#oppositional gaze

The chart is about who reads and who does not but also who’s reading what. Women read everything men read *and more* but men don’t - that’s the tweet!

These long-standing sex differences in media consumption struck me viscerally when watching two men do a YT reaction to Revenged Love yesterday. Their commentary reflects male reading and knowledge consumption patterns and how these limit innovative creativity, aspirational depth and empathetic understanding.

Likewise, you can always tell when a BL Director *does not read* by what he thinks constitutes love and even intimacy - even more worryingly he can declare “we’re gay we love sex” and still be celebrated a a queer media auteur. You can tell not only that he doesn’t read but specifically that he doesn’t read WIDELY - philosophy, history, theory, *literary fiction* and therefore his creativity is truncated and shallow because it’s funnelled primarily through a lens of “lived experience”. For more on the limits of lived experience for progressive politics see here:

A Director who declares he doesn’t need feedback from “cis straight women” BL fans has no understanding of how engaging more widely with the world of ideas helps increase human empathy and prevents him from degrading a potentially emancipatory space while increasing the likelihood of him creating speculative fiction that’s progressive, ie constructed in ACTIVE OPPOSITION to the world view of the power-holders in society - men.

Just think of the way straight and queer women’s development of feminist critiques of sex and sexuality gave queer as well as straight men the intellectual tools to challenge heteronormativity and patriarchy, and how this solidarity would’ve been non-existent if they leaned on their own personal identity to reason or construct alternatives to sexual oppression.

Same as when BL fans give opinions or review a BL and concentrate on quantifying the budget, describing the cinematography and CGI but don’t notice the emotional moments highlighted all centre around what’s selectively made *visible* like physical interactions and familiar aesthetics, over what’s purposefully invisiblised - giving sexual expression to reactionary homonormative politics, which is the very point of foregrounding the physical interactions and familiar aesthetics in particularly aggressive ways.

Paris Is Burning reveals the world of the “Children,” as Black gay men and women lovingly call themselves. This documentary examines the community’s flamboyant rituals of balls and voguing. It is not only a celebration of queer culture, but a chronicle of overcoming adversity by being vocally unapologetically yourself.

The overarching theme of Paris is Burning revolves around the influence that Black and Latine queer, trans, and gender non-conforming people had on the ballroom and drag scene. This influence stems from the resilience that these communities had in self-affirmation in the face of opposition from those who wanted to deny them their humanity.

The defiant joy we witness in the ball walkers at so many moments of the film, despite the AIDS pandemic, racism, homophobia, transphobia, pov­erty, homelessness, violence, harassment, addiction, and what­ever other hardships they may have been dealing with at any given time, was infectious in 1990, when the film premiered, and remains so today. In this era of fake news, hate speech, anti-trans legislation, the resurgence of white-supremacist ide­ology, immi­gration blockades, and mass violence to suppress social change and human-rights advancements, Paris Is Burning still provides a vision of vibrant resistance—a fierce proclamation that queer and trans lives matter, now as they did then. That message, along with the unique performance culture and the everyday lives that Paris illuminates for us, made it a global revelation when it was released and has since elevated it to legendary status.

The film is an education: a way into a lifestyle that even many of us who share an identity with the people onscreen otherwise had no access to, because this culture felt—still feels—so specific to a time and place. Which is part of the reason the movie’s legacy remains so complicated. It was directed by a white filmmaker with relative financial and social privilege: a complete outsider to ball culture. It went on to win a prize at Sundance, get a distribution deal with Miramax, and land raves from publications like the New Yorker and the New York Times—all signs, to some, that the movie was intended from the outset to be consumed by white audiences.

At least one star has spoken out against the film over the years. “I love the movie. I watch it more than often, and I don’t agree that it exploits us,” said LaBeija, mother of the House of LaBeija, and one of the documentary’s most memorable storytellers, to the New York Times in 1993. “But I feel betrayed. When Jennie first came, we were at a ball, in our fantasy, and she threw papers at us. We didn’t read them, because we wanted the attention. We loved being filmed. Later, when she did the interviews, she gave us a couple hundred dollars. But she told us that when the film came out, we would be all right. There would be more coming.” The film went on to make $4 million, according to Miramax, and a battle raged between some of the featured performers and the distributor over compensation. In the end, about $55,000 was divided among 13 performers, based on screen time.

Another problem with Livingston’s depiction of the ballroom and drag culture is that it virtually erases the impact that Black queer women and gender nonconforming people had in the scene. Although some were featured in the documentary, such as Octavia St. Laurent, they were relegated to such little screen time that you could’ve blinked and missed them. 

