Ways of Seeing & Resistance

[Brave] Disney

click above link to watch the movie.

"Men act. Women appear." Unfortunately, this is the overall common message we get from most of what we see in popular culture and by extension, throughout everyday interactions. John Berger was correct in his observations when he said that the social presence of a man and a woman are entirely different and depend on power. “A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping . From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.” Boys and men don't really have this profound anxiety lingering over them all of the time. Since the beginning (or so we have been told), one group has always been in control so the “ideal” viewer or spectator is them, men. As a consequence of this, women have often been portrayed through the filter of a man. This is what the male gaze means. It's 2014 these days and this overwhelmingly inaccurate narrative still can be found and identified all over traditional and popular culture alike.

     Laura Mulvey attempts to break down how and why women appeared the way they did in movies, through psychoanalytic theory and refers to some of Freud's findings. Mainly investigating the correlation of desire and reality with emphasis on camera techniques and its relationship with the audience. Viewing it this way serves as a political weapon because it allows one to figure out how the unconscious of patriarchal society influenced even the very inner workings of film. A 1950's film director named Budd Boetticher said “What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance.” Mulvey notes that “Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.” She explains how the image of women in film has been hijacked and misappropriated and ultimately how these mechanisms are reinforced within society.

     By examining black female spectators specifically, bell hook's piece is the only one which observes more closely the intersection of race and gender but especially highlighting the negation of black female representation in cinema. Because black people (especially black women) were in so many ways left out, they were constantly “on guard” when at the movies. It was there where they could confront and interrogate what was supposedly representations of themselves. From here, came the idea of the oppositional gaze. hooks believes, and I strongly agree, that there is a sort of power in looking. She remembers that because so many slaves were denied the right to look, those experiences resulted in an immense longing and desire to look. Revoking their ability to look kept them powerless. The oppositional gaze is one of the best ways to resist and understand the way the world is, I think. hooks references the French philosopher Foucault, recalling that he “insists on describing domination in terms of 'relations of power' as part of an effort to challenge the assumption that 'power is a system of domination which controls everything and which leaves no room for freedom.' Emphatically adding “there is necessarily the possibility of resistance” in all relations of power and “invites the critical thinker to search those margins, gaps, and locations on and through the body where agency can be found.” hooks also acknowledges how violent and damaging these images were. For black female spectators, looking too deep hurt so turning away or not even participating in looking was “a gesture of resistance, a way to protest, to reject negation.” I also hear and understand her frustration with conventional feminist theorists, who don't even try to discuss or bring up race. This denial clearly contributes to the psychological terrorism that is patriarchy.

“The kind of beauty I want most is the hard-to-get kind that comes from within: strength, courage, dignity.” — Ruby Dee

     As little kids (especially young girls), if you don't have people around you to consistently help you break down these images and messages, it only gets worse as you grow up. Luckily for me, I was always asking questions (to myself) because my family never really talked about these things. The TV and culture was always seen as a destructive force. Being captain of the varsity girls soccer and basketball teams, I never really internalized all the negativity I witnessed around me. Women's rights and where we fit in the world is an overwhelming subject and it still bothers me on a day to day basis. No matter how many different ways or angles I try to consider what's happening, I can not understand why we (human beings, members of different communities, Americans) accept, allow and worst of all, sometimes even justify and defend such cruelty. It seems as though you can get away with almost anything under the banner of "free speech" and making profits or going along with the status quo — something I find incredibly irritating and shameful. Just hearing and finding out what's happening to women across the globe and certainly in our inner circles, is very dispiriting.

An insightful South American girl adopts the oppositional gaze. She's reacting here to Disney princesses (video is in Spanish but you can tell how she feels by how she's saying it). She believes that almost all the Disney princesses are "stupid" because they are waiting to be rescued or are following the guy around and not doing anything on their own, with the exception of the character of Mulan, who she really admires and describes as "very strong." It's true, Mulan is a very good character, the sort we rarely find.

References:
1. Berger, John (1972). Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books
2. Mulvey, Laura (1975 article)  “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism

3. hooks, bell (1992) Black Looks: Race and Representation, Chapter 7 The Oppositional Gaze