Bell Hooks - Black Gaze

• Bell Hooks - oppositional gaze -All of these attempts to stop black people from gazing produced an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze.  That is what Bell Hooks’ paper is all about.  The “gaze” has been and is a site of resistance for colonized black people globally.  
• As spectators, black men could look at white womanhood without being murdered or lynched.  In the cinema they could enter an imaginative space of phallocentric power (which Mulvey introduced us to) that mediated racial negation.
• Most of the black women never went to movies expecting to see ‘compelling representations of black femaleness’. Aware of the absence of black womanhood in mass media.
• No positive representations of black women - as white women or female slaves / laughable objects

• Black people always realised that mass-media helped maintain white supremacy by presenting white people as dominance, and black people as a mere negation

• The only way to enjoy cinema is to igore racism and sexism - Kaplan, identify with the white women