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98 “She Will Never Look” Film Spectatorship, Black Feminism, and Scary Subjectivities In a 1966 Negro Digest article, the actress Ruby dee laments the ways in which she and other black women actors face “double discrimination— that of sex and that of race.”1 Moreover, dee goes on to say that a dearth of rewarding artistic material leaves the artists mere “tattered queens” who tend to retire too early or simply disappear from public life without explanation or much notice, “haunted by an aura of tragedy, failure and defeat.”2 dee stresses the urgency of producing material for a range of black women actresses inasmuch as it would reflect and encourage diversity within the black community. She writes that because “art not only reflects life but also influences it, we must dedicate ourselves to the improvement of life and its truths—about women, about Negroes.”3 despite the ways in which such “truths” may be complicated and shifting rather than essential and universal, as dee implies, the spirit of her comments is well understood: social activism, aided by artistic intervention, would help to vindicate and validate black women as cultural producers. Rather than disappearing politely into an invisibility that might be socially acceptable in the american racist and sexist symbolic order, black women, in a revised system, would insist on being seen, perhaps even in terms of their own visions. dee experienced a measure of liberation intellectually . Writing that while she often felt isolated within her professional success, the actress found “a continuity of experience” through studying books that documented an earlier generation of entertainers; this knowledge helped to contextualize her own career. For dee, the issue of black women’s representation is best framed as a compound concept: race-and02 Chapters_4_7.indd 98 1/13/10 11:55 AM 99 Film Spectatorship, Black Feminism, and Scary Subjectivities gender, or, as she put it, “about women, about Negroes.” This intersectional way of thinking is foundational in black feminist thought and complicates the use of “woman” in mainstream or white feminist discourse. My citation of dee’s essay and Black Feminist Cultural Criticism, the anthology in which it is reprinted, indicates the subjects of this essay: race/ethnicity, women, and african american film culture. My intervention is directed toward an overwhelmingly whiteness-dominated feminist film criticism: I explore theories of black women’s spectatorship and the problem of cinematic subjectivity. In the spirit of creative and constructive incoherence, I define (and deny) the idea of black female “scary” subjectivity on the one hand, while on the other I provide a historical overview of black women’s commentary on the cinema through writing, filmmaking, and performance. My essay’s title is a phrase heard on the soundtrack of the film Reckless Eyeballing, discussed later; I use it, with dee’s article, to address issues of who can look and how the cinematic gaze is constructed or disallowed in particular films along racial and gendered lines. I imagine that black feminist film theory would do more than illuminate the conditions of black women; it should address the receptivity and articulation of a black female psychic and social space in cinema, and do so in a way that is responsive to the idea of black women as both consumers and producers of cultural texts. an ideal black feminist film theory therefore shifts our emphasis from manifest images or the icons of black womanhood, and places greater attention on the mysterious give-and-take between images and viewers, the variation and unpredictability involved in spectatorship that takes place in the dark, collective privacy of the cinema. an ideal black feminist film theory also would open up more ways to think about how films address and affect spectators, and serve as a tool of selffashioning . and it would account for cinematic pleasure—the attractions, fulfillments, and expectations of watching movies for black people. With regard to spectators, black feminist film theory would avoid prescriptive readings of black womanhood, and would shed light on the ways spectators shift, expand, or escape their subject positions and identify with film characters across gendered and racialized similarities or differences. It would consider the authorship of black women filmmakers in tandem with black women spectators in such a way that theories of shifting subjectivity and aesthetics rather than biology would frame the discussion. a black feminist film theory is not necessarily about literal black women. Black feminist film theory should help us imagine people who are not 02 Chapters_4_7.indd 99...

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