what’s up world telecom here and it’s time for an essay review today we’re doing oppositional gays the black female spectator by bell hooks um this says it came as a part of her essay collection black looks and i think this essay kind of incur are these forces the second reading because of three key things one you kind of have to read it twice to understand clearly what bell hooks means by the oppositional gaze two she doesn’t really clearly explain what she means by the fallacy centric center and when she’s talking about male black males that make movies and then three she kind of assumes that the reader understands what she means by the cinematic construction of white womanhood so hooks starts off the essay talking about the power of the gays or just looking at somebody how you can look at somebody and it can be interpreted as different things and you can do it with different intentions uh you can be political you can be oppositional um you can be insulting and she kind of just explains the the structure of the times when black people and slaves were often punished just for looking at somebody and she uses um emmett till’s story as kind of a centerpiece of that that whole story of a black kid getting puni getting beaten and killed looking at a wet woman and then there being an open casket it’s kind of like the centerpiece of this idea that you know a gays looking at somebody can have other effects than just looking at somebody can be oppositional it can be you can be punished for it um in all times books brings up michel foucault and his ears and his ideas of power that power can kind of present itself in different time periods in different forms but still utilize the same mechanisms to exert dominance the oppositional gaze is a sort of resistance and michelle foucault kind of encourages this um this resistance encourages this opposition really believes that these are these pockets of opportunity to oppose or resist exist in like all forms of life in any situation and it’s he kind of says that it’s up to the oppressors their responsibility to find those pockets and and and to resist the next part that essay bell hooks discusses black men in cinema and uh and black women in cinema i’m saying that black men were able to escape kind of a white supremacist structure within cinema and black women really couldn’t do that and she said black women were not able to do that because men presented black women as objects of a male gaze when she starts talking about black male black male filmmakers presenting black woman in a male gaze i wish bell hooks would have become i would have provided a few more examples or even any examples at all because i wasn’t really sure what time period she was talking about there is parts of the essay where she says that she knows that things kind of kind of evolved but she still wanted to i guess express some thoughts that can span over a many decades over a longer time period but this part where she’s talking about the rise of black cinema i think we would have it would have been useful to add some examples just because especially if you’re thinking of the 90s or you have movie like poetic justice and movies like even like soul food or something like that it’ll be good for us to dig into this idea that black cinema is presenting one black woman um as objects of a male gaze when in some cases that’s not really the in some movies that’s not really the case this is kind of the section of the of the essay where she starts talking about phallocentric power which i think is just another term for male dominance there’s plenty of movies from like has to go the golden age of black cinema that don’t really do anything for women like miss society jews um boys in the hood movies like that not really just about the men like men in urban settings but there’s plenty of movies that i don’t think really objectify women at all like soul food or even poetic justice or even love jones but then again i’m not really sure what time period bell hooks is talking about she refers to movies from the 60s 50s 70s all the way up to the 90s so it got kind of confusing and all these time periods are very different for black cinema i think the last kind of third of the essay really talks about like the usefulness of oppositional gaze why it exists and whether it’s necessary or not the optics from the gaze is really just black women watching film in general and looking past race kind of forgetting race they do that simply so that they are not hurt by the film i don’t think there’s much of an argument in this essay that said that argues the oppositional gays makes things really better for anybody but there’s definitely an argument that the oppositional gauge for black women is necessary just to avoid being hurt and still being able to enjoy a certain enjoy film as an art form at the end are in summary i think this essay is really just saying that watching movies can be harder for black women which i guess is true i think that’s true for everybody i mean it’s probably hard for a white person to watch boondocks i think what would have really helped me in this essay is is i agree with a lot of what bell hooks was saying but i think what would have helped me would have completed this entire essay as one be more specific specific with the with the examples in terms of the movies and the time periods that she’s listening but also i like her to address this i the idea that some people just choose to be hurt by certain things like where does willpower come into play with this because like i said like those movies out there that can really just hurt anybody there’s all types of movies out there i don’t think bell hooks is really concerned about just the run run-of-the-mill moviegoer i think what she’s really concerned about is theory that theory continues to be developed in film um especially like in like black film theory about women i guess feminist film theory um in a time when oppositional gains are still necessary so you have the development of this type of theory um kind of developing different rules and ideas and what like norms within this area of study but oppositional gaze is still necessary for you know a lot of different groups i think that’s where her concern really is is that she doesn’t want there to be any foundational principles i’m gaining too much i guess legitimacy in a time when oppositional gaze um is still necessary for certain groups in order to really appreciate it and also to just like judge it on a scholarly level so yes oppositional gaze um by bell hooks thank you for watching and i’ll see you next time