Opengender

The question of how black lesbians might rework gendered representation in mainstream culture has, as yet, barely been addressed. It is only more recently that the question of black spectatorship of popular film has been critically addressed at all. Initial theorisations of black spectatorship (male, female, straight and gay) appear also to depend on reference to identifications external to the cinematic text. Text-based theorisations of female and lesbian spectatorship generally refer to the controlling position of the male in the relay. Diawara (1993) argued that Hollywood cinema is organised not only for male spectators, but for white male spectators. For Jones (1993) the visual regime of popular cinema negates even black heterosexual male subjectivity:

Although Black male heterosexuality is generally treated as the dominating context in which Black feminist and Black gay and lesbian critical theories are situated, I submit that Black male heterosexuality itself is also a repressed discourse currently characterised by powerlessness and reaction in the mainstream cinema. (Jones, 1993: 247-8)

Hooks repositioned such arguments as gender-specific:

When most Black people in the United States first had the opportunity to look at film and television, they did so fully aware that mass media as a system of knowledge and power was reproducing and maintaining White supremacy . . . [The Black man] could "look" at White womanhood without a structure of domination overseeing the gaze, interpreting, punishing [...] Black men could enter an imaginative space of phallocentric power that mediated racial negation. This gendered relation to looking made the experience of the Black male spectator radically different from that of the Black female spectator [...] The prolonged silence of Black women as spectators and critics was a response to absence, to cinematic negation. (hooks, 1993: 289-291)

Those black women who did engage with the popular text experienced a deep ambivalence towards the pleasures offered to, and the pain experienced by, black female spectators.

Black feminists critics have nevertheless chosen to problematise the discourses of popular cinema through critical engagement in its processes rather than by a strategy of total refusal. As in white lesbian analysis of (white) lesbian spectatorship, Wallace brought the diversity of viewing subjects into play with dualistic theorisations of film as text:

[T]here was a way in which these [Hollywood] films were possessed by Black female viewers. The process may have been about problematising and expanding one's racial identity instead of abandoning it. It seems crucial here to view spectatorship not only as potentially bisexual but also multiracial and multiethnic. Even as the 'Law of the Father' may impose its premature closure on the filmic gaze in the co-ordination of suture and classic narrative, disparate factions in the audience, not all equally well indoctrinated in the dominant discourse, may have their way, now and then, with interpretation. (Wallace, 1993: 264)

Young (1996) also argued that a move beyond the limiting terms of a theoretical discourse of desire is needed. If a figural black spectator is abstracted from the cinematic text, the exclusionary tendencies of the dominant text are reproduced (although it seems strange that sexual orientation is omitted from her list of diversities):

As regards audiences, how the desires of black viewers may or may not differ in absolute terms from those of white audiences, or how this concept of black spectatorship might be fractured or differentiated along class, gender and generational lines, is just beginning to be investigated (Young, 1996: 191).

Florence (1993) suggested that, as for white lesbians, a woman-only context is an important element in black lesbian reading of popular film:

Being part of an all-female audience is a further element relevant to lesbian spectatorship [...] The Asian woman in We've Been Framed [...] described her response to an Indian film Razia Sultan (1983) [...] although the direct address of the film is to straight men, the spectator was able to subvert the structuring gaze, her pleasure being increased by the knowledge of the heterosexual tradition (man singing to woman) and by being part of a female audience [...] The interviewee was adjusting the look of the film to her own gaze in response to a perceived need of her multiple subjectivity as an Asian lesbian in Britain. The same is true of the Black woman in the programme who found in Whoopi Goldberg's screen presence in Ghosts [sic] (1990) an image of Black lesbianhood otherwise unavailable to her. Too often the assumed identity of the camera does not take sufficient account of this form of resistance and appropriation. (Florence, 1993: 137)

Nataf's (1995) account again seems to indicate an ability to 'bracket-off' the unwelcome aspects of popular film — regardless of exhibition context:

The black lesbian spectator has a schizophrenic response to mainstream, popular film. That is because her experience with the mass media is that it has rarely reflected or represented anything that resembles her life, doing so only in ways which are stereotypical or marginal [...] So when there is a moment which reflects black lesbian lives — however inadequately — the black lesbian spectator's desire and need for it to be there is often so strong that the negative part of the experience is ignored and what is of use is engaged with and received. (Nataf, 1995: 58)

In Ghost, Nataf (1995) argued that the "possession" of Oda Mae's black, female, body by the white, male character, Sam, effects "the 'splitting of the subject in the construction of white identity, entailed in the affirmation and denial of racial difference' for part of the audience" (Nataf, 1995: 71; quoting Mercer, 1991: 187).

For the black lesbian spectator, this simulates the struggle she usually has trying to get her desire to fit the shape of the white or male hero in mainstream cinema. The pleasure in this instance comes from the fact that, through the static, the struggle of presence and absence, she can make out her image and her desire from time to time in the weaving. (Nataf, 1995: 71)

Thus "the circulation of lesbian desire runs riot" in this scene (71).

A lesbian appropriation of the text is also enabled by the activity of the black lesbian spectator herself, who may make intertextual connections, via Goldberg's star persona, between her role in The Color Purple and a subtextual lesbian eroticism in the substitution scene in Ghost. Whilst Nataf did not interrogate the constitution of the black lesbian spectator, it would seem clear enough that, in order to locate herself in the popular cinematic text — or at least to 'make out' her own image (71), the spectator draws not only on the familiarity of the struggle to 'fit' into the spectatorial process itself, but also to discursive formations which exceed the cinematic processes.

In spite of the historical and cultural diversity of Hollywood's 'others,' it may be that they hold in common certain modes of resistance to the discursive dominance effected by popular cinema. These resistances cannot be articulated wholly within the terms of classical feminist film theory which is based in a binaristic account of gender. The deployment of extra-textual identifications furnishes an enabling point of transmission between dominant discursive formations (which are, of course, perfectly well understood by its 'others') and those oppositional formations which mainstream cinema has traditionally been unable or unwilling to represent. At the same time as lesbians redeploy popular film text to the transformation of lesbian discourses, mainstream cinema is also transformed in these processes of contestation. In my next two chapters, I will be looking at the re-circulation of the trope of homosociality through mainstream and independent productive contexts in the 1970s and 1980s.