University of Minnesota Press Cultural Critique

White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory
Author(s): Jane Gaines

Source: Cultural Critique, No. 4 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 59-79
Published by: University of Minnesota Press
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White Privilege and Looking Relations:
Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory
Jane Gaines
orn in Flames, a feminist science fiction film set ten years after a
Social-Democratic "revolution" in the U.S., provides an abrupt
reminder of the place of theory in the context of social change. Toward
the end of the film, with the women's takeover of New York com-
munications channels in progress, the voice of theory is heard over the
image, insisting that women also need to take over the production of
language. Although the film gives credence to the voice of theory (a
white female British-accented voice), it is clear that the militant Wom-
en's Emergency Brigade and the martyred Black lesbian leader are
carrying the revolutionary moment. What strikes me about the jux-
taposition - images of women hot-wiring U-Haul trucks and the voice
of theory urging women to take control of their own images - is that
the voice sounds so crisply detached and arid.'
What I want to discuss is not so much the scene as the tenor of the
female intellectual voice, which immediately recalls for me the tone of
feminist film theory - firm in its insistence on attention to cinematic
1. Feminist discussions around Lizzie Borden's 1983 feature, such as the one in
June, 1985, at the Society for Cinema Studies Conference at New York University,
actually exemplify my argument. Holding ourselves to consideration of the film's repre-
sentational system was a frustrating exercise since crucial issues of subcultural recep-
tion and feminist political strategy were also at stake.
59
60 Jane Gaines
language and strict in its prohibition against making comparison

tween "actuality" and the text. Let me be clear that this is somethi
a caricature of a stance which many of us who work on feminist fi
theory find less and less tenable.2 Certainly, the intense concentrat
on cinema as language has helped to remedy a naivete about fo
which characterized early feminist film criticism. However, as inte
in the operations of the cinematic text increased, we witnessed
banishment of sociological reference points and historical detail
criticism. From this viewpoint it seems that one can only analyz
ideological through its encoding in the conventions of editing o
mechanics of the motion picture machine.3
For Marxists, this textual detachment, as I will call it, has sp
implications: concentration on the functioning of discourse creates
impression that developments in an ideological realm are unrelat
developments elsewhere in social life. As feminist film theory
emphasized the irresistible allure and captivating power of cla
narrative cinema, it has located determination exclusively in the ideo
cal realm. At the center of this difficulty has been the effort to underst
the ideological work of mainstream cinema in terms of the ps
choanalytic concept of sexual difference, which has largely meant c
ing formal structures such as narrative and point of view as mascu
and locating the feminine, the opposite term, in the repressed
excluded. Since this theory has focused on sexual difference, class a
racial differences have remained outside its problematic, divor
from textual concerns by the very split in the social totality that
incompatibility of these discourses misrepresents. Adorno has
marked on this split, although in the context of an argument for t
merger of sociology and psychology:
2. For an overview, see my "Women and Representation: Can We Enjoy Alt

tive Pleasure?" in Entertainment as Social Control, ed. Donald Lazere (Berkeley: U
California Press), forthcoming.
3. In "Aesthetics and Politics," New Left Review 107 (1978): 23, Terry Eagleton
scribes his exasperation with Screen, the journal which introduced this analytica
into British criticism:
And yet, perusing still another article in that journal on the complex
mechanisms by which a shot/reverse shot reinstates the imaginary, or the
devices by which a particular cinematic syntagm permits the interruption
of symbolic heterogeneity into the positioned perceptual space of the
subject, one is forced to query with certain vehemence why ideological
codes have been so remorselessly collapsed back into the intestines of the
cinematic machine.
White Privilege and Looking Relations 61
The separation of sociology and psychology is both correct and

false. False because it encourages the specialists to relinquish the
attempt to know the totality which even the separation of the two
demands; and correct insofar as it registers more intransigently
the split that has actually taken place in reality than does the pre-
mature unification at the level of theory.4
In the interest of understanding the social totality, I am suggesting that

our criticism should work to demystify this apparent separation by
raising questions of race and class exactly where they have been theo-
retically disallowed.
Here I want 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. Immedi-
ately, the Diana Ross star-vehicle, Mahogany (Berry Gordy, 1975), sug-
gests a psychoanalytic approach because the narrative is organized
around the connections between sadism, voyeurism, and photographic
acts. Furthermore, it is a perfect specimen of classical narrative cinema
which has been so fully theorized in Freudian terms. The psycho-
analytic mode, however, works to block out considerations which
take a different configuration. For instance, the Freudian scenario,
based on the male/female distinction, is incongruous with the scenario
of racial and sexual relations in Afro-American history. Where we use a
psychoanalytic model to explain Black family relations, we force an
erroneous universalization, and inadvertently reaffirm white middle-
class norms.
Since it has taken gender as its starting point in the analysis of
oppression, feminist theory has helped to reinforce white middle-class
values, and to the extent that it works to keep women from seeing other
structures of oppression, it functions ideologically. In this regard, Bell
Hooks specifically criticizes a feminism which seems unable to imag-
ine women's oppression in terms other than gender:
Feminist analyses of woman's lot tend to focus exclusively on gen-
der and do not provide a solid foundation on which to construct
feminist theory. They reflect the dominant tendency in Western
patriarchal minds to mystify women's reality by insisting that gen-
der is the sole determinant of woman's fate.5
4. T.W. Adorno, "Sociology and Psychology," New Left Review 46 (November-

