5.1: "Oppositional Viewership - An Introduction to Study" | J. F. Lindsay

Popular culture and media often speaks to a 'mass' rather than to the particulars of our unique, intersectional identities. Accordingly, the popular is filled with artifacts (television shows, movies, songs, advertisements, etc.) that we love, but may not always be 'about' us, and may even perpetuate false, damaging depictions of us. Our key concept for the week—oppositional viewership—is all about centering alternative ways of approaching mass media, offering strategies for thinking, viewing, and interacting with popular culture ‘against the grain.’

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While one can certainly trace far earlier origination points, we’ll enter the conversation with Laura Mulvey and her seminal 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which introduces the concept of the “male gaze.”

When we’re talking about the gaze, we’re talking about the common definition, like, say, intensely looking at something or someone: the fox gazes at the chicken coop, awaiting the best moment to strike. But we’re also talking about the power dynamics of/behind/within those looks, the larger ‘looking relations,’ the way any given look is informed by a larger social/cultural/political context. For Mulvey, women are overwhelmingly sexualized, trivialized, and objectified in mediated representation. She coined this phenomenon the “male gaze,” a way to put language to women’s frequent sidelining for “to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey 68) in film, while men are granted endless agency.

For a great example of the male gaze, check out this clip from Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. Pay attention to how the camera introduces the various inhabitants of the apartment complex, noticing not only the differences between the treatment of male and female characters, but between the various women specifically (i.e., treatment of stereotypical beauty vs. an ‘old maid’ trope). For a more modern, obvious (and far more crude) example, you’re welcome to check out this Hardee’s ad, which reveals the objectifying gaze quite clearly.

Beyond cinematic enjoyment, the more pressing component to Mulvey’s theorization is that these representations, in turn, affect the larger cultural, social, and political experience of gender across the spectrum, reinforcing patriarchal ideologies through the seductive power of cinema. In order to build a truly liberatory, revelatory cinema, she argues these patriarchal “cinematic codes and their relationship to formal external structures… must be broken down” (68), which begins with critiquing the status quo, calling out sexist depictions, and advocating for ulterior representations.

To learn more about the male gaze (with particular focus on the fashion/advertising industries), check out this brilliant hypertext essay by Thomas Streeter, Nicole Hintlian, Samantha Chipetz, and Susanna Callender.

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Our next stop is bell hooks, who both builds on—and directly counters—Mulvey’s work in her 1992 essay “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators" (1992). For hooks, Mulvey improperly assumes a universality amongst women, failing to realize that differences in categories outside of sex (such as race, class, sexuality) can also impact one's experience of cinema. Reflecting on her experience growing up in the 1970s, hooks writes, “when most black people in the United States first had the opportunity to look at film and television, they did so fully aware that mass media was a system of knowledge and power reproducing and maintaining white supremacy. To stare at the television, or mainstream movies, to engage its images, was to engage its negation of black representation” (463).

In her essay, hooks first discusses the specific relationship to the cinema for both white women and Black men respectively, before then turning to Black women, demonstrating the ways in which these viewers—barred from privilege(s) afforded by both patriarchy and/or white supremacy—are found in a dynamic which makes near-impossible a direct relation to cinema. As she writes, “with the possible exception of early race movies, black female spectators have had to develop looking relations within a cinematic context that constructs our presence as absence, that denies the 'body' of the black female so as to perpetuate white supremacy and with it a phallocentric spectatorship where the woman to be looked at and desired is 'white’” (464).

But hooks is not willing to accept this cinematic exclusion as a given, and strives to find a new route to cinematic pleasure: “When I returned to films as a young woman, after a long period of silence, I had developed an oppositional gaze. 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 for aspects of content, form, language” (466). As neither looker or lookee, located outside the power dynamics depicted in mainstream cinema, hooks found a different kind of relationship: “looking at films with an oppositional gaze, black women were able to critically assess the cinema's construction of white womanhood as object of phallocentric gaze and choose not to identify with either the victim or the perpetrator” (467).

