Nobody hates looking at women’s funny character in movies. Something that mulvey well put across. The conditions of watching a move in the cinema gives authority to a voyeuristic spectatorship. All spectators are chirping characters taking pleasure and watching others while they remain unseen. In other fields, feminists have identified voyeurism as violence that is because of gender. The chirping character is most often a man-watching female without her knowledge. Most of the funny erotic scenes, you find a woman fully exposing her body and private parts but never will you find a man doing so. The power of the man’s look reminds the woman about her object status, sexualization, violation and lack of power. Violation according to Kelly, a renowned sociologist, is the continuum of suppression of violence on women from men.
On the cinema screen, the actors may not be the actual victims but the spectator connects the situation where the word woman remains constant. This shows how men get social entitlement sense extension from the films they watch. The entitlement sense however comes with its accompaniment, anxieties. Mulvey using Freudian psychoanalysis argues that the figure by the woman causes problems to the man.
The woman’s lack of a penis poses threat of man’s castration. Although there are no reasons to justify this, the important part is Mulvey’s argument of the threat content cinematically. The woman’s figure according to Mulvey provides means of compensation because she becomes the reason for the men’s gaze and to whom they direct probe, look at, control and contain. This works for both levels of the story, which are the story and the image level. The story level is where question come to the spectators mind about what will happen and the female character will end up. The image level on the other end is the woman’s display, style and fragmentation for male’s pleasure.
Although critics point out other differences that result to the gaze including race, most of Mulvey’s work concentrates on sexual differences in Hollywood cinema. Mulvey helps us understand that for those critics with interests in violence, racial and sexual class inflections support gender norms. There is in no way a male will ever have equal right with the women since they have more power. Women will continue to pose naked on Hollywood’s films and assume it is normal since there is nothing to happen. The movies industry has now turned into pornographic content, where clear warnings display on film advertisement requiring that to be eligible to watch, one must be of certain age.
Mulvey has tried to address the problem. If all female film characters adhered to Mulvey’s advice, men would no longer sit down and look at women act for their own pleasure. Picturing that scenario makes it worse and it would be better if women took the men’s roles and men take the women’s roles. To greater heights, she appears as a sex object and her revealing her naked body to the public seems okay. It is time women changed men’s perceptions about them through living the Mulvey’s legacy. She greatly uses negotiations as a tool for change but the film industry seems too biased already. Many producers look down upon women by the virtue of the fact that they cannot decline any role assigned to them. Be it stripping naked or displaying all their bodies. To some extent, some Hollywood’s films have multiple sex sceneries and suggestive talks.
Not two not one time will you find a man showing off his body, unless muscles which of course they enjoy doing. While creating a film in Hollywood, many producers and directors go for beautiful and good-looking girls. Looks do not deceive they say but they make movies interesting and fascinating. A film without women would appear incomplete to many men as the images meet their expectations and give them pleasure. They find it necessary to put girls on the cover pages so that the films can fully sell. The black female use in the film industry is somehow going out of hands, mulvey says. The use of her images is somehow racism since they hardly use her in good rated business movies. She only appears as a bad girl in the back street films. They completely expose the black race and making every one have a bad impact on the latter.
Hooks analysis of the intersection of race and gender in film
As a result, for Stuart Hall insights, Hooks and other critics bring up many questions about the response of women regarding the visual arts in the modern world, which includes photography and film. The black looks say a lot about race and representation. Basing this on Hook’s argument, critical spectatorship of the black female only comes up when an individual woman resist becoming the subject of looking and knowing or in other words image and story. Their resistance to identifying themselves with settings of gender and race tender for their consumption. Men critic their positive decisions and creates opposite texts and interpretations. This makes the black woman lack freedom to make decisions on her own since her wish means end of career. Hook says that any black woman featured on Hollywood’s films creates either a good image or a bad image to her race.
Some independent films have empowered featured women as cultural product interpreters. Hook pioneered a research field in black women readers of culture that put together the cultural studies and the African American studies. This was possible through the techniques of interviewing and textual interpretation based on criticism. The research’s intentions were to join the two studies and eradicate criticism. After a series of lengthy interviews, she came up with conclusive answers that the black women were not happy with the image instilled on them especially on the interpretations of the press, which contrasted theirs. Her work was difficult and a historical moment is the only thing that helps.