December 1967): 78.
5. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984), 12.
62 Jane Gaines
This gender analysis illuminates the condition of white middle-

women rather exclusively, Hooks explains, and its centrality in fem
ist theory suggests that the women who have contributed to the co
struction of this theory have been ignorant of the way wome
different racial groups and social classes experience oppression.
should the white middle-class feminist who does not want to be rac
in her work respond to this criticism? In her essay, "On Being Wh
one of the few considerations of this delicate dilemma, Marilyn
urges us not to do what middle-class feminists have historically do
to assume responsibility for everyone. To take it upon oneself t
write feminist theory so that it encompasses our differences is ano
exercise of racial privilege.6 What one can, with conscience, do
undertake the difficult study of our own "determined ignorance";
can begin to learn about the people whose history cannot be ima
from a position of privilege.7 In this context, my argument takes
directions. Onejuxtaposes Black feminist theory with those aspe
feminist theory which have a tendency to function as normativ
other transposes these issues, as Marxist theory would unders
them, into the question of how we are to grasp the interaction of
various levels.
The feminist commitment to revealing the patriarchal assumptions

behind familiar cinematic language dates from the mid-seventies with
the appearance of Clare Johnston's "Women's Cinema as Counter-
Cinema"8 and Laura Mulvey's often reprinted "Visual Pleasure and
Narrative Cinema."9 The latter essay, coinciding as it did with the
publication of Christian Metz's "The Imaginary Signifier," paired with
a supporting theoretical statement from the editors of the British
Screen, helped introduce psychoanalytic concepts into contemporary
film theory where they quickly streamlined a Marxist problematic
6. The Politics of Reality (Trumansburg, New York: The Crossing Press, 1984),
113.
7. Frye, 118.
8. Notes on Women's Cinema, ed. ClaireJohnston (London: Society for Education in
Film and Television, 1973); rpt. Sexual Strategems, ed. Patricia Erens (New York: Horizon,
1979), 133-143; Movies andMethods, ed. Bill Nichols (Berkeleyand LosAngeles: Univ. of
California Press, 1976), 208-217.
9. Screen 16, no. 3 (Autumn 1975): 6-18; rpt. Womenand Cinema, eds. KarynKayand
Gerald Peary (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977), 412-428; Film Theory and Criticism, eds.
Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford, 1985).
which dealt awkwardly with the social individual.'0 The terms of psy-
choanalysis, introduced through the permission of Althusserian
Marxism, made it possible to investigate the sites outside the work-
place where oppression is experienced. For Marxist feminists, this
connection between Marxism and psychoanalysis immediately en-
riched the study of the construction of subjectivity in its prime location
- the family.
Althusser's antidote to empiricism and economic reductionism has
been welcomed by Marxists working in cultural studies, and the appeal
is understandable. If materiality is no longer elsewhere, scholars are
suddenly free to concentrate on textual matters without having to con-
cern themselves simultaneously with economic specificity. Marxists in
cultural studies outside Screen, however, believe that Althusser's
understanding of ideology as having a materiality of its own con-
tradicts basic Marxist tenets."l Within British cultural studies, then,
psychoanalysis is held in check by the larger debates around Althus-
serian Marxism. This is not, however, the case in the U.S. where these
traditions are often a distant point of reference. Thus the Screen film
theory imported to the U.S. comes furnished with idealist assumptions
that are mistaken for Marxist underpinnings. Because traditional
Marxist terms do not support the critical context in film and television
studies in the U.S. as they do in Britain, the challenge to psychoanalytic
film theory here may have to come from other critical vantage
points.
Lesbian feminists in the U.S. have already raised objections to the
way in which contemporary film theory explains the operation of the
classic realist text in terms of tensions between masculinity and fem-
ininity. Drawing on Freud and Lacan, this position (which is basically
Mulvey's) defines the classic cinema as an expression of the patri-
archal unconscious in the way it constructs points of view or "look-
10. Trans. Ben Brewster, Screen 16, no. 2 (Summer 1975): 14-76.
11. Examples include Simon Clarke, VictorJeleniewski Seidler, Kevin McDon-
nell, Kevin Robins, and Terry Lovell, One-Dimensional Marxism (London: Alison & Bus-
by, 1980); Kevin Robins, "Althusserian Marxism and Media Studies: The Case of
Screen," Media, Culture and Society 1, no. 4 (October 1979): 355-370; Ed Buscombe,
Christine Gledhill, Alan Lovell, Christopher Williams, "Statement: Psychoanalysis
and Film," Screen 20, no. 1 (Spring 1979): 121-133; Christine Gledhill, "Recent
Developments in Feminist Criticism," Quarterly Review of Film Studies 3, no. 4 (Fall
1978): 457-493; rpt. Re-Vision, eds. Mary Ann Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda
Williams, (Frederick, Maryland: University Publications of America, 1984), 18-48.
64 Jane Gaines
ing positions." At issue here is the way these viewing vant

