AAS 275: Midterm Key Terms/Authors

Representation (bell hooks)

Black representation shaped by context of white media; holds oppression in place; beyond good and bad, understand how, why, what, and when; understanding media and creating liberatory media are priorities

Representation (Stuart Hall)

Production of meaning through language

• Reflective – meaning is in the object

• Intentional – the author imbues the meaning

• Constructive – we construct the meaning

Semiotics

Stuart Hall – the “how” of representation and things getting meanings; study of signs and their general role as vehicles of meaning in culture 

Discourse

Stuart Hall – formation of ideas, images, and practices which provides ways of talking about particular topics, social activities, or institutional sites in our society

Misogynoir 

Moya Bailey – co-constructive racialized and sexist violence against Black women, resulting from their interlocking oppression and intersectionality of racial and gender marginalization

Digital Alchemy

Moya Bailey — transforming harmful ideas and material into something that reduces harm through remixing, satire, sarcasm, and other strategies 

Ideology

Stuart Hall – system of ideas and ideals that form a basis of economic or political thought and policy

Hegemony

Stuart Hall – winning consent of other groups in a society to view the world a specific way

Black Feminist Thought (Patricia Hill Collins)

Argues that because Black women are often misrepresented or ignored in research and in higher education, it is necessary to center their experiences, voices, and thoughts when doing research on/with them – standpoint theory

• Structure of U.S. society considered Black women’s knowledge as inaccurate, less than, and inadequate – matrix of domination

Black Feminist Thought (bell hooks)

White women activists have made a critical mistake in feminist organizing by centering their own experiences in articulating the “common oppression” of women

• Argues that middle-class, straight white women centering themselves in feminist discourse left many women on the margins of women’s activism

  • Made the women’s movement an ineffective intervention into the broader issues in society that hurt all people

• Names the system we all live in “white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy”

Black Feminist Epistemology

Patricia Hill Collins: how do we know what we know? How are we producing knowledge?

1. Lived experience matters for knowledge production

2. Dialogue is central to assessing what we know

3. An ethic of caring is necessary for a researcher

4. Personal accountability for the knowledge you create 

5. Black women are legitimate agents of knowledge about their own lives 

Intersectionality (Kimberlé Crenshaw)

An anti-discrimination framework developed to understand how Black women are made invisible/illegible in legal structures. This theory of law is concerned about the complications that occur at the “intersection.” 

Intersectionality (Combahee River Collective)

Freedom and self-determination address all interlocking systems of oppression, which include racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia; emphasized structural change that would free Black women and, therefore, everyone else 

Spectatorship

bell hooks – Black women as critical spectators participate in a broad range of looking relations to contest, resist, critique, revise, interrogate, and invent representations in society

• Passive – spectators don’t have a choice but to accept the filmmakers’ perspective

• Active – spectators may identify, reject, or negotiate identification

Thick Description (Purpose)

Describe an image in enough detail that someone who has never seen the image can understand what the image is

Thick Description (Process)

Describing images in deep, painstaking, rich detail that attends to what is visible in an image

“Other” (Stuart Hall)

Reasons for difference:

• Necessary to meaning (linguistics)

• Meaning can only happen through dialogue (“other” Bakhtin)

• Classification and symbolic order of things in a culture (anthropology)

• Unconscious relations in our psychic life, ungirded by sexuality (psychoanalytic)

“Other” (bell hooks)

Black women are positioned in media as absent or negated subjects, oppositional gaze as a way to counter otherness

Controlling Images

• Patricia Hill Collins

  • Mammy 

  • Matriarch

  • Black Lady

  • Jezebel

  • Welfare Queen

  • Hoochie Mama

  • Sapphire (Angry Black Woman)

Mammy

The faithful, obedient domestic servant who accepts her subordination

Matriarch

Aggressive/unfeminine/emasculates men, failed mammy and “bad” mother figure who rejects submission and servitude 

Black Lady

Represents a modern version of the politics of respectability advanced by the club women, the modern mammy, all-consuming jobs and no time for men

Jezebel

Excessive sexual appetites, deviant sexuality

Welfare Queen

Economic dependency, lots of children, lazy

Hoochie Mama

Modern jezebel, providing sexual favors for money motivated by children’s economic needs

Sapphire (Angry Black Woman)

Rude/loud, “sassy Black friend,” overly aggressive/domineering/emasculating

History of Black Representation in the U.S.

• historic stereotypes created to justify slavery

  • sambo, mammy, jezebel, pickaninny, coon

  • popularized through minstrel shows, advertisements, early films, cartoons, and household items

  • images were tools of social control designed to rationalize and maintain racial inequality and oppression

Oppositional Gaze

bell hooks – a site of resistance for diasporic Black peoples. The power of Black women to assert agency by claiming and cultivating awareness – how one learns to look a certain way in order to resist

Politics of Respectability (Jane Rhodes)

cultural-educational efforts within Black communities, especially via media, to teach “proper” behavior, image, sexual conduct, and public presence to counter negative stereotypes

Politics of Respectability (Patricia Hill Collins)

controlling images (i.e., Black Lady) justify social oppression and constrain Black women’s self-definition by establishing what is respectable in dominant society

Representations of Black Women’s Sexuality (Patricia Hill Collins)

• shaped by racist and sexual ideologies designed to justify oppression

• sexuality is hypervisible or erased through use of controlling images

• resistance through self-definition, sexual autonomy, and collective reimagining of Black womanhood

Representations of Black Women’s Sexuality (bell hooks)

• in black looks, discusses how black women’s sexuality has been distorted, suppressed, and exploited

• insists on power of reclaiming and reshaping representation through oppositional gaze

• studied example of saartje baartman

Representations of Black Women’s Sexuality (Hazel Carby)

• examines how black women’s sexuality has been regulated and represented during their migration into urban spaces in the early 20th century

• southern black women migrating to the north created a sense of moral panic — portayed as sexually deviant, dangerous, in need of control

• representations tied sexuality to labor, class, race, and urban space

Representations of Black Women’s Sexuality (Darlene Clark Hine)

argues that black women’s sexuality cannot be understood without acknowledging the history of sexual violence and the ways the violence shaped their social representation, psychological experiences, and resistance strategies

• history of black women’s sexualization begins in slavery

Dissemblance

Darlene Clark Hine – process by which Black women give the impression of openness to others, while maintaining privacy in order to have sanity and “something for themselves”

• Necessary for safety, especially for Black domestic workers who relied on their employers’ comfort and approval

• Necessary for cultivating an interiority that increased the sense of self-possession and worth

Policing Black Women

Hazel Carby — complex system of social and moral regulation; black women in urban spaces were seen as sexually and socially dangerous leading to institutions working to discipline them; policing sought to suppress their freedom (e.g., ability to move, work, and express sexuality on their own terms)