Women interpretive images from the positions they held dominated the constructions of gender and race. Hook paid extra attention to images of gender and race gotten from the gallery and the museum. At the same time, many scholars paid attention to the images intersection depicting gender and race. One of the scholars did examinations on two images totally unrelated. The images were that of the Hottentots women and that of a prostitute. There is no way the two could ever be in the same relationship. Prostitution is a very bad image in the society and no body likes the association.
The whole section is about the black woman’s body that is very attractive and one that cause many to gaze and drool. The body has in several occasions represented many things but all in literature and films. The problematic of gender and race are never evident but when we realize how the media covers the white woman unreasonably to the black woman and man who get very little coverage. The woman and man only get full coverage when showing off their bodies or in sex scenes. The white woman gets almost more than half the coverage in the media. The media is however very biased but it is not by wish but because of demand and the wants of the white man to see and satisfy his pleasure because he has power.
According to hook, it is all about sex and the white woman chooses what to use and the role to play but editors give the black man and woman what to use. The target demographics seem to be white men and women. Images of violence toward the beautiful white woman dominate the horrific movies. However, no horror film is complete without the scenes of bloody body and boobs, all these from the black woman. It is not that the black would want such images on them but their invisibility gives them no choice. Hook is the pioneer ambassador of intersection of race and gender. She uncovered the disadvantages of some feminist groups that were very modern and as a result, she was very courageous against gender and race, which end up bringing gender discrimination and racism. The blacks did not get any attention unlike the middle class white woman who remained the subject for quite some time.
It appears that Hooks meant something important when she made utterances like "Even when representations of black women were present in film, our bodies and being were there to serve-to enhance and maintain white womanhood as object of the phallocentric gaze", 513. Mulvey has the greatest intentions to see to it that she leaves behind a legacy that shows how the black woman should get equal right as to the white woman since they serve the same role.
Hooks however combines this with some possibilities of resistance especially when she says that the black woman has the role in Hollywood films to maintain the morals of the white woman. With this, she explains and says that the black woman plays the sexual parts and her image is sexual. This is a combination to Mulvey’s argument that the black woman reveals her body to attract many men. Since the black woman has no power over Hollywood, she cannot make any choices on what role to play. Racism is evident on sexual imagery in cinema and the only part a white woman appears compromised is when under containment.
Mulvey despises all the producers and Hollywood at large for allowing race and gender dominate the industry while it is the most popular movie industry. She talks of the two factors and topped with power can ruin everything. Any time there is a woman on stage; white men just sit back and expect the best from the black women. Whenever the word black comes and the fact that it is Hollywood everybody knows that, it is the African American woman. There are very many of them because of the slavery and since everybody want to work, going for the film industry becomes a good option for them.
The chirping character according to Mulvey argument is always a man and hiding behind the screen just because they are more powerful is violence in great depths. How Mulvey conducts many interviews with the black women shows her concern for the issue. She says that it is no longer a dream to make appearances on the big cinema screens. On the other hand, Hooks gives an example of how the black woman gains popularity and even became interpreters of gender and race after making an appearance on the individual film. If the same women had made the appearance on Hollywood’s films, they would have appeared like sex objects and victims of gender and race. She also points out the images displayed in the gallery and the museum saying the two had nothing to base their relationship.
Conclusion
Both essays from Mulvey and Hooks are very informative and especially on the current situation where the industry depicts the black woman as a sex tool. It is no longer interesting for women to do the obvious things repeatedly and exposing themselves to rich powerful men just for pleasure. It is very discouraging that even after a fellow woman comes out clearly condemning the situation, the movie directors continue using gender and race as a tool to make money. The have no say and anyone refusing to play the role assigned to her simply spell the end of her career.
During the 19th century, a white woman could not seduce a man since the moral values do not allow them. Such instances went to the black women who had nothing to say. Both Mulvey and Hook support each other’s analysis. Mulvey added the power to Hook’s analysis where power is the root of the black woman posing with bare backs and revealing boobs to powerful men and women in the industry. Hook also adds gender and race to Mulvey’s analysis where the two bring out the black woman as a sex object of pornography. Both of them have done a commendable job fighting for the black race and their legacies live on.
Bibliography
Collins, P.H. 1998. The tie that binds: race, gender, and US violence. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 21 (5).
Mann, S.A. & Kelley, L.R. 1997. Standing at the Crossroads of Modernist Thought: Collins, Smith, and the New Feminist Epistemologies. Gender and Society, 11(4). 391–408.
Mann, S.A & Huffman, D.J. 2005. The Decentering of Second Wave Feminism and the Rise of the Third Wave. Science and Society, 69 (1). 56–91.