control the female body on the screen and privilege the visua
(the gaze) of the male character(s) within the film. The g
"look" of the male character in the film merges with the
viewing position in such a way that the spectator sees as that
sees. This theory goes beyond the understanding of the text a
ing its own ideal reader; the text is also able to specify the gen
imputed subject, which in the classic cinema is male.
This understanding of the viewing pleasure in classical
inherently male has drawn an especially sharp response fr
who have argued that this response cancels the lesbian
whose viewing pleasure would never be male pleasure. Posi
bian spectator would significanty change the trajectory of
since the eroticized star body might be the visual objective of
female character in the film with whose "look" the viewer m
tify. (Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell in Gentlemen Prefe
according to this argument, are "only for each other's eyes.")'
ing the direction of an early lesbian reading of Gentlemen Pref
studies of Personal Best show lesbian readership as subverting
meanings and confounding textual structures.13 Consistently,
have charged that cultural theory posed in psychoanalyti
unable to conceive of desire or explain pleasure without re
the binary oppositions male/female. This is, as Monique Witti
the function of the heterosexual assumption, or the "straig
that unacknowledged structure built not only into Lacan
choanalysis, but underlying the basic divisions of Wester
organizing all knowledge, yet escaping any close examinati
With its ineluctability as knowledge, as an obvious principle
given prior to any science, the straight mind develops a totaliz
interpretation of history, social reality, culture, language
can only underline the oppressive character that the straight m
is clothed in in its tendency to immediately generalize its prod
12. Lucie Arbuthnot and Gail Seneca, "Pre-Text and Text in Gentlemen Pref
Film Reader 5 (Winter 1981): 13-23.
13. Chris Straayer, "Personal Best: Lesbian/Feminist Audience,"Jump
ruary 1984): 40-44; Elizabeth Ellsworth, "The Power of Interpretive Co
Feminist Appropriations of Personal Best," paper delivered at Society
Studies Conference, University of Wisconsin-Madison, March, 1984.
tion of concepts into general laws which claim to hold true for all
societies, all epochs, all individuals. .14
I want to suggest further that the male/female opposition, so seemingly
fundamental to feminism, may actually lock us into modes of analysis
which will continually misunderstand the position of many women.
Women of color, like lesbians, have been added to feminist analysis
as an afterthought. Standard feminist anthologies consistently include
articles on Black female and lesbian perspectives as illustration of the
liberality and the inclusiveness of feminist work. However, the very
concept of "different perspectives," while validating distinctness and
maintaining a common denominator (woman), still places the catego-
ries of race and sexual preference in theoretical limbo. Our political
etiquette is correct, but our theory is not so perfect. A familiar litany in
our work is the broad-minded conclusion to a feminist argument: "Of
course, the implications are somewhat different if race, class, and sex-
ual preference are considered." In Marxist feminist analysis, the fac-
tors of race and sexual preference often remain loose ends because
these categories of oppression do not fit easily into a model based on
class relations in capitalist society. Some gay historians have been able
to determine a relationship between the rise of capitalism and the
creation of the social homosexual.15 However, only with a very gen-
erous notion of sexual hierarchies, such as the one Gayle Rubin uses in
her recent work on the politics of sexuality, can sexual oppression (as
different from gender oppression) be located in relation to a framework
based on class.16 Race has folded more neatly than sexual preference
into Marxist models, but the orthodox formulation which understands
racial conflict as class struggle is unsatisfactory to Marxist feminists
who want to know exactly how gender intersects with race. The oppres-
sion of women of color remains incompletely grasped by this paradigm.
Just as the classic Marxist model of social analysis based on class has
14. "The Straight Mind," Feminist Issues (Summer 1980): 107-111.

15. See, for instance, John D'Emilio's Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984).
16. In "Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality," in
Pleasure and Danger, ed. Carol Vance (Boston and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul,
1984), 307, Rubin stresses the need to make this distinction because feminism does not
immediately apply to both oppressions. As she clarifies this:
Feminism is the theory of gender oppression. To automatically assume
that this makes it the theory of sexual oppression is to fail to distinguish
between gender, on the one hand, and erotic desire, on the other.
66 Jane Gaines
obscured the function of gender, the feminist model bas

male/female division under patriarchy has obscured the f
race. The dominant feminist paradigm actually encourages
think in terms of any oppression other than male domin
female subordination. Feminism seems, as Barbara Smith s
blinded to the implications of any womanhood that is
womanhood."'7 Black feminists agree that for purposes o
class is as significant as race; however, if these feminists
emphasize gender as a factor, it is in deference to the way Bl
describe their experience.18 Historically, Afro-American w
formulated political allegiance and identity in terms of race r
gender or class.'9 Feminism, however, has not registered
ments of women of color who realize oppression first in relat
rather than to gender: for them exploitation is personified b
female.20 Even more difficult for feminist theory to dige
female identification with the Black male. On this point, Blac
ists diverge from white feminists as they repeatedly remi
Black women do not necessarily see the Black male as pat
antagonist but feel instead that their racial oppression is "sha
men.21 In the most comprehensive analysis, Black lesbian
17. Towards a Black Feminist Criticism (Trumansburg, New York: O

