Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance

Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance by bell hooks

Commodification of Otherness

• Mass culture promotes the idea of pleasure in racial difference.

• Ethnicity is commodified as a spice to enrich mainstream white culture.

• Media transgresses cultural taboos by presenting difference, moving away from white supremacist ideals.

• This reflects a postmodern revival of interest in the "primitive".

• Desires for the "primitive" can be exploited to maintain the status quo of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.

Desire and the Other

• Exploring how desire for the Other is expressed and manipulated is critical.

• Contemporary slang equates sexual encounter with "getting 'a bit of the Other.'"

• Commodity culture exploits ideas about race, gender, and sexual desire.

• Transgressing racial boundaries sexually is seen as a way to counter the constraints of fixed identity.

• Difference seduces because the mainstream enforces sameness.

Seduction of Difference

• Seeking the Other doesn't require relinquishing one's mainstream position.

• Race and ethnicity are commodified for pleasure, allowing dominant groups to assert power.

• Young white males view sexual encounters with non-white females as a ritual of transcendence.

• The Other's body is seen as existing to serve white male desires and transformation.

Critique of Inter-racial Desire

• White males claim the colored Other instrumentally to reconstruct the masculine norm.

• Openly desiring the Other is seen as a break from a white supremacist past.

• These men view themselves as non-racist, seeking change through intimacy with dark Others.

• The desire for contact is seen as a progressive change, aiming for greater pleasure in difference.

Politics of Racial Domination

• Simply expressing desire doesn't eradicate racial domination.

• Mutual recognition of racism is necessary for genuine encounters.

• The reality of white supremacy problematizes the desire of white people for contact with the Other.

• This reality is often masked in mass culture representations.