually beneficial way. The problem with feminism was that it presented a threat to men and the male socio/political order. Feminism emasculated men by presenting the possibility of the erasure of the usefulness of the role of men. Images of women performing as men and essentially do the work traditionally perceived as a man’s work throws the role of men into nebula and hence men perpetuate conditions that maintain the status quo that keeps them in positions of power and reaffirms notions of masculinity.
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However, these notions of success are elusive “Female achievement predicated not on feminism, but on ‘female individualism’” (McRobbie, 258:2004). In addition companies have used this as a strategy to subvert the ostensible progress that feminism provided women by enslaving them to consumerism and once again centralizing the site of feminist power as being purely physical. The new world has reinvented the wheel of commodifying female sexuality by guising it as women being in control of their beauty and being able to convert beauty into a tool of agency for attaining success in a male dominated world. Ironically despite the fact that feminism is said to have brought all these freedoms and leveled the playing field for men and women, it is acknowledged as being a fallacy through the very idea of being able to take control in a male world. This point to the fact that we all know it is still a man’s world and that women still need to prove themselves as equals or compete in it. Feminism drew too much attention to itself and thus has become it’s own undoing in that men in large consumerist corporations have taken the tools of feminism and are using them to reshape their campaigns essentially using feminism to feed into their economies of attention enabling them to maintain their positions of social and financial power. This is illustrated in the Wonderbra commercial “At the same time the advertisement expects to provoke feminist condemnation as a means of generating publicity” (McRobbie, 259:2004). What is the response of women to all of this? Silence, at the risk of seeming complacent because it is better than being perceived as fanatic Women’s Libers (The new female subject is, despite her freedom, called upon to be silent, to withhold critique, to count as a modern sophisticated girl, or indeed this withholding of critique is a condition of her freedom” (McRobbie, 260:2004).
This represents an internal gaze. This is an unlikely possibility because the media teach women how to be beautiful through prescribing and constructing image management. Women are through various mediations as though they have inverted the male gaze and that the performance of aesthetic beauty is for the female self. Female sexuality has become embedded and embroiled in popular culture through the use of the female body as a site of consumerism. Commodity feminism is the term used to describe this phenomenon “the complex and clever assimilation of fragments of feminist /post feminist discourse in social advertising” (Lazar, 507:2007). Such examples of this are clearly seen the Dove Real Beauty adverts where a model comes in for a photo shoot. The model is made up and photographed. Afterwards the photo is then digitally altered so that it fits with what is now considered the standard of beauty. The photo of the model no longer is the model it is a a perfect possibly even different woman in the advert. The tagline reads: no wonder our perception of beauty is distorted. This links to a social responsibility organization called the Dove Self Esteem for Girls Fund. Dove is playing on the fact that what is mediated as true beauty is all fabricated and through the use of their product women can be beautiful naturally as themselves without the aid of technology and make up specialists. However, the underlining point is the same, that left to their own devices women are not beautiful and that beauty is as a result of the use of some product. Thus beauty exists as an object independent of the barer. The advert informs us that the product industry continues to shape perceptions of female bodies and acknowledges the social damage it causes “The incorporation makes critique of the ads harder as the message of consumption is threaded together with voices of social consciousness” (Lazar, 507:2006).
The question then is what has really changed from the days pre-feminism to now in the post feminist era. Feminism was about empowerment and now advertising makes the same argument through presenting products of consumption as agents of empowerment. However the empowerment is based upon the old social norms of women as being objects whose quality related directly to their aesthetic value. The other way in which women overcome inequality is to perform of do masculinity as is the case of Agent Olivia Dunam and agent of the FBI Fringe Division in the popular serial Fringe. She shows no emotion, and always wears a suite (with pants) and flat shoes with hair hair drearily drawn into a neat pony tail. Her appearance makes no effort to do feminine beauty and therefore she is considered serious and is able to be the best agent in the division. Her ability to be like a man makes her a successful woman.
