This chapter explores the origins in theorizing the contemporary gaze within a twentieth-century French philosophy, beginning with Jean-Paul Sartre. From there, this chapter will turn to how the contemporary gaze is handled by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault, which all explain aspects of looking, situations in which looking relations develop, and the extent to which this looking becomes phenomenological (for Merleau-Ponty), psychoanalytic (for Lacan), and classificatory (for Foucault). Across all of these discussions of the gaze, what concerns the act of looking, and the nature of looking relations, this chapter will place hooks in conversation with each, in order to show that what matters to Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, and Foucault also matter to hooks. To this end, though hooks makes only marginal references to Lacan and Foucault, but never acknowledges the works of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, hooks’s contribution of the oppositional gaze broadens and makes more robust the extent to which race, class, and gender have roles in the act of looking and in the nature of looking relations.