I’m reminded of bell hooks and her works surrounding Black Feminist Theory and oppositional gaze and how this influenced how I consumed this piece of media. The idea that the liberation of Black women would lead to the liberation of all people was something that hooks felt really strongly about and this documentary was an opportunity to not only uplift the LGBTQ+ community, but to uplift Black women. And, as is usually the case, Black women were forgotten. 

Happy to see people re-assessing blanket approval for Directors Boss’ consistent blind spots in his latest production in the clearer, more considered light of day. I don’t think any distortions credited to him are the fault of romance genre, as BL is on record as blazing Transformative new trails in this respect.

I do agree with the as yet not fully-formed green shoots of analysis suggesting this has more to do with capitalism and how ships have to be commodified and profited from later. This is what distorts the ending in capitalist BL producing countries. This ignored factor, not the pair system, is how the real potential of BL gets wasted because emotionally contented, satiated, and fulfilled people don’t exhibit the same spending patterns in the libidinal economy.

However, in terms of romance tropes in storytelling, the whole history of BL emerges because women looked at the problems of intimate relations with men - which are primarily emotional and sexual violations, and from there, something people called toxic but sensible people recognise as women’s everyday reality, they work through a process of visionary imagination with those male characters until they become something suitable for a romantic relationship that they’d like to experience in media. They don’t become perfect men at the end but there is a sense of having re-gained the skills and aptitudes that have beaten out of boys over the course of boyhood that prevents their gender disproportionately from accessing the resources generative of the intimacy(which is not sex) they crave as adults.

There are so many times when we see an adaptation of a BL in Thailand where fans of the original source material say “it was better in the book”. Why? Mostly because the OG women (and a growing minority of men who wanted to challenge and transform “gay reality”) writing it spent a disproportionate amount of time dealing with the emotional interiority of the characters and the Process by which they come to recognise what they’re doing and to Struggle to Change it, or at least be on a path where they’re in full comprehension of what needs to change. In the drive for views this priority often gives way to superficial aesthetics, and or hot visuals, pushing out emotional depth as well as basic storytelling logics.

Furthermore, sometimes when male directors take up the stories, it’s obvious that too often restitution and reparation is not something they personally believe in and they’re not as obsessed with or even minimally invested in moving away from the desirability norms (dominance, hierarchy, valuing of the physical over the emotional; devaluing of femininity) pedestalised by other men in the community or in the wider society, which is the audience they appear to be writing for (not viewers who deliberately eschew mainstream gay media precisely because they’re dissatisfied and want to experience something different).

In reality these things do get accommodated in male dating circles so in most ways Director Boss is indeed accurately depicting what happens in the community in real life but in BL when critics say it’s not based in reality this is really a way to dismiss and reject the often painful character growth that men tend to go through in the original BL source material, that constitutes the departure of BL from mainstream queer media. In that sense, the fact BL doesn’t totally reflect gay reality - in the absolute and elaborate centering of Conflict Resolution elements of the storytelling, is the point!

Women invented this genre not simply to reflect reality, which it does, but primarily to Transcend it. To be clear some writers do this visioning better than others but the universal objective is not to remain within our current social reality but to CONTEST it. The contestation is articulating the heartfelt cry that - as lovers, mothers, sisters and friends of men, if we continue having gender relations as we do now, there is no future for humanity. We only have to look at several Asian countries that are producing BL to see the catastrophic state of gender relations is such that women are restricting interacting with men for friendship, dates, having children or for marriage. This is urgent because status quo threatens the whole of society.

This is happening in the west as well and not only among women but what queer men are going through in their relationships with other men has been given far less social concern. Just listen to the despair of ciz men and trans people talk about their experiences every weekend after Grindr hookups. They too are disillusioned but it is women who are still at the front of passionate initiatives (movements for men and boys’ socialisation are constantly pleading for more men to join as mentors and guides) to elaborate what kinds of radically different relationships we can have with men - as women and girls or as men and boys, not how can we navigate emotional and physical abuse in order to still find a way to be together with our unreconstructed abusers.

Now there are examples of Thai BL creators who have worked through queer intimacy challenges well (Dir New comes to mind as a king of this until his regrettable GMM era), it is not as though they do not exist despite the fact that there are fewer and fewer between in the post Cvd years. However there are undeniable reasons the data would point to, that are responsible for this divergence: the financial needs of the investors behind productions are being prioritised in the storytelling, not the HUMAN NEEDS of those typically interested in consuming it. This is where the reactionary and ultimately disappointing narratives are being inserted -because in the dominant culture they are “sexier”.

