Looking and looking back: bell hooks’ Oppositional Gaze

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Looking and looking backbell hooks
Oppositional Gaze
By Dr. Kay Picart
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Key Terms/Concepts

• The Gaze
• Rupture
• Woman -

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Imitation of LifeDouglas Sirk, 1959
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Responding to the Film

• How is the character of Sarah Jane humiliating,
  strange, and sad?
• How or why does Hollywood cinema have no place
  for the black woman?

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Group Discussion

• For hooks, what does the black female spectator
  need to do while watching a movie - how can she
  develop a critical eye?
• Black women filmmakers like the ones mentioned by
  hooks (Billops, Collins, Dash, Chenzira, Davis)
  have to work outside of the mainstream, outside
  of Hollywood. Why?
• Why is hooks, and eventually her sister, more
  attracted to foreign films than Hollywood
  films?
• Does Hollywood cinema continue to produce films
  that negate or violate the black woman and the
  black female spectator? How does Hollywood handle
  race or racism in general? How about gender?
  Sexuality?
• Hooks concludes that black women spectators must
  see our history as countermemory by looking
  and looking back and using it as a way to know
  the present and invent the future (158-59). Does
  this essay accomplish such a task? How?

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Works Cited

• hooks, bell. The Oppositional Gaze. Feminism
  and Tradition in Aesthetics. Eds. Peggy Zeglin
  Brand and Carolyn Korsmeyer. University Park
  Pennsylvania State UP, 1995. 142-159.
• Imitation of Life. 1959. Dir. Douglas Sirk.
  Universal, 2002.