In her 1992 essay “The Oppositional Gaze,” bell hooks examines classical cinema’s “negation” of the black female subject (686), arguing that intersections of racial and gender oppression set the black female spectator’s experience apart from the black male spectator, who can assume the “phallocentric gaze” and (within the context of the theater) resist a system of white supremacy[1] invested in guarding “White womanhood” (683).
Foucault’s theory of discipline and Mulvey’s work on the gaze are instrumental to this portion of her argument, as she begins her analysis of black spectatorship by noting the white slaveholder’s injunction against the black gaze – the recognition that looking constitutes an act of resistance. In his discussion of the panopticon and spectatorship, Foucault locates power both externally and within the subject, arguing that “in all relations of power ‘there is necessarily the possibility of resistance,’” and enjoining the reader to “search those margins, gaps, locations on and through the body, where agency can be found” (682). Thus, the act of gazing confers power, as it allows the viewer to exercise agency and engages the viewed in a process of self-surveillance. For hooks, the act of “look[ing] back” – of reversing the direction of the gaze – provides this “possibility of resistance” (682).
Mulvey’s work in addressing the gender dynamics of the disciplinary gaze gestures toward this “possibility of resistance,” but like much other feminist criticism, it does not recognize race as integral to representations of gender in cinema. For hooks, Mulvey charts a viewing experience ending at the point of “disaffectation” that the black female spectator assumes from the beginning (689).
hooks answers Foucault’s invitation and conventional feminism’s failure to recognize the black female subject with “critical spectatorship,” an analytical framework interrogating cinema that occludes the black female spectator (684). In this way, “critical spectatorship” not only opposes the “White male gaze that seeks to reinscribe the Black female body in a narrative of voyeuristic pleasure” (692), but also resists a mainstream feminist narrative that only recognizes the female subject as white. Thus, the critical spectator resists both the “phallocentric gaze” and “the construction of White womanhood as lack” (689-90), imagining “alternative[s]” to this conventional cinematic model (691). hooks’ alternative is a hermeneutic that “[creates] space for the construction of radical Black female subjectivity” (692), and her examples of this subject formation focus upon pairs of women engaging in acts of “mirrored recognition” and “affirmation” (692-93).[2]
Since these examples emphasize subject formation in the context of pair relationships, Tangerine’s final scene seems especially relevant to the hermeneutic outlined in “The Oppositional Gaze.” (We might therefore consider whether hooks’ essay addresses the cisgender subject or whether it also addresses the transgender subject.) This scene (1:24:16) highlights the film’s main pair relationship, excluding the passers-by that occupy many of the earlier street shots. Sin-Dee and Alexandra’s mutual gaze seems to constitute an instance of “mirrored recognition” and “affirmation” – the audience momentarily distanced from the scene with a brief shot from outside the coin laundry. Their gazes, as well as the exchange of the wig, not only signal the primacy of their friendship within the film, but also represent “recognition of their common struggle for subjectivity” (292).
[1] In the 1992 version of this article, hooks capitalizes the terms “Black” and “White,” but later versions of this essay render these terms in lowercase. I follow the later convention within my own analysis of the 1992 version, but the difference warrants further discussion.
[2] She draws her examples from Julie Dash’s Illusions and Sankofa’s A Passion of Remembrance.