For hooks, “critical black female spectators construct a theory of looking relations where cinematic visual delight is the pleasure of interrogation” (468): the gaze has become oppositional, a “look to change reality” (463), a tool of resistance against the erasure and stereotyping perpetuated by mainstream visual media where one gains power to not only notice and call out damaging depictions, but locate spaces to reinterpret, redefine, and reimagine those representation, as well.

The critical contributions of hooks’ work are wide-ranging, as other marginalized identities found resonance in her perspective and modified the frame to make sense of the ways in which their own mediated depictions served to silence, stereotype, and diminish their actual lived cultural, social, political experiences. To hear a bit more about hooks’ work with the oppositional gaze, I encourage you to check out this short piece featuring narration by Laverne Cox.

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If the male gaze was coined to call out sexist, patriarchal depictions in media, and the oppositional gaze to add an intersectional lens to the pleasure of analysis, then one can understand “queer reading” as a practice of imagination, using these critiques to fuel ulterior reimaginings of any given media.

The practice originates in groundbreaking works like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Between Men and Alexander Doty’s Making Things Perfectly Queer, and encourages viewers to ‘wrongly’ interpret media in ways that subvert heteronormative frameworks. When Elsa belts out “Let It Go” in Frozen, who’s to say it’s not an anthem for her self-acceptance, proudly coming out and ‘letting go’ of what others might think? Why can’t one read Ariel’s journey to live in her ‘authentic body’ in The Little Mermaid as an allegory for gender dysphoria, as experienced by many trans people? When Chad insists to Ryan that he ‘doesn’t dance’ in High School Musical 2, what exactly are we to understand that ‘dancing’ to mean?

For queer readers, our culture—“caught within the spell of heterocentrism (and, for some gay and straight men, sexism)”—“persist[s] in seeing heterosexuality where it ain’t” (Doty 139). In response, the practice looks to showcase that queerness is an inherent, unequivocal part of popular culture, whether intended or not. Queer readings not only challenge traditional narratives of heterosexual desire, identity, and success, but validate the queer experience by shining light on the queerness always lurking right around the bend, in the margins, in the subtext. By identifying these moments of ambiguity, tension, and/or coded queerness, viewers can reclaim media as sites of possibility and resistance. Queer reading, like the oppositional gaze, is an act of defiance and imagination, a way to navigate and transform media spaces that often marginalize non-normative identities.

To see exceptional queer reading at work, I recommend you check out “2 Bi 2 Furious,” video essayist Ben From Canada's wonderfully hilarious and insightful piece on the bisexual love story within Hollywood action staple 2 Fast 2 Furious.

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These frameworks—Mulvey’s male gaze, hooks’ oppositional gaze, and the practice of queer reading—highlight the transformative potential of oppositional viewership: just because media is made to be understood ‘one way’ doesn’t mean that’s the interpretation you have to settle for. By actively resisting dominant perspectives through these strategies of oppositional viewership, one is able to not only critique the media they consume, but also reimagine it in ways that speak to the particular, lived realities of their diverse, intersectional identities and experiences.

Works Cited

Ben From Canada. "2 Bi 2 Furious." YouTube, 2021. [https://www.patreon.com/benfromcanada]

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “The Urgency of Intersectionality.” TED, Nov. 2016

Doty, Alexander. “My Beautiful Wickedness: The Wizard of Oz as Lesbian Fantasy.” Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, edited by Jenkins, McPherson, & Shattuc, Duke University Press, 2002, p. 135–148.

Frozen. Walt Disney Animation Studios, 2013.

Hardee's. "Texas Toast Bacon Cheese Thickburger," 2009.

High School Musical 2. Disney Channel, 2007.

hooks, bell. “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators.” Media Studies: A Reader, edited by Thornham, Bassett, and Marris, Edinburgh University Press, 2000, p. 462–470.

Mulvey, Laura. “‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.’” Feminist Film Theory: A Reader, edited by Sue Thornham, Edinburgh University Press, 1999, p. 58–69.

Rear Window. Paramount Pictures, 1954.

Streeter, Hintlian, Chipetz, & Callender. "This Is Not Sex: A Web Essay on the Male Gaze, Fashion Advertising, and the Pose," 2002.

The Little Mermaid. Walt Disney Pictures, 2023.

 

© J. F. Lindsay, CC BY-NC-SA