This chapter advances what bell hooks theorizes as the power in looking, here, as the power in commodified looking, which is predicated on a discussion of what corporeal capitalism imposes on hooks’s conceptualization of black female spectators. By emphasizing the power in commodified looking, this chapter will discuss the looking relations in which black female spectators find themselves, such that they are commodified in a constructed marketplace, based on the constructed images of the black female body. What this chapter considers is how the deployment of an oppositional gaze resists these constructed images and, in turn, acts oppositionally to the constructed marketplace that looks at and documents black womanhood relative to corporeal capitalism and its inherent sexualization of the black female. For hooks, while the body is where agency can be found, the black female body becomes instrumental in how black female spectators create spaces of agency that look at, document, and become oppositional to the looking relations in which they find themselves, so that the sites of resistance that emerge for these black female spectators challenge what is imposed by a sexist-patriarchal gaze.

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The Power in Commodified Looking: Corporeal Capitalism(s), Constructed Marketplaces, and Image-Making

  • Hue Woodson

摘要

This chapter advances what bell hooks theorizes as the power in looking, here, as the power in commodified looking, which is predicated on a discussion of what corporeal capitalism imposes on hooks’s conceptualization of black female spectators. By emphasizing the power in commodified looking, this chapter will discuss the looking relations in which black female spectators find themselves, such that they are commodified in a constructed marketplace, based on the constructed images of the black female body. What this chapter considers is how the deployment of an oppositional gaze resists these constructed images and, in turn, acts oppositionally to the constructed marketplace that looks at and documents black womanhood relative to corporeal capitalism and its inherent sexualization of the black female. For hooks, while the body is where agency can be found, the black female body becomes instrumental in how black female spectators create spaces of agency that look at, document, and become oppositional to the looking relations in which they find themselves, so that the sites of resistance that emerge for these black female spectators challenge what is imposed by a sexist-patriarchal gaze.