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bell-hooks-03

bell hooks – feminist theory.

What is it?

bell hooks believes that white, male, upper class people control the media industries and their values and beliefs are the ones that we see in the vast majority of media products.

This means that people who are not white, male and upper class will not see their values in media products and means that whole groups of people and their values can be misrepresented or ignored.

It can also create prejudice and discrimination towards these groups. In particular, bell hooks believes that black women are seen as the lowest status in media representations because of their ethnicity and gender – a combination of misogyny and racism – which comes from historical racism, such as the slave trade, which has never gone away.

What’s the advanced version?

Feminism is a movement to end patriarchy (a society ran by men for men): sexism, sexist exploitation, and oppression.

hooks (intentionally lower-case) explains that ‘intersectionality’ refers to the intersections of gender, race, class and sexuality to create a ‘white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’, whose ideologies dominate media representations.

She argues that black women should develop an ‘oppositional gaze’ that refuses to identify with characters – the ‘gaze’ is political for black Americans, as slaves were punished for looking at their white owners.

In “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators”, hooks gives the rubric that black woman are not only underrepresented in film, but they are also not allowed to ‘look’ either. Looking implores a sense of power that is removed from the black female body, to play the role of object in direct relation to white female existence.

The oppositional gaze serves as “a gesture of resistance” to not only the male gaze (see Laura Mulvey) but also toward the oppression of minorities through cinema by the all-inclusive gendering of woman. This gaze criticizes the doubling effect of objectification by “turning away [as] one way to protest, to reject negation”.

Where can I use it?

bell hooks’ theory can be used when exploring representations of gender and ethnicity, especially black women. It can also reveal the ideologies and viewpoints of producers, such as newspapers – especially when bias exists – which is more common in right wing products.