In order for feminism to be considered a real success structures of patriarchal social order would have to change and the existing gender binary would have to provide a space for negotiation where both genders could submit to each other in a mutually beneficial way. The problem with feminism was that it presented a threat to men and the male socio/political order. Feminism emasculated men by presenting the possibility of the erasure of the usefulness of the role of men. Images of women performing as men and essentially do the work traditionally perceived as a man’s work throws the role of men into nebula and hence men perpetuate conditions that maintain the status quo that keeps them in positions of power and reaffirms notions of masculinity.
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Saturday, March 12, 2011
Looks of Colorblindness
Historically films and movies are a form of entertainment easily embraced because of their ability to transport the viewer into the world of the narrative, a form of escapology. The history of film followed much the same path as that of the world in which it was produced in. Movies moved from being dominated by male representations to stories inclusive of women during and after the feminist movement gained salience. Even then movies with and centered around female protagonists were a reproduction or maintenance of the phallocentric norms that existed in society “the function of woman in forming the patriarchal conscious” and “Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier fir the male other” (Mulvey, 746: 1992). Mulvey argues that women were in the films but only as a space for men to fill in the meaning of a woman in a given context, meaning they were present but powerless in that they were not self determinant entities. On account of the fact that cinema focuses on a type of voyeuristic looking, that looking is transferred quite easily to the female form in an erotic way because of how this already exists off camera in the lived world. Therefore women are subjected to being watched for their physical qualities more so than their actual role in the film “In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to- be- looked- at- ness” (Mulvey, 750:1992). Theories around the portrayal and representation of women in cinema have been put forth by many but what is always omitted is the fact that the category ‘women’ is monolithic because they are shaped by the white woman dominant theory. The experience of middle class white women is taken to be the representative for all women.
As a result of being omitted from most narratives and thus denied their right to gaze or recognize themselves and unable to relate or engage to the imagery of white women in film, women of color have developed what Hooks calls the oppositional gaze. She sees the lack of representation as a continuation of the racial subjugation that black people were subject to in the days of slavery “The politics of slavery, of racialized power relations, were such that the slaves were denied their right to gaze” (Hooks, 115: 1992). She further argues that to consume cinematic film with its negation of black women was to accept the notion being put forth that women of color are neither desired nor required to be represented in film. Because film is or was believed to be carried over from real life onto the screen this acceptance would hold true in the real world too. This is constructed around phallocentric spectatorship which I view as a form of soft power, a subliminal means of subjugating women of color. This serves to make the black woman feel inferior, insecure in her outward appearance and feel as though her beauty and womanhood are things that exist in relation to the beauty of the white woman. A good example of this is in the Tyler Perry movie “For Colored Girls” where Whoopi Goldberg the mother of two mixed race girls reveals how her husband “gave” her to a white man because he wanted to have beautiful children. The concept of beauty is in relation to closeness to whiteness and consequently Whoopi Goldberg herself is by her husband’s definition ugly because of her lack of whiteness and therefore has no ability to produce beauty in her offspring.
Even in films a where black women are represented, the women are not portrayed in an appealing manner or even a manner that black female spectators can relate to as seen in the example of Sapphire in the television show ‘Amos & Andy’ “How could we long to be there when our image, visually constructed, was so ugly. We did not long for her. She was not us” (Hooks, 120:1992). The other form of representation of black women was to be the backdrop of and draw more emphasis to the white female characters in the narratives “Even when representations of black women were present in film, our bodies and being were there to serve- to enhance and maintain white womanhood as object of the phallocentric gaze” (Hooks, 119:1992). Interestingly enough the images of black women which were and are considered desirable emulate the images of white women. Good examples of this are Jennifer Bills who is not easily recognizable as black and Oscar award winning actress, Halle Berry. Additionally, characteristics which are typically physical characteristics of white women have come to embody what the characteristics of women as a whole should be as is evident in all the films we see where black leading ladies are dawning Rapunzel like mains and straight figures. These characteristics have become the entertainment industry standards.
