racial fantasies

white vs black

TV sitcoms in the 1970s depicted racial difference in the U.S. as-– literally—black and white. Other racial minorities (Asian, Hispanic, Indigenous etc. barely featured except in supporting roles or/and derogatory stereotypes)

Black women vs Feminism: were often depicted through oppositional, even anatagonistic representational schemas

why quality vs relevance?

•The 1970s saw a concerted attempt by TV network executives to offer higher  “quality” and more “relevant” programs. They also tried to counteract the long association of TV with “degraded consumerist femininity" (45-6)

•Two related reasons for why the TV industry attempted to remake network television at this time: 1) the impact of feminist and civil rights and black power movements on American society, and 2) new target audience of active, politically aware young white women and people of color. How to make TV shows (and therefore advertising) reach these people? (46-47)

what quality vs relevance?

• Quality TV & Relevance TV

Source– "Quality versus Relevance: Feminism, Race, and the Politics of the Sign in 1970s Television" Kirsten Marthe Lentz

• Quality TV: “associated as it was with feminism and improved images of womanhood, attached this feminism to a self-reflexive critique of the medium of television itself.

• Ex) The Mary Tyler Moore Show

  • Idealistic

  • Gender representative 

  • Much more glamorous and well shot 

  • Offers a gender fantasy 

  • Investment in dismissing feminism (upholds hegemony)

• Relevance TV: “situate race, rather than gender politics, as the central element in their treatments of various controversial themes and topics” (58)

• Ex) All In The Family

  • Realistic - often reflected in how it was shot  (video rather than film)

  • Race representative 

  •  Why is race more authentic and real?

    • Political climate- civil rights movement 

    • Race is distinct, actually reproduces the idea that black people are other 

    • Lentz finds this problematic 

    • Burden of representation 

    • This idea places Blackness in a box, Black people are confined to just representing Blackness soley instead of being representative of things like gender identity.

Mary Tyler Moore show

•Iconography of MTM and its production Co. was  reflective of the moral values associated with white middle-class femininity—48

•MTM show was about  “Enfolding”  feminism into a self-reflexive discourse of TV—49 (TV show about a TV show) 

•“1970s television, far from distancing itself from feminism, adopted a position of proximity to it, using feminist logics to improve its own modes of self-representation” (50) 

•Iconography of its star—Mary Tyler Moore—what type of star was she? (50-1)

• How is the high production quality  of the MTM show related to its presentation of white womanhood? (63--

  • develops a class aesthetic

  • bourgeois

  • upwardly mobile in professionalism

  • tidy and not messy

all in the family

•”In contrast with The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Tandem/TAT’s productions were widely understood to situate race, rather than gender politics, as the central element in their treatments of various controversial themes and topics” (58)

•The emphasis was on “representational realism” and authenticity (58)

•This “authenticity” was produced, paradoxically, by the relatively low-quality production standards of a show like All in the Family, which was shot on videotape rather than film (63-5)

contrasting visuals

•The Mary Tyler Moore Show: shot on film which uses a different lighting technique. Everything is sunnier and brighter creating a “mise-en-scene of bourgeois, upwardly mobile professional life” (63)

•All in the family: videotape makes for a look that is ”visually muddy” and ”tinted in orange and brown.” The characters “blend into the environment” with the set “flat and patently two-dimensional” (64)

•All in the family “was associated with the undervalued term and the MTM show with the valued term in a long series of oppositions: cheap/expensive, videotape/film, illiterate/literate, obvious/subtle, satirical/gentle, and alienating/respectful” (64)

unmixed representation

•Although The Mary Tyler Moore Show and All in the Family “aired together in the same CBS prime-time programming block” (63) they were situated by TV critics and commentators as antagonistic to each other:

•“This battle established and policed the boundary between ’quality’ and ‘relevance’ as well as the boundary between gender and racial representation” (63)

•Anxiety that All in the Family would ‘pollute’ The Mary Tyler Moore Show with race: “But what is at stake is less the possibility of ‘Mary and the black guy’ than the unholy coupling of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and All in the Family, a union that would produce racially ambiguous offspring” (66)

Maude

The dichotomy between quality and relevance TV= opposition of racial and gender politics within “the visual logics of particular shows” (69)

Maude combines the two: it attempts “to represent the project of feminism and a critique of white, liberal racism in tandem” (69)

The show “uses its feminist protagonist to offer a critique of white liberalism” (72)

The show creates an opposition between white feminism vs Black Women and Racial Justice

florida and Maude

•Difference between political rhetoric and the “real world”: Maude’s idea of the backdoor having “racial overtones” “literally makes Florida’s feet hurt” (74)

•Florida’s “more material and experiential knowledge” vs Maude’s artificial and ideological knowledge (74)

•“Maude [the show] uses the differences between Maude and Florida to dichotomize Blackness and feminism” (78)

•

politics of the signifier vs politics of the referent

•Relevance TV (All in the Family, Maude, Good Times)and Quality TV(Mary Tyler Moore Show) provide “two different discursive territories for the representation of race politics and gender politics” (70)

•Relevance TV relies on representational realism: “Images of race and racial struggle were embedded in a politics of the referent, which mobilized a fantasy of unmediated access to the real” (79)

•Quality TV relies on idealization and fantasy: “If racial images mobilized a politics of the referent, feminism on TV in the 1970s mobilized a politics of the signifier: representing feminism meant engaging questions of signification itself” (79)

•“Feminism promoted an exploration of the relationship between a signifier (Maude) and the cluster of concepts that collect around it (woman; whiteness; feminist; liberal racist; television etc” 79)

• Q. Why does TV portray race (and racism) as more authentic and real than gender (and sexism)?

