Gazes in Battle

     
http://webpages.scu.edu/ftp/kmarume/the%20beauty%20myth.htm

      In Bell Hooks’ Oppositional Gaze, she articulates how the media can force the ‘spectator’ to analyze themselves versus the image being portrayed. Images are sometimes never seen in reality before people see them on television and this concept is a contemporary paradox as well as a historical one based on Hooks’ analysis. Hooks specifies ‘black relations’ as they are displayed in the white dominated media and how the media portrayal can deeply affect the lens through which African Americans view themselves. Hooks’s cites Manthia Diawara’s analysis in which she identifies the people being portrayed as having a choice to identify with the representation. Diawara calls the African American experience ‘subjecthood’ in the context of the adopted qualities that are generated in the consumption of dominant images that inform reality to a certain extent (Hooks 117). This inherently develops into a social pathology in which reality is constantly being avoided.

      There is overflow of escapist tendencies that parallel throughout the human experience as it reproduces hegemonic structures and tyrannical minorities misrepresenting and subordinating entire perspectives. The accepted structure is keeping many mouths silent by not mentioning them at all. Ultimately, the lack of African American representation in the media also formed a sense of social investigation against themselves and against white men. This opposition carries on historically through conceptions of slavery and literary works in which the narrative of the African American was also manipulated in order to adhere to white hegemonic structure that continued to oppress them. White interpretation being the only available images in the media also presented African Americans with the notion to be in opposition to oppression via a powerful public source. Through the creation of independent Black Cinema they produced critical interpretations of themselves to be seen by viewers in addition to the white dominant structured media.

      These conceptions speak volumes on our society’s relationship to media images and the manner in which people are represented. There is less evidence of documenting existence or of preserving self but, the overwhelming need to adhere to what the media says people ‘like you’ look like. The reality is that there is literally a minority representing a majority and the tyranny of majority means that despite our wide acceptance of images that continue to misrepresent us, they still misrepresent us. There is ceaseless promising and suggestions in the media about the way that people should look or feel or carry themselves but I would argue that there have not been enough representations in which oppositional gaze manifests in the preservation of people at their truest state of being. This also refers back to John Berger's fundamental ideas in Ways of Seeing, "A woman's presence expresses her own attitude to herself, and defines what can and cannot be done to her," (46), because the perpetual competition of women on women derives from this idea that they are holding the mirror. It may give women the impression that they have control to view themselves as empowered when, in fact, they are feeding into a pseudo reality that sprung from what advertisers tell men they should be, or the "male gaze".

      Jean Kilbourne speaks on the imposition of the male gaze on the American female experience. Young women specifically, are generating a mass approval of a ‘culturally toxic environment’ in which they actively destroy themselves in order to adhere to images portrayed in the mass media (Kilbourne 130). This is oppositional gaze in action yet its functionality becomes ineffective due to its subjective interpretation which I argue differentiates the female from the parallel of racial subordination faced by African American in white dominated society. One might say that it is an obvious conclusion that females could and have produced media through the functionality of oppositional gaze. Examples are expansive historically as well as contemporarily.  The media is making decisions everyday on how to differentiate a standard that simply cannot apply to everyone. They construct reality of the female experience as it should be, as men believe it should be in subservience to their desires and not always for the benefit or preservation of a women’s best interest. Women can find shows with entire female casts where they construct realties on how to proceed in all social relationships including friendships, families, romantic and especially sexual relationships. If not they can watch shows starring specific females, watch their every move and see how they specifically go about living their life almost like a instruction manual for our own. There are entire television networks dedicated to the viewing pleasures of women.

      Yet, even in these categories there are more discrepancies. For example, historically the media has produced shows catering to the female audience as a narrative around one woman’s experience or main character with many supplementary characters on shows such as  Moesha (1996-2001), Sister, Sister in which there were at least characters in a general plot and narrative that reproduced female subordination through fueling young women’s minds with images that did not parallel what they saw, but now there is an even more severe pandemic arising. Oppositional gaze operates literally to say that if there is a ‘gaze’, that gaze is simply a perspective and as Diawara explains there is a choice and inherently a detachment of self in the realization that what you watch in the media is not necessarily what you see on a daily basis. The issue now is, women don’t want to pretend anymore. They don’t want to watch the better version of themselves on the media they need these qualities to be their own. I would argue that the focus of media is more shifted toward reproducing a reality, but a reality that is founded upon the same structure that demeans women constantly. Shows such as the Bad Girls Club, the Real Housewives, and Mobwives demonstrate women in social contexts of superiority to one another and in opposition to one another as opposed to working to deconstruct conceptions that keep women in competition with one another, in a battle with themselves, and (as usual) insubordinate to the male. This principle of subservience was set up by society in biblical aspects, when mass media just began to peak. Berger incorporates a woman's lack of sense of self as the culprit to her search for perfection and, therefore, her image of relative beauty, "Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves," (47).

      The foundational issue with oppositional gaze, then, comes with the disproportionate amount of images that discourage women and socially pathologize them by the images being reproduced and enjoyed by outlets of mass media. Nonetheless, it might be too much to ask of the media to be based on more of a tangible reality, because then it would lose its ultilitarian service of directing our lifestyle choices. The largest issue to me is that the gaze belongs to the eye of a human being, who if compared to another human being cannot be prioritized as better or worse. This society is obsessed with the reconstruction of self and furthermore the belief that the individual is truly in control of who they are developing into. The subordinates of structures such as the male gaze are in the fight against themselves in their acceptance of these images as standard to live by. The true crime lies in mass media informing the American female that they need to reproduce a structure that does not preserve them, and further more that actively deteriorates their ability to redefine self acceptance.

Bell Hooks: In Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992)

Jean Kilbourne: The More You Subtract , The More You Add Cutting Girls Down to Size

John Berger: Ways of Seeing


http://blog.newsok.com/television/2008/12/30/be-on-the-tyra-banks-show/


http://www.eliteoftheworld.com/elite_detail/115/Oprah-Winfrey/photos_albums