Ironically the images that women of color emulate in order to be accepted in film are in themselves fallacious as Julie Burchill points out “What does it say about racial purity, that the best blondes have all been brunettes (Harlow, Monroe, Bardot)? We are not as white as we think” (Hooks, 119:1992). This means that even the new and improved more representative images of the black female should not be something that women of color identify with. However, what they identify with is the ability to be accepted and viewed as desirable even though that is still not them. This further perpetuates the racial subjugation because what it is teaching is that what is and continues to be accepted blackness is as close to white as possible.
Writers and producers like Tyler Perry work to try and change or rather present a more accurate representation of women of color in the multiple forms in which they exist and points it out in the film dialogues, presenting it as humor, as something women of color and the black community at large can laugh at because ultimately the idea that one group of people should try to erase another’s presence is laughable.
As a result of being omitted from most narratives and thus denied their right to gaze or recognize themselves and unable to relate or engage to the imagery of white women in film, women of color have developed what Hooks calls the oppositional gaze. She sees the lack of representation as a continuation of the racial subjugation that black people were subject to in the days of slavery “The politics of slavery, of racialized power relations, were such that the slaves were denied their right to gaze” (Hooks, 115: 1992). She further argues that to consume cinematic film with its negation of black women was to accept the notion being put forth that women of color are neither desired nor required to be represented in film. Because film is or was believed to be carried over from real life onto the screen this acceptance would hold true in the real world too. This is constructed around phallocentric spectatorship which I view as a form of soft power, a subliminal means of subjugating women of color. This serves to make the black woman feel inferior, insecure in her outward appearance and feel as though her beauty and womanhood are things that exist in relation to the beauty of the white woman. A good example of this is in the Tyler Perry movie “For Colored Girls” where Whoopi Goldberg the mother of two mixed race girls reveals how her husband “gave” her to a white man because he wanted to have beautiful children. The concept of beauty is in relation to closeness to whiteness and consequently Whoopi Goldberg herself is by her husband’s definition ugly because of her lack of whiteness and therefore has no ability to produce beauty in her offspring.
Even in films a where black women are represented, the women are not portrayed in an appealing manner or even a manner that black female spectators can relate to as seen in the example of Sapphire in the television show ‘Amos & Andy’ “How could we long to be there when our image, visually constructed, was so ugly. We did not long for her. She was not us” (Hooks, 120:1992). The other form of representation of black women was to be the backdrop of and draw more emphasis to the white female characters in the narratives “Even when representations of black women were present in film, our bodies and being were there to serve- to enhance and maintain white womanhood as object of the phallocentric gaze” (Hooks, 119:1992). Interestingly enough the images of black women which were and are considered desirable emulate the images of white women. Good examples of this are Jennifer Bills who is not easily recognizable as black and Oscar award winning actress, Halle Berry. Additionally, characteristics which are typically physical characteristics of white women have come to embody what the characteristics of women as a whole should be as is evident in all the films we see where black leading ladies are dawning Rapunzel like mains and straight figures. These characteristics have become the entertainment industry standards.
Ironically the images that women of color emulate in order to be accepted in film are in themselves fallacious as Julie Burchill points out “What does it say about racial purity, that the best blondes have all been brunettes (Harlow, Monroe, Bardot)? We are not as white as we think” (Hooks, 119:1992). This means that even the new and improved more representative images of the black female should not be something that women of color identify with. However, what they identify with is the ability to be accepted and viewed as desirable even though that is still not them. This further perpetuates the racial subjugation because what it is teaching is that what is and continues to be accepted blackness is as close to white as possible.
Writers and producers like Tyler Perry work to try and change or rather present a more accurate representation of women of color in the multiple forms in which they exist and points it out in the film dialogues, presenting it as humor, as something women of color and the black community at large can laugh at because ultimately the idea that one group of people should try to erase another’s presence is laughable.
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