• •Q. What is problematic about viewing Florida as more “real” than Maude?

• •Q. What does whiteness become in these shows? (67)

• •Q. Is the split between “Quality” and “Relevance” TV still playing out in today’s TV?

• Q. Why does TV portray race (and racism) as more authentic and real than gender (and sexism)?

  • problematic

  • affecting the way people view race

  • Race is distinct, actually reproduces the idea that black people are other 

•Q. What is problematic about viewing Florida as more “real” than Maude?

social satire of the white liberal

burden of representation

reduces black people to their struggle

dismisses that Maude is real

reinforces steryotlpes

•Q. What does whiteness become in these shows? (67)

the norm

disappears into the background

•Q. Is the split between “Quality” and “Relevance” TV still playing out in today’s TV?

“quality” and “relevance” have left lasting marks upon both antiracist and feminist political projects

•Q. What does the phrase, “a bit of the Other,” mean? (367 + 372)

•Q. Why do the Yale boys want a bit of the Other? (368-9)

•Q. What is the difference between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation? Does hooks offer any examples of the former?

•Q. Why is eating such a compelling metaphor for cultural appropriation? What do we do when we eat? How does this help us to understand what mass culture does to the “Other”?

•Q. What does the phrase, “a bit of the Other,” mean? (367 + 372)

used to be a sexual term

sexuality is the other that threatens to take over, sexual pleasure altering the subject

a bit of the other becomes the racial alternative to whiteness

is the exploited version of blackness

•Q. Why do the Yale boys want a bit of the Other? (368-9)

to transition them out of innocence

see themselves as non racist

•Q. What is the difference between cultural appreciation and cultural appropriation? Does hooks offer any examples of the former?

awareness and intention, consent

hairspray = appreciation

•Q. Why is eating such a compelling metaphor for cultural appropriation? What do we do when we eat? How does this help us to understand what mass culture does to the “Other”?

gaining sustenance

ripping something apart and using it for your benefit

can be for necessity but also for pleasure

a bit of the other

“Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture” (366)

•How is racial and ethnic difference commodified in mainstream culture?

•To think about racial difference as a commodity is to also think about what the image or object or idea of racial otherness hides from view—what gets eradicated via the “exchange” of the Other? (btm 373)

•How is racial and ethnic difference commodified in mainstream culture?\

• described in a sensational way that makes it more of a spice and sustains white supremacy

• made exotic or real

• not equality bt showing that white is normal and black is not

•To think about racial difference as a commodity is to also think about what the image or object or idea of racial otherness hides from view—what gets eradicated via the “exchange” of the Other? (btm 373)

• the difference that the other inhabits

• complexities of marginalized groups

In this essay, hooks focuses on the consumption and appropriation of racial and ethnic difference in mainstream US culture

She is interested in how racial and ethnic difference becomes commodified and how commodification maintains and regenerates hegemonic white mainstream culture

commodification of blackness

•Mass media (music; fashion; sports; films and TV) commodify blackness

•Commodification =  Blackness as something that can be bought and sold—consumed, used, and exchanged.

•Commodification decontextualizes, it “strips these signs [of black culture] of political integrity and meaning” (375)

•Mass culture creates “communities of consumption” rather than resistance and transformation (376)

cultural appropriation - heart condition

Heart Condition (1990) is a film that “dramatizes a process of ‘eating the other’”

Whiteness is enhanced and regenerated by extracting the vitality and labor of Black people (literally the heart)

“the fantasy, of course, is that this labor will no longer be exacted by domination, but will be given willingly” (374)

Cultural appropriation is also, therefore, about reproducing hegemony (white supremacy)

The film (Heart Condition) dramatizes “a process of ‘eating the Other’ (in ancient religious practices among so called ‘primitive’ people, the heart of a person may be ripped out and eaten so that one can embody that person’s spirit or special characteristics)” (374)

“He says that to eat black food is a way to say, ‘death, I am eating you’ and thereby conquering fear and acknowledging power. White racism, imperialism, and sexist domination prevail by courageous consumption. It is by eating the Other . . . that one asserts power and privilege” (378)

•Imperialist Nostalgia

•Cultural Appropriation

•Tweeds Catalogue

•Imperialist Nostalgia—a “process of yearning for what one has destroyed” (369)

•Cultural Appropriation: consuming the other as a way to feel pleasure and transform yourself (370)

•Tweeds Catalogue—Egypt and Brown and Black people as the background, the landscape, in which whiteness can be “returned to more intently” (372)

fetishization of the young black male

•“It may very well be that living on the edge, so close to the possibility of being ‘exterminated’ (which is how many young black males feel) heightens one’s ability to risk and make one’s pleasure more intense” (377)