Look at the most popular BL adaptation in the world which is a Danmei adaptation. Dangai adaptations that emerge from Danmei, despite censorship - why are these the biggest, most loved and most rewatched, even driving their source material to be the most sought after BLs novels on the planet? I suggest it is because whether they are explicit or not, from Addicted to The Untamed, the characters in question go through a lengthy period of personal growth and in that personal growth they move further and further away from hegemonic masculinity (I think this is the point we miss with this brain-dead, illiterate campaign that comparing countries is to be forbidden). This openness of the male characters to change does more to undermine resistance to the dominant social construction of masculinity and male sexuality, than essentialist fables in our culture that all kinds of men internalise to their disadvantage.

This secret ingredient is called the Female Gaze. In its execution, it transforms both the nature of the couple’s relationship with and between themselves And Their Relationships With Others. The resolution is something that can change society rather than only themselves as individuals.

The female gaze is not something women do but a Form of Politics that can be adopted regardless of sex. The female gaze is why even when a Dangai doesn’t end with the main characters in the same frame, their journey to love as a couple fills the viewer with hope and a TRANSFORMATIVE mental attitude that can persist years later. Trapped is an example of a Dangai that even though adapted in a capitalist environment still actively resisted dominant romance storytelling norms in many ways; their CP is still marketable years later.

What frustrates us so much about the adaptations from some BL producing environments is that as time has gone on we are seeing the move further and further away from the political philosophy of BL while the values of the dominant culture, yes including the damaging values that exist in vulnerable subcultures, have come to supplant the more revolutionary potentials of BL. Meanwhile in China even the government is begging creators to re-impose hegemonic, Male-Gaze aesthetics and behaviours such as Thailand is increasingly doing without any laws forcing them to make CPs almost exclusively reflect hyper-masculine norms. As a result these compromised, self censored BLs from countries Without Acknowledged Censorship are more reflecting and tolerant of, and hence less challenging to, the societal status quo.

Older TBL for instance was largely among those to be experienced as a distinct Queer Reservoir of Optimism but today instead of challenging hierarchies and hegemony we are by and large, left with accepting, valuing and “giving grace” to inherently destructive ways of being - just as they are. I think that is the principal disconnect and despite such seeming high potential the ending of GelBoys proved to be as much a let-down as the general TBL trajectory. To live up to its transformative potential to viewers a BL must be Counter-Hegemonic in resisting even its own dominant cultures and sub-cultures.

The article Oppositional Gaze by Bell Hooks emphasizes on the psychological and sociological effects of white supremacy on framing, racism and feminism. The author has constructed the article in order to explain how the black women’s experience is not revealed or fairly represented in cinema. You can understand a cultures primary and principle ideologies by understanding the funding of the economy, the politics and art. The United States is a capitalistic country where distributions of wealth are divided by the rich and the poor (majority whites and minority blacks). Politics in the United States of America is labeled as a ‘democracy’, but it is truly a country build on slavery, mass production of labor/natural resources and white supremacy. This accounts to the ideologies constructed throughout American history that have influenced the perspective of Americans regarding success, race, and gender. From the perspective of a black American women, Bell Hooks uses her experience and film (a form of art that projects experience) to argue that the Black Women in America is repressed and not being represented in film because she is the complete opposite of a cisgender white male allegedly making the black women and her experiences inferior.

           In the beginning of the article Oppositional Gaze, Hooks defines the Oppositional Gaze theory as a form of oppression, a taboo especially for southerners in America. To gaze or to look at a person’s eyes is statement of equality, power and awareness. She described the black persons experience to look at the white person on film especially before integration as a form of gazing. Film gives the black community an opportunity to see white people express their eurocentrism on screen. Through film the African American visually observes the interaction of white people as a collective. Film is also a form of inviting a large audience into the living room of white homes without being ridiculed or hung for looking at a white person “where in black men were being murdered/lynched for looking at white women hood, where the male gaze was always subject to control and/or punishment by the powerful white man” (p118) white supremacy is seen in early films to defend racism by depicting black men as a sexually driven savage as seen in the film Birth of a Nation, the white men is the hero protecting the innocent white women. Interesting enough through colonial history European men are known to have rapped enslaved women for centuries. Whether or not the men were married they kept the black women as concubines. The enslaved women would give birth to children of mixed race also known as mulatto, mestizo and creole. The white man take history and erases it to continue to oppress ethnicities of non-European decent. The film writer and director Oscar Micheaux’s emphasized on the racism and experience of a black people in his 1920thfilm Within Our Gates, Micheaux addressed the issue of white sexual abuse in a toward black women in America. Micheaux used the art of film to tell the story of African American through the lens of an African American as supposed to a white person playing black face and framing the black experience. Micheaux’s film was a representation of taking power as so did the gaze.