Books, 1977), 1.
18. Bonnie Thornton Dill, "Race, Class, and Gender: Prospects for an
Sisterhood," Feminist Studies 9, no. 1 (Spring 1983): 134; for a slightly differ
of this essay, see" 'On the Hem of Life': Race, Class, and the Prospects for
in Class, Race, and Sex: The Dynamics of Control, eds. Amy Swerdlow and Ha
(Boston: G.K. Hall, 1983).
19. Margaret Simons, "Racism and Feminism: A Schism in the Sist
Feminist Studies 5, no. 2 (Summer 1979): 392.
20. Adrienne Rich, in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (New York: W.W. No
302-303, notes that while Blacks link their experience of racism with the wh
this is still patriarchal racism working through her. It is possible, she says,
first grader, or that child's mother, or a black patient in a hospital, or
welfare, may experience racism most directly in the person of a white w
stands for those service professions through which white male suprem
controls the mother, the child, the family, and all of us. It is her racism, yes,
learned in the same patriarchal school which taught her that women are
or unequal, not to be trusted with power; where she learned to mistrust
own impulses for rebellion; to become an instrument."
21. GloriaJoseph, "The Incompatible Menage a Trois: Marxism, Fem
Racism," in Women and Revolution, ed. Lydia Sargent (Boston: South End
96; The Combahee River Collective in "Combahee River Collective Sta
have described race, class, and gender oppression as "interlocking" in

reference to the way these oppressions are synthesized in the lives of
Black women.22
The point here is not to rank the structures of oppression in a way
that implies the need for Black women to choose between solidarity
with men or with women and between race or gender as the basis for a
political strategy. At issue is the question of the fundamental antago-
nism relevant to any Marxist feminist theory.23 Where we have fore-
grounded one antagonism in our analysis, we have misunderstood
another, and this is most dramatically illustrated in the applications of
the notion of patriarchy. Feminists have not been absolutely certain
what they mean by patriarchy: alternately it has referred to either
father right or to the domination of women;24 but what is consistent
about the use of the concept is the rigidity of the structure it describes.
Patriarchy is incompatible with Marxism where it is used trans-historical-
ly without qualification and where it becomes the source to which all
other oppressions are tributary, as in the radical feminist theory of patri-
archal order which sees oppression in all forms and through all ages as
derived from the male/female division.25 Unfortunately, this deter-
ministic model, which in Sheila Rowbotham's analysis almost func-
tions like a "feminist base-superstructure," has the disadvantage of
leaving us with no sense of movement, or no idea of how women have
acted to change their condition, especially in comparison with the
Home Girls, ed. Barbara Smith (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983), 275, compares
their alliance with Black men with the negative identification white women have with
white men:
Our situation as Black people necessitates that we have solidarity around
the fact of race, which white women of course do not need to have with
white men, unless it is their negative solidarity as racial oppressors. We
struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle
with Black men about sexism.
22. "Combahee River Collective Statement," 272.
23. E. Ann Kaplan, in Women and Film (New York and London: Methuen, 1983
140, says the danger for Marxists in employing the connection between Althusse
and Lacan is that "the theories do no accommodate the categories of either class
race: economic language as the primary shaping force replaces socioeconomic re
tions and institutions as the dominant influence. Sexual difference becomes the driv
ing force of history in place of the Marxist one of class contradictions."
24. Michele Barrett, Women's Oppression Today (London: Verso, 1980), 15.
25. For a comparison between radical feminism, liberal feminism, Marxism an
socialist feminism, see Alison Jaggar, Feminist Politics and Human Nature (Sussex: T
Harvester Press, 1983).
68 Jane Gaines
fluidity of the Marxist conception of class.26 The radical femin