•“Hence the overall tendency in our culture to see young black men as both dangerous and desirable” (377)

resistance

Q. What is needed for these cultural forms to become acts of resistance to white hegemony? (btm, 375)

Black nationalism, subcultures and style—hooks refers to breakdancing and rap (377)—are responses to the mass-mediated images of racial and ethnic Otherness that can, in certain moments and conditions of visibility, become forms of resistance to cultural appropriation, even though they might also get “eaten” by mainstream culture (377)

Q. What is needed for these cultural forms to become acts of resistance to white hegemony? (btm, 375)

transcending consumerism

more than just what to buy

analyzing consumption

whiteness and invisibility

“As long as race is something only applied to non-white peoples, as long aswhite people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm. Other people are raced, we are just people” (10)

Q. How do cultural texts (TV shows and films) create the “ ‘(white) point in space from which we tend to identify difference’” (Hazel Carby quoted in Dyer, 11)

The ubiquity of whites = the invisibility of whiteness

Q. How do cultural texts (TV shows and films) create the “ ‘(white) point in space from which we tend to identify difference’” (Hazel Carby quoted in Dyer, 11)

sensationalize blackness and normalize whiteness

white people are just the human race rather than raced

“White people need to learn to see themselves as white, to see their particularity. In other words, whiteness needs to be made strange” (12)

Q. How can we make whiteness strange?

Q. Can you think of examples in the media of whiteness made strange?

Q. In what ways is whiteness being revalidated or re-idealized in our contemporary culture?

“White people need to learn to see themselves as white, to see their particularity. In other words, whiteness needs to be made strange” (12)

Q. How can we make whiteness strange?

dismantle position as invisible

forced visibility

analyzed representation

Q. Can you think of examples in the media of whiteness made strange?

get out

Q. In what ways is whiteness being revalidated or re-idealized in our contemporary culture?

politics and crime only mentioning black race

light technology in movies making white people seem pure

religion being white people allegedly

•How is looking about power? What is dangerous about looking and looking back? (115)

•How is looking about power? What is dangerous about looking and looking back? (115)

•“Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality” (116)

•*The film still on the previous slide is from Julie Dash’s 1991 film, Daughters of the Dust – a film mentioned by hooks at the end of her essay as an example of filmmaking from the perspective of the black female spectator.

critical gaze as misidentification

•“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” (117)

•“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” (118)

•What is the Sapphire caricature?

•How does the young hooks respond to seeing Sapphire Stevens on TV? What about the response of older Black women? (120)

•Image on left is of Ernestine Wade, who played Sapphire Stevens in the Amos ‘n’ Andy Show (1951-53)

•What is the Sapphire caricature?

harsh racist, sexist portrayal of black women as loud, aggressive, and emasculating

nagging, belittling

•How does the young hooks respond to seeing Sapphire Stevens on TV? What about the response of older Black women? (120)

hooks hated it and found her unlikable

older women claimed them as their own

violence of the image

Think about how hooks describes her own evolving relationship to watching television and film (120-1).  Why did watching Imitation of Life make her stop going to the cinema? (121-2)

•Q. How is the oppositional gaze about disidentification? (122)

•"Conventional representations of black women have done violence to the image" (120)

•In response, black women have either “shut out the image” (120) or shut down their critical mind to enjoy the films as “masochistic” viewers (121)

•Think about how hooks describes her own evolving relationship to watching television and film (120-1).  Why did watching Imitation of Life make her stop going to the cinema? (121-2)

profound erasure of black womanhood

women as only servitude

•Q. How is the oppositional gaze about disidentification? (122)

distancing yourself from the identity posed on you

allowing yourself to view the way youre represented critically

not identifying with what youre told to

black female spectator

•Q. How does hooks describe her sister’s (and her own) developing relationship to watching films—which films engaged their ”critical consciousness” and why? (126-7)

•Q. How does hooks describe her sister’s (and her own) developing relationship to watching films—which films engaged their ”critical consciousness” and why? (126-7)

learned to be critical of movies

scrutinize and deconstruct

shes gotta have it, women as center of phallocentric gaze

illusions, challanging stereotypical notions

•“critical black female spectatorship emerges as a site of resistance only when individual black women actively resist the imposition of dominant ways of knowing and looking” (128)

•Julie Dash: “ ‘I make films because I was such a spectator!’ . . . Dash watched mainstream movies over and over againfor the pleasure of deconstructing them” (126)

•Q. Is there such a thing as a black female gaze? (130)

•Q. Is there an interrogating black look in Get Out?•

Q. How does Get Out create an oppositional gaze?

•Q. Is there such a thing as a black female gaze? (130)

black women are denied the right to look

critical gaze

recognition for common struggle for subjectivity

new understanding of complex black identity

•Q. Is there an interrogating black look in Get Out?•

questions the white gaze

force audience to experience the fear of black people

Q. How does Get Out create an oppositional gaze?

center protagonist experience

force audience to experience the white gaze

allows audience to adopt that resistant and critical looking