Looking implores a sense of power that is removed from the black female body, to play the role of object in direct relation to white female existence. In 'The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators', hooks explains that black women are not only underrepresented in film, but they are also not allowed to 'look' either. As hooks concludes on the black characterization of Sapphire, 'How could we long to be there when our image, visually constructed, was so ugly.' Black female spectatorship black female image was not the body of desire. Īs a child, hook's first encounter with Sapphire from Amos 'n' Andy, started her thinking as the characterization of Sapphire, '.explored both the negation of black female representation in cinema and television and black women's rejection of these images. However, hooks notes that black male filmmakers represented black women in their films as objects of male gaze which inherently perpetuated white supremacy, as the black female body was presented only to enhance and maintain white womanhood as an object of the phallocentric gaze. As a result of the racist portrayals of black people in white-dominated cinema, independent black film arose.

Through critical discussion around black women and cinema, the oppositional gaze enters as a way for black people to attain agency to combat white supremacy. hooks describes the gaze of a black body as repressed, denied, and ultimately interrogating. The concept was first developed as a critique of film theory by bell hooks in her essay 'The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators'.

The oppositional gaze encompasses modes of looking that employ reflexive gazes such as: Hooks' essay is a work of feminist film theory that criticizes both the male gaze through Michel Foucault's 'relations of power' and the prevalence of white feminism in feminist film theory. As hooks states, white slave-owners would punish their slaves regularly simply for looking at them.

The 'oppositional gaze', first coined by feminist, scholar and social activist bell hooks in her 1992 essay collection Black Looks: Race and Representation, is a type of looking relation that involves the political rebellion and resistance against the repression of a black person's right to look.

Bell hooks on theory