of absolute patriarchy has also one-sidedly portrayed the
of women through an analogy with slavery, and since this th
identified woman as man's savage or repressed Other it compe
theories of racial difference which understand the Black as the "un-
assimilable Other."27 Finally, the notion of patriarchy is most obtuse
when it disregards the position white women occupy over Black men as
well as Black women.28 In order to rectify this tendency in feminism,
Black feminists refer to "racial patriarchy," based on an analysis of the
white patriarch/master in American history and his dominance over
the Black male as well as the Black female.29
For Black feminists, history also seems to be the key to understand-
ing Black female sexuality. "The construction of the sexual self of the
Afro-American women," says Rennie Simson, "has its roots in the days
of slavery."30 Looking at this construction over time reveals a pattern of
patriarchal phases and women's sexual adjustments that has no equiva-
lent in the history of white women in the U.S. In the first phase, charac-
terized by the dominance of the white master during the period of
slavery, Black men and women were equal by default. To have allowed
the Black male any power over the Black woman would have threatened
the power balance of the slave system. Thus, as Angela Davis explains
social control in the slave community, "The man slave could not be the
unquestioned superior within the 'family' or community, for there was
no such thing as the 'family provided' among the Slaves."3' The legacy
26. "The Trouble with Patriarchy," in People's History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael
Samuel (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 365.
27. Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (Paris,
1952; rpt. New York: Grove Press, 1967), 161.
28. Simons, 387.
29. Barbara Omolade, "Hearts of Darkness," in Powers ofDesire, eds. Ann Snitow,
Christine Stansell, and Sharon Thompson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983),
352.
30. The Afro-American Female: The Historical Context of the Construction of
Sexual Identity," in Powers of Desire, 230. The "days of slavery" is a recurring reference
point in the writings of Black feminists. Although I am arguing that studying the Black
condition in history is the antithesis of theorizing subjectivity ahistorically, I can also see
how the "days of slavery" might function as an ideological construct. We do the evolving
work of Black feminists a disservice if we do not subj ect it to the same critique we would
apply to white middle class feminism. How, for instance, can equal subjugation dur-
ing slavery have anything to do with ideals of male/female equality? I am indebted to
Brackette Williams for calling this to my attention.
31. "The Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves," The Black Scholar
(December 1971): 5-6.
of this phase has involved both the rejection of the pedestal the white
female has enjoyed and the heritage of retaliation against white male
abuse. If the strategy for racial survival was resistance during the first
phase, it was accommodation during the following phase. During
Reconstruction, the Black family, modelled after the white bourgeois
household, was constituted defensively in an effort to preserve the
race.32 Black women yielded to their men in deference to a tradition
that promised respectability and safety. Reevaluating this history,
Black feminists point out that during Reconstruction the Black male,
following the example of the white patriarch, "learned" to dominate.
The position consistently taken by Black feminists, that patriarchy was
originally foreign to the Afro-American community and was introduced
into it historically, then, represents a significant break with feminist
theories which see patriarchal power invested in all men through-
out history.33
Black history also adds another dimension to the concept of rape
which has emerged as the favored metaphor for defining women's
jeopardy in the second wave of feminism.34 The charge of rape, conjur-
ing up a historical connection with lynching, is always connected with
the myth of the Black man as archetypal rapist. During slavery, this
abuse provided an opportunity to strike a blow at Black manhood, but
the increase in the sexual violation of black women during Reconstruc-
tion reveals its political implications. After emancipation, the rape of
Black women was a "message" to Black men which, as one historian
describes the phemomenon, could be seen as "a reaction to the effort
32. Omolade, 352.

33. Joseph, 99; Audre Lorde, in Sister Outsider (Trumansburg, New York: The
Crossing Press, 1984), 119, sees sexism in Black communities as not original to them,
but as a plague that has struck. She argues:
Because of the continuous battle against racial erasure that Black women
and Black men share, some Black women still refuse to recognize that we
are also oppressed as women, and that sexual hostility against Black
women is practiced not only by the white racist society, but implemented
within our Black communities as well. It is a disease striking the heart of
Black nationhood, and silence will not make it disappear.
34. Linda Gordon and Ellen DuBois, in "Seeking Ecstasy on the Battefield:
Danger and Pleasure in Nineteenth Century Feminist Sexual Thought," Feminist
Review 13 (Spring 1983): 43, note that in its two stages the feminist movement has
developed two major themes which have expressed women's sexual danger. Whereas
prostitution articulated women's fears in the nineteenth century, rape summarizes the
contemporary terror.
70 Jane Gaines
of the freedman to assume the role of patriarch, able to provide for and
protect his family."35 If, as feminists have argued, women's sexuality
evokes an unconscious terror in men, then Black women's sexuality
represents a special threat to white patriarchy; the possibility of it
"eruption" stands for the aspirations of the Black race as a whole. The
following analysis poses the questions raised when race complicat
sexual prohibition. In the context of race relations in U.S. history, sex-
ual looking carries with it the threat of actual rather than symbol
castration. The following analysis poses the questions raised when race
complicates sexual prohibition. In the context of race relations in U.S.
history, sexual looking carries with it the threat of actual rather then
symbolic castration.
In Mahogany, the sequel to Lady Sings the Blues, Diana Ross plays an
aspiring fashion designer who dreams of pulling herself up and out of
her Chicago South Side neighborhood through a high-powered ca-
reer. During the day, Tracy Chambers is assistant to the modellin
supervisor for a large department store resembling Marshall Field
Company. At night she attends design school where the instructor rep
rimands her for sketching a cocktail dress instead of the assignment,
the first suggestion of the exotic irrelevance of her fantasy caree
Although she loses her job with the department store, the renowne
fashion photographer Sean McEvoy (Tony Perkins) discovers her as
model and whisks her off to Rome. There Tracy finally realizes he
ambition to become a designer when a wealthy Italian admirer give
her a business of her own. After the grand show, unveiling her first lin
of clothes, she decides to return to Chicago where she is reunited with
community organizer Brian Walker (Billy Dee Williams) whose polit
cal career is organized as a kind of counterpoint to Tracy's.
With its long fashion photography montage sequences temporaril
interrupting the narrative, Mahogany invites a reading based on th
alternation between narrative and woman-as-spectacle as theorized i
"Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." To the allure of pure spect
cle these sequences add the fascination of masquerade and transfor
mation. Effected with wigs and make-up colors, the transformation
are a play on and against "darkness"; Diana Ross is a high-tech Egyp
tian queen, a pale medieval princess, a turbaned Asiatic, and a body
35. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall," 'The Mind That Burns in Each Body': Women, Rape
and Racial Violence," in Powers of Desire, 332.
painted blue nymph. As her body color is washed out in bright light or
powdered over, and as her long-haired wigs blow around her face, she
becomes suddenly "white."
Motion pictures seem never to exhaust the narrative possibilities
associated with the metaphor of the camera-as-deadly-weapon; Mahog-
any adds to this the sadomasochistic connotations of high fashion
photography with reference to the mid-seventies work of Guy Bourdin
and Helmut Newton that is linked to the tradition of "attraction by
shock."36 The montage sequences chronicling Tracy's career, from
perfume ads to high fashion magazine covers, equate the photo-
graphic act with humiliation and violation. Camera zoom and freeze
frame effects translate directly into aggression, as in the sequence in
which Sean pushes Tracy into a fountain: her dripping image solidifies
into an Italian Revlon advertisement. Finally, the motif of stopping-
the-action-as-aggression is equated with the supreme violation - the
attempt to murder. Pressing his favorite model to her expressive limits,
Sean drives her off an expressway ramp. Since this brutality escalates
after the scene in which he fails with Tracy in bed, the film represents
her punishment as a direct consequence of his impotence.37
With its classic castration threat scenario, its connection between
voyeurism and sadism, and its reference to fetishization as seen in
Sean's photographic shrine to the models he has abused, Mahogany is
the perfect complement to a psychoanalytic analysis of classical Holly-
wood's "visual pleasure." The film feeds further into the latter by pro-
ducing its own "proof' that there is only an incremental difference
between voyeurism (fashion photography) and the supreme violation
- murder. The black and white photographic blow-ups of Tracy
salvaged from the death car seem undeniable evidence of the fine line
between looking and killing, or, held at another angle, between adver-
tising imagery and pornography. These, then, are the points that the
analysis of cinema as patriarchal makes when it characterizes classical
film form as ideologically insidious in its control of the female image,
its assuagement of women's threat, and its denial of its own complicity
in this signifying activity.
36. Nancy Hall-Duncan, The History ofFashion Photography (NewYork: Alpine Books,
1979), 196.
37. White reviewerJay Cocks, in"BlackandTanFantasy,"Time, 27 October, 1975,
71, interprets the scene in which Tony Perkins is represented as severely devastated
after his failure in bed with Diana Ross as a "romantic interlude," and the "one pearl"
in the entire film.
72 Jane Gaines
To explain the ideological function of this film in terms of the co

