Gazing is the New Universal Language

The Phallocentric Gaze 

The Phallocentric Gaze permits
the gazer to treat the subject
how the gazer sees fit.

They say music is the universal language, but gazing may be the new universal language. In the process of creating today’s mass media, especially in cinema, it is often the Phallocentric Gaze that is taken into consideration, but never the Oppositional Gaze. The Phallocentric Gaze is the “traditional exhibitionist [look in which] women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact” often at the expense of interrupting the narrative of the art and for black and white male eyes only (Mulvey, 837). This look permits the gazer to treat the subject how the gazer sees fit. This predetermination of treatment simply from gazing goes as far back to story of Adam and Eve: “and when the woman saw that the tree was good...a delight to the eyes...she took of the fruit thereof and did eat” (Berger, 47). In this quote, Eve ate the fruit because it aroused her visually. 

Who Controls the Gaze?

The problem with the power of looking is that although it is controlled by the spectator, it is also controlled by outside forces. In the case of cinema, the director controls the camera angles, colors, and moods for the moviegoer to experience. For example, “Hitchcock’s skillful use of identification processes and liberal use of subjective camera from the point of view of the male protagonist draw the spectators deeply into his position, mak[e] them share his uneasy gaze” (Mulvey,841). This means that moviegoers view films from forced perspectives, most often the perspective of the male protagonist. If we go further back in history, there is more evidence of one’s gaze being controlled by a more socially powerful other. In this case of racism, “white supremacist structure...murdered Emmett Till after interpreting his look (at white womanhood) as rape (Hooks, O.G, 118). Here, Till owned and controlled his gaze, but because our culture is dominated by the recognition of the Phallocentric Gaze, the white supremacist interprets this gaze as Till owning and controlling the white woman he gazed at, thereby punishing Till for gazing. 

The Oppositional Gaze Emerges as a Resistance Language  

When movies focus so much on the Phallocentric Gaze, the conversation of black female representation is ignored, or looked away. Black women resist this "missing truth" through the act of gazing at the movie that they are left out of, and by gazing they are given the agency to construct a new language- a new looking relation. Rather than taking on a “Phallocentric Gaze of desire and possession”(Hooks, O.G, 122) unto themselves, black women created their own “theory of looking relations where cinematic visual delight is the pleasure of interrogation" (Hooks, O.G, 126)- the Oppositional Gaze. The Oppositional Gaze is a result of black women not being able to identify within the language constraints of the Phallocentric Gaze, contraints "built into what that language constitutes as the imaginable domain of gender" (Butler, 12). Additionally, "attempts to repress black people’s right to gaze had produced in [black women] an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an Oppositional Gaze. The ability to manipulate one’s gaze in the face of structures of domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency. The “gaze” has been and is a site of resistance...one learns to look a certain way to resist  (Hooks, O.G, 116). Resistance, which is performed through the Oppositional Gaze, creates conversation. Ergo the act of gazing is in and of itself a language - one that can communicate resistance.

What Took So Long?

Knowing that looking is a language that leads to conversation, why is it that even though women have been “surveying their own femininity” for years  (Berger, 63), feminism is a fairly recent topic of discussion? According to Hooks and Berger, one reason is that people have been taught since an early age not to resist strict gender roles, so we think it’s as normal as eating and breathing. Hooks claims that “we are afraid to talk about ourselves as spectators because we have been so abused by ‘the gaze’” (O.G, 125). Not only have we been abused by the gaze, we have also been taught that resisting the abuse is worse. Another factor that has delayed the topic of feminism is the lack of space for conversation. Gradually, the advent of cinema has helped women, especially black women, create a space for sharing their Oppositional Gaze. “Black female critical thinkers concerned with creating space for the construction of radical black female subjectivity…, identifies the terrain of Hollywood cinema was a space of knowledge production that has enormous power” (Hooks, O.G, 128-9). This power, which comes from it's dominance of imagery and gazing a particular direction, allows resistance through the unrecognized Oppositional Gaze, and so a space is created for conversation for black female spectators- a conversation that started with a gaze.

More Looking Relations

According to Butler, looking changes reality, sends a message, identifies. According to Hooks looking documents, resists whether you are looking at or away from the subject you are resisting, engages in representation, both controlling and controlled, deconstructs the subject, recognizes, can be a caring gesture of affirmation, transmits messages of shame (U.P, 22), reinforces solidarity, and opens up the possibility of agency. To Berger, it is difficult to avoid, pleasurable, determines how a man will treat a woman, promotes awareness, deliberately directed. According to Mulvey, looking destroys pleasure and beauty), is a source of pleasure (835) constitutes the ego and predates language for a child (836), and built by cinema.

Like Hooks, I can create my own language 
by creating a new looking relation.

For me, I will try to “see film ‘not as a second-order mirror held up to reflect what already exists, but as a form of representation which is able to constitute us as new kinds of subjects, and thereby enable us to discover who we are” (Hooks, O.G, 131). The following quote by Hooks is what should become the fundamental reference of my critiquing of media that I consume: “Not only would I not be hurt by the absence of black female presence, or the insertion of violating representation, I interrogated the work, cultivated a way to look past race and gender…”(O.G, 122). In other words, like Hooks, I can create my own language by creating a new looking relation.

Works Cited

 

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting, 1973. 36-64. Print.

Butler, Judith. "Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire." Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990. 12-13. Print.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism “ Introductory Readings. Eds. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. New York: Oxford UP, 1999: 833-44.

Hooks, Bell. "Oppositional Gaze, The." Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston, MA: South End, 1992. 115-31. Print.

Hooks, Bell. "Understanding Patriarchy." The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York: Atria, 2004. 17-33. Print.