Project Abstract
Within the ethnographies, memories, and archives produced throughout a capitalist empire, the ‘gaze’ has generally been used against the subject, creating narratives which entrench the hegemony in defining the subject to accord with the needs of the dominating culture. The term ‘oppositional gaze’ was developed in 1992 by bell hooks in conversation with Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema: the ‘gaze’ is a scopophilic act albeit with the potential to be a radical method for resistance, the oppositional gaze then refers to ‘looking’ as a defiant act to which the actors reclaim a sense of autonomy over the spectator and turn the gaze back upon their oppressors. What makes the act of ‘looking’ so defiant and how this looking translates to an oppositional gaze is the question this project attempts to answer through a close reading of various media and using an array of methods and theories from such disciplines as film studies, ethnography, data ethics. I build upon the foundations of hooks and Mulvey while asserting that the definition of ‘looking’ goes beyond visual perception and into the act of understanding and perceiving. I apply these theories of the ‘gaze’ and my own explorations of ‘looking’ to juxtapose Rahul Jain’s Machines (2016) and Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland (2020) in analyzing its application and limitations. With this project, I hope to impel further discussion on the study of the gaze by compiling demonstrations of its application in various media and its disruption of prevailing narratives.
This project was created as part of the Summer Institute in the Arts and Humanities 2021
Mayumi Sophiya Alino, University of Washington
August 2021