struction of male pleasure, however, is to "aid and abet" the f
other ideological project. Following this line of analysis, one is a
step into an ideological signifying trap set up by the chain of mean
that lead away from seeing the film in terms of black and white conf
Because there are so many connotative paths - photographer exp
model, madman assaults woman, voyeur attempts murder - we
not immediately see white man as the aggressor against Black woma
Other strategies encourage the viewer to forget or not notice r
issues. For instance, the narrative removes Tracy from racially p
ized Chicago to Rome where the brown Afro-American woman
Caucasian features is collected by the photographer who name
subjects after inanimate objects. Losing her Black community ident
Tracy becomes Mahogany, a dark, rich, valuable substance; that is, h
Blackness becomes commodified.
Mahogany functions ideologically for Black viewers in the traditional
Marxist sense, that is, in the way the film obscures the class nature of
social antagonisms. This has certain implications for working clas
Black viewers who would benefit the most from seeing the relationship
between race, gender, and class oppression. This film experiences th
same problem in its placement of Black femaleness that the wider cul-
ture has had historically; a Black female is either all woman and tinted
Black, or mostly Black and scarcely woman. These two expectations
correspond roughly to the two worlds and two struggles the film con-
trasts: the struggle over the sexual objectification of Tracy's body,
targeting commercial exploiters, and the class struggle of the Black
community, targeting slum landlords. The film identifies this antag
onism as the hostility between fashion and politics, corresponding
roughly with Tracy and Brian and organizing their conflict and recon-
ciliation. Intensifying the conflict between the two characters, the film
brings "politics" and "fashion" together in one daring homage to th
aesthetic of"attraction by shock." Sean arranges his models symmet
rically on the back stairwell of a run-down Chicago apartment building
and plants the confused tenants and street people as props. Flam-
boyant excess, the residue of capital, is juxtaposed with a kind of
dumbfounded poverty. For a moment, the scene figures the synthesis
of gender, class, and race, but the political glimpse is fleeting. Forced
together as a consequence of the avant-garde's socially irresponsible
quest for new outrage, the political antagonisms are suspended -
temporarily immobilized as the subjects pose.
The connection between gender, class, and race oppression is also

