Developing an Oppositional Gaze: Learning to Look with bell hooks

Abstract

Over coffee with a friend recently, we compared notes on how graduate students currently engage with cultural studies literature and popular media in seminar courses. He shared a particularly challenging discussion on the politics of representation, where Beyonc e became a key example. One student immediately responded, “Beyonc e is offlimits!” I remember laughing in the moment as I considered how students in my courses also felt protective of their favorite subjects of fandom. Conversely, I am also intimately aware of how easily the classroom becomes a space where “everything is trash” or irredeemable in the supposed service of intellectual inquiry. I later reflected on that conversation and considered how bell hooks might have responded to that student’s exclamation. Given hooks’s own dissection of the pop culture icon, I doubt anyone would have left the classroom seeing ’Yonc e the same way. I first thought of hooks’s piece in The Guardian where she considers how Beyonc e’s album Lemonade “offers viewers a visual extravaganza—a display of black female bodies that transgresses all boundaries. It’s all about the body, and the body as commodity. This is certainly not radical or revolutionary. From slavery to the present day, black female bodies, clothed and unclothed, have been bought and sold” (hooks, 2016, para. 5). Here, the “visual extravaganza” hooks describes breaks boundaries yet replicates the historical commodification of Black female flesh. This, she argues, dilutes the revolutionary potential of the work. Later in the article, hooks describes how the visual album “[constructs] a powerfully symbolic black female sisterhood that resists invisibility, that refuses to be silent. This in and of itself is no small feat—it shifts the gaze of white mainstream culture. It challenges us all to look anew, to radically revision how we see the black female body” (hooks, 2016, para. 8). Gazing. Looking. Seeing. Revisioning. Even as she laments the limits of representation in Lemonade, hooks acknowledges the uneasy task of choosing to be seen, of moving beyond a mere glance or oppressive gaze. This, perhaps, is the greatest gift bestowed upon communication scholars who engage with hooks’s body of work: learning to look. She consistently avoided flattened interpretations and leaned into the complications of what she saw across various platforms. Developing an oppositional gaze, she argues,