           Hooks mentions in the article that black women have mixed feelings about cinema. A few women she spoke with mentioned being excited about race movies. Why is that? From my understanding of the article Hooks argues that black women are not being represented properly or enough. Films sharing perspectives of the minority groups is either sharing black male or white women lens. White women represented as ideal beauty of America. The framing of the white American experience in films is portrayed to be happy, healthy and wealthy. Black women spectators negate the oppression of the black women’s experience in film in order to enjoy the film because  “From ‘Jump’ black female spectators have gone to films with awareness of the way in which race and racism determined the visual construction of gender” (122) black women are not being represented in sufficiently and it’s a expectation to watch a film and not have a black women play the leading role or share the experience of black women in America, not being able to relate with the white women hood or black male hood. Also considering black women are not populated in the film industry therefore not having their stories properly distributed. For example, Tyler Perry is a black male director and actor that attempts to entertain by illustrating the life of Black Americans in comedy. He throughs on suit and a wig to play the role of and angry black women. He is unable to represent for the black women because he hasn’t experienced the reality of a black women. His gestures of wearing a custom and playing the role of Medea is a term I call “women face” when a man dresses up as a woman to perform as an act of entertainment.

           America is a patriarchal Eurocentric nation that for centuries has used racism and sexism to keep minorities oppressed. Racism can be manifested psychologically by internalizing the concepts formulated by the oppression of society. This affects the black community by manifesting in ideals, self-portrait, films and in mass media. There used to be a brown paper bag test to determine if a woman was worthy of being beautiful or presented on media, film, nightclubs and even musical entertainment. European features are depicted a beautiful, advertisements focus on the white image as successful, intelligent and wealthy. The way a black women perceives herself as beautiful shouldn’t be because mass media advertises or frames the ideal beautiful ‘American Girl’ but because it is taught at home that the color of her skin glisten from the rays of the sun and that every pattern and shape of her hair is as unique as her personality. This article argues that black women are not being represented enough of film. My thoughts go to a time when one of my favorite writers, a black female said “I was debating with myself if I should put a picture of myself on the cover of my book because I didn’t know if it would sell” Here is a confident intelligent women ready to share her knowledge with the world but also very aware of her image and what it represents. Not only are black women being misrepresented in films but in all fields. Considering how stigmatized they are in society, being depicted as ‘welfare queens’ and ‘single baby moms’ although there are black successful women that are bypassed and seen as counter memory.

           During the black negro movement newspapers sought to inform the nationwide political and social circumstances. This is a symbolic movement as African Americans refrained from the oppressor, gazing right in their eyes and taking their power back and demanding to be equal. Women were heavily involved in producing alternative news in places like Mississippi. The increased activity of black women helped promote a more humanistic perspective in the press. The decrease of black press was led by integration because it offered black people opportunities in radio, publications and television. Ida B. Wells  is a great example of a women fighting for representation for the black community and women’s rights for social and political justice. She fought for what she believed in by participating in the Black Women’s Club Movement. Unfortunately, just because she was black it didn’t mean she was fully accepted by all people of color; Black ministers had an issue with her because she was a woman despite her courage, intellect and relatable story to many other African Americans. She continued to fight for women’s rights by joining the suffrage movement in Illinois. I am thankful for the courageous black women that came before me and paved the way for women of color. Social ethics are continuously being questioned because there is always room for change and progress. Social change also comes with understanding diversity and having multiple people of different heritage, gender, race and sexual orientation, show up at the table, look in each others’ eyes and have an intellectual conversation for everyone to be represented accordingly.

Citation:

Both Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” and Bell Hook’s “The Oppositional Gaze: Black female spectators” texts brought up a lot of interesting questions about the relationship between films and its spectators for me. Going to the theatre, buying popcorn and watching a movie may seem like such a mundane practice. While we’re immersed in the storyline of the film, we don’t really question what is shown on-screen. Instead, we are carefully designed to laugh, cry or get angry at particular characters and moments, in a grander scheme of things. We’re boxed into a certain perspective/ lens as a spectator, almost like an offscreen character who watches the story unfold from a distance but who is unable to incite change on the film’s narrative.

Mulvey talks about women as “erotic spectacle” (Mulvey, 835), objects of sexual stimulation that plays to and signifies male desire. There is a unified gaze between the spectator and the male characters in the film as, we, the spectators adopt a male gaze as well. As most films structure the main protagonist with whom the spectator can identify with, we are given the power and satisfying sense of omnipotence that the male protagonist possesses. Mulvey’s argument made me think of the angles, perspectives, and circumstances in which we meet our female counterparts in movies.