denied as the ghetto photography session illustrates the analogy be-
tween commercial and race/class exploitation which registers on the
screen as visual incongruity. Visual discrepancy, which is finally used
for aesthetic effect, also makes it difficult to grasp the confluence of
race, class, and gender oppression in the image of Tracy Chambers.
Her class background magically becomes decor in the film; it neither
radicalizes her nor drags her down - rather it sets her off. Diana Ross
is alternately weighed down by the glamour iconography of commercial
modelling and stripped to a Black body essence. But the haute couture
iconography ultimately dominates the film. Since race is decorative
and class does not reveal itself to the eye, she can only be seen as "ex-
ploited" in terms of her role as a model.
If the film plays down race, it does so not only to accommodate white
audiences. While it worships the success of the Black cult star and treats
aspiring young Blacks to Diana Ross's dream come true - a chance to
design all the costumes in her own film, Mahogany also hawks the
philosophy of Black enterprise. Here it does not matter where you
come from, but you should ask yourself, in the words of the theme
song, "Where are you going to, do you know?"38 Race is like any other
obstacle - to be transcended through diligent work and dedication to
a goal. Supporting the film's self-help philosophy is the related story of
Diana Ross's discovery as a skinny teenager singing in a Baptist Church
in Detroit. With Mahogany, Motown president and founder Berry
Gordy (who fired Tony Richardson to take over the film's direction
himself) helps Diana Ross make something of herself again (on a
larger scale) just as he helped so many aspiring recording artists by
coaching them in money management and social decorum in his
talent school.39
The phenomenon of Motown Industries comments less on the pop-
ularity of the self-help philosophy and more on the discrepancy be-
tween the opportunity formula and the social existence of Black
Americans. Ironically, Black capitalism's one big success is thriving on
the impossibility of Black enterprise: soul entertainment as compensa-
38. Simon Frith, in "Mood Music," Screen 25, no. 3 (May-June 1984): 78, says that
the theme song is more signficant than critics have realized. It is the last of the motion
picture experience to touch us as we leave the theatre, and it works to "rearrange
our feelings."
39. Stephen Birmingham, Certain People (Boston & Toronto: Little, Brown, and
Co., 1977), 262-263.
74 Jane Gaines
tion and release sells because capitalism cannot deliver we

all.40 Black music and performance, despite the homogenizat
original forms, represent a utopian aspiration for Black A
well as white suburbanites. Simon Frith describes the "ne
by rock fantasy:
Black music had a radical, rebellious edge: it carried a sen
possibility denied in the labor market; it suggested a comrade
a sensuality, a grace and joy and energy lacking in work
power of rock fantasy rests, precisely on utopianism.41
Here I am drawing on a theory of culture which sees ca

erratically supplying subversive "needs" as well as "false" des
through the same commodities which produce the ideolog
Given that popular culture can accommodate the possibili
containment and resistance in what Stuart Hall calls its "double move-
ment," I want to turn, then, to the ways Mahogany can be seen to move
in the other direction.42
Racial conflict surfaces or recedes in this film rather like the percep-
tual trick in which, depending on the angle of view, one swirling pat-
tern or the other pops out at the viewer. Some ambiguity, for instance,
is built into the confrontation between Black and white, as in the scene
where Sean lures Brian into a struggle over an unloaded weapon. The
outcome, in which Sean, characterized as a harmless eccentric, manip-
ulates Brian into pulling the trigger, could be read as confirming the
racist conception that Blacks who possess street reflexes are mur-
derous aggressors. Ebony magazine, however, features a promotional
still of the scene (representing Brian holding a gun over Sean), with a
caption describing how Brian is tricked but still wins the fight.43 View-
ers, who choose the winners of ambiguous conflicts, may also choose
to inhabit "looking" structures. The studies of lesbian readership
already cited show that subcultural groups can interpret popular
forms to their advantage, even without "invitation" from the text. Cer-
tainly more work needs to be done with the positioning of the audience
40. Manning Marable, in How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (Boston:

South End Press, 1983), 157, lists Motown Industries as the largest grossing Black-
owned corporation in the U.S., which did $64.8 million in business in 1979.
41. Sound Effects (New York: Pantheon, 1981), 264.
42. "Notes on Deconstructing 'The Popular'," in People's History and Socialist
Theory, 228.
43. "Spectacular New Film for Diana Ross: Mahogany," Ebony, October 1975,
146.
75
White Privilege and Looking Relations
around the category of race, considering, for instance, the social pro-
hibitions against the Black man's sexual glance, the interracial inter-
mingling of male "looks," and other visual taboos related to sanctions
against interracial sexuality, but these issues are beyond the scope of
this essay.
What I do find is that one of the basic tenants of contemporary
feminist film theory - that the (male) spectator possesses the female
indirectly through the eyes of the male protagonist (his screen sur-
rogate) - is problematized in a film in which racial difference struc-
tures a hierarchy of access to the female image. These racial positions
relate to other scenarios which are unknown by psychoanalytic cate-
gories. Considering the racial categories which psychoanalysis does
not recognize, we see that the white male photographer monopolizes the
classic patriarchal look controlling the view of the female body, and
that the Black male protagonist's look is either repudiated or frus-
trated. The sumptuous image of Diana Ross is made available to the
spectator via the white male character (Sean) but not through the look of
the Black male character (Brian). In the sequence in which Tracy
and Brian first meet outside her apartment building, his "look" is
renounced. In each of the three shots of Tracy from Brian's point of
view, she turns from him, walking out of his sight and away from the
sound of his voice as he shouts at her through a megaphone. The
relationship between the male and female protagonists is negotiated
around Brian's bullhorn, emblem of his charismatic Black leadership,
through which he tries to reach both the Black woman and his con-
stituents. Thus both visual and audio control is denied the Black
male, and the failure of his voice is consistently associated with Tracy
publicity image. The discovery by Brian's aides of the Mahogany ad f
Revlon in Newsweek coincides with the report that the Gallup po
show the Black candidate trailing in the election. Later, the film c
from Mahogany on the Harper's Bazaar cover to Brian's limping ca
paign where the sound of his voice magnified through a microphone
intermittently drowned out by a passing train as he makes his fu
pitch to white factory workers. The manifest goal of the film, the rec
ciliation of the Black heterosexual couple, is thwarted by the commer
cial appropriation of her image, but, in addition, her highly mediated
form threatens the Black political struggle.
Quite simply, then, there are structures relevant to any interpreta
tion of this film which override the patriarchal scenario feminists h
76 Jane Gaines
theorized as formally determining. From Afro-American literat

