Janes Gaines's White Privilege And Looking Relations: Race And Gender In Feminist Film Theory?

In Janes Gaines’s, White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory, Gaines wanted to show how a theory of the text and its spectator, based on the psychoanalytic concept of sexual difference, is unequipped to deal with a film which is about racial difference and sexuality. “The Diana Ross star vehicle Mahogany (directed by Berry Gordy, 1975) immediately suggests a psychoanalytic approach because the narrative is organized around the connections between voyeurism and photographic acts, because it exemplifies the classical cinema which has been so fully theorized in Lacanian terms” (Gaines, 12). But as Gaines argued, the psychoanalytic model works to block out considerations which assume a different configuration …show more content…
“The genre received its appellation of blaxploitation from Griffin, who argued that these films exploited African Americans and offered no redeeming aesthetic or cultural value” (Sims, …show more content…
How would you describe any or all of these films and roles (Grier’s or Dobson’s)? What do you remember about them? What did or do you like about them? Dislike?” (Dunn, 14). The most often repeated sentiment by the respondents was that they liked that the characters were strong women, but their appreciation of black female heroines who fought back didn’t negate what many black women referred to as the over-sexualization, even degradation, of Grier in the