One example is the blockbuster Transformers (2007) which frames Mikaela, the lead female character played by Megan Fox, as a vulnerable and hyper-sexualized character. In a particular scene of the movie in which Mikaela checks Sam’s engine, the camera captures Mikaela leaning against the hood of the car with her arms outstretched in a seductive way. The camera then pans to her scantily clad outfit and lingers on her bare skin. In this scene, the spectators share the same male gaze as that of our male protagonist in the movie. The quick close frame shots of Mikaela’s body and that of our male protagonist’s facial expressions and reactions lends us his gaze as we obtain pleasure by looking at her. (Mulvey, 840) Because there is only one perspective at looking at Mikaela, we are not only looking in on this story but also participating in it as we objectify her ourselves. In another scene of the movie, Mikaela is also framed as a damsel in distress as she lies flat, palms on the ground with her head up, reacting to what is above her. These scenes speak volume about the portrayal of women in film and their role in entertaining the spectators. It makes me question the percentage of female characters in the film who are depicted and portrayed as alluring in a way beyond her appearance and sexual appeal. I’ve never thought of myself as a proponent of the “’male gaze”, but endorsing movies like the transformers contributes to the validation of the male gaze.

In respond to movies that propagate gender inequality, movie critics have taken a stand to prove their point with various tests that hold movies and their directors accountable for producing unfair stereotypes and perspectives on women. One such example is the Bechdel Test. To pass the Bechdel test, the movie must have two female characters who both have names and who talk to each other about something other than a man. The purpose of the test is to highlight just how male-dominated cinema is. In recent years, a lot more movies have surpassed the Bechdel Test which sounds promising. But with the rise in popularity the Bechdel Test, it also seems to point to a key question: whether this test is the only one we should consider when looking about the representation of women in film. 

Race, in addition to gender, is also a construct to consider when thinking about representation and the ability to “look.” As Hooks mentioned in her text, there are other intersections of “looking” in addition to gender. Gender is not simply one big lump. Under this category, there are intersections of looking such as race, socioeconomic statuses, identity etc so I was happy to find that women in the film industry expressed their opinions and own take on the Bechdel Test. Most notably, New York Times critic Ava DuVernay, developed the DuVerynay Test which requires “African Americans and other minorities to have fully realized their lives than serve as scenery in white stories.” Amongst other discussions of visual representation, these tests serve as a start for dialogue about diversity, representation and the stories that characters in films hold.

I thought this week’s reading was interesting for a number of reasons; specifically, because as an Asian American female, I fall into a unique intersection of the material covered. When I was in kindergarten, I told my mom that I wanted to have blonde hair, a middle part and blue eyes. I didn’t understand yet that the way I looked was a product of my ethnic background, only that I looked different from what was being portrayed by popular culture and media. Before becoming fully conscious of my own identity, I had already adopted the gaze that many black female spectators had to embrace in order to enjoy their own cinematic experiences; one that Miss Pauline in The Bluest Eye undergoes. As Hooks describes, “To experience pleasure, Miss Pauline sitting in the dark must imagine herself transformed, turned into the white woman portrayed on the screen” (Hooks 121). I had done so without even knowing. 

[Emma Stone casted to play a green-eyed, blonde hair quarter-Chinese, quarter-Native Hawaiian pilot in Aloha]

Because of the lack of representation of Asian women in American cinema, I feel that I have also developed a relationship to the oppositional gaze. While my apporach and relationship with the gaze is quite different than that of black Americans, I think it’s quite interesting to acknowledge that a form still exists despite cultural differences. When Mulvey describes, “the meaning of women is sexual difference [to men, in the context of being a white woman]” (Mulvey 840), I beg the question, ‘...then what does it mean to be a non-white woman? Is that the ultimate difference, subjecting to fetishization?’ As we discussed in class, Far Eastern women are viewed differently than white women, and even black women. Portrayed as everything other than Western culture, Orientalism paints women as submissive, docile and exotic -- falling victim to what Mulvey describes as scopophilia, exhibitionism and voyeurism (Cartwright 122). Looking away remains a form of submission, but one that is expected of Asian women, not something that is imposed upon (which is unique to the experience of black Americans). When I felt most fetishized and exoticized while studying abroad in Rome, Italy, I would look these offenders in the eye to let them know that I was not as weak and docile as they were led to believe. I felt powerful and able to defend myself by simply taking ownership of my own gaze.