bell hooks’s Oppositional Gaze and Black Feminist Film Production in Brazil

Abstract

At her death, bell hooks left a legacy of theories and ideas through which to interrogate the racialized and gendered contours of power and inequality. While hooks wrote from the context of the United States, her theories resonate throughout the diaspora. She offers us the idea of the oppositional gaze as a space of agency in which Black spectators demand the right to look, interrogate images, and create their own images. By examining Afro-Brazilian cinema, this article builds on the idea of the oppositional gaze to engage my understanding of Black feminist film production. I analyze the considera-tions that the creators of the film Temporada ( “ Long Way Home, ” 2018) employed when rendering their Black woman protagonist. The criticality of the oppositional gaze can include Black filmmakers ’ praxis as they develop layered and dynamic Black characters.