for instance, we should consider the scenario of the talented a
beautiful mulatta who "passes" in white culture, but decides to retur
to Black society.44 From Afro-American history, we should recall th
white male's appropriation of the Black women's body which we
ened the Black male and undermined the community. We need
develop a theory of Black female representation which takes accoun
"passing" as an eroticizing alternation and a peculiar play on dif
ence, and the corresponding double consciousness it requires of t
who can seem either Black orWhite. Further, we need to reconsider
woman's picture narrative convention - the career renounce
favor of the man - in the context of Black history. Tracy Chambers
choice recapitulates Black aspiration and the white middle class m
which equates stable family life with respectability, but Tracy's
sion is complicated since it favors Black community cooperation
acceptance by white society. Finally, one of the most difficult quest
raised by Afro-American history and literature has to do with inter
cial heterosexuality and sexual "looking." Mahogany suggests th
since a Black male character is not allowed the position of cont
occupied by a white male character, race could be a factor in the
struction of cinema language. More work on looking and racial ta
might determine whether or not mainstream cinema can offer
spectator the pleasure of looking at a white female character via
gaze of a Black male character. Framing the question of male privile
and viewing pleasure as the "right to look" may help us to rethink f
theory along more materialist lines, considering, for instance, how s
groups have historically had the license to "look" openly while o
groups have "looked" illicitly.45 Or, does the psychoanalytic m
44. See, for instance, Jessie Fauset's There is Confusion (New York.: Boni and L
eright, 1924), and Plum Bun ( New York: 1928; rpt. New York and London: Roude
and Kegan Paul, 1985); Nella Larsen's Quicksand (New York: 1928; rpt. New Yo
Collier, 1971), and Passing (New York: 1929; rpt. New York: Collier, 1971).
45. FredricJameson, in "Pleasure: A Political Issue," Formations of Pleasure (Bos
and London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), 7, interprets Mulvey's connection
tween viewing pleasure and male power as the conferral of a "right to look." He
not take this further, but I find the term suggestive and at the same time poten
volatile. I refer to the current division in the women's movement over the need for
pornography legislation. Feminist supporters of the legislation argue that male p
nographic reading and "looking" should be illegal because it is an infringeme
allow us to consider also the prohibitions against homosexuality and

miscegenation?
Feminists who use psychoanalytic theory are careful to point out
that "looking" positions do not correlate with social groups, and that
ideological positioning is placement in a representational system
which has no one-to-one correspondence with social reality. This, of
course, keeps the levels of the social totality hopelessly separate. While
I would not want to argue that form is ideologically neutral, I would
suggest that we have overemphasized the ideological function of"sig-
nifying practice" at the expense of considering other ideological im-
plications of the conflicting meanings in the text. Or, as Terry Lovell
puts it:
... while interpretation depends on analysis of the work's signify-
ing practice, assessment of its meanings from the point of view of
its validity, or of its ideology, depends on comparison between
those structures of meaning and their object of reference, through
the mediation of another type of discourse.46
The impetus behind Marxist criticism, whether we want to admit it or

not, is to make comparisons between social reality as we live it and
ideology as it does not correspond to that reality.
Mahogany is finally about the mythical existence of some illusive and
potent substance. We know it only through what white men do to
secure it, and what Black men are without it. It is the ultimate substance
to the photographer-connoisseur of women who dies trying to record
its "trace" on film. It is known by degree - whatever is most wild and
enigmatic, whatever cannot be conquered or subdued - the last fron-
tier of female sexuality. Although it is undetectable to the advertising
men who analyze physical attributes, it is immediately perceptable to a
woman (Gavina herself, the owner of the Italian advertising agency),
who uses it to promote the most inexplicable and subjective of com-
women's civil rights. For an overview of the debates around pornography as they relate
to film theory see Chuck Kleinhans andJulia Lesage, "The Politics of Sexual Represen-
tation," inJump Cut 30 (March, 1985): 24-26. In the same issue, two articles argue the
political significance of sexual looking for the gay male subculture (Richard Dyer's
"Coming to Terms," 28-29, and Tom Waugh's "Men's Pornography: Gay vs. Straight,"
30-33.) For one of the most provocative analyses of the feminist position on por-
nography, see Joanna Russ, Magic Mommas, Trembling Sisters, Puritans, and Perverts,
(Trumansburg, New York: The Crossing Press, 1985).
46. Pictures of Reality (London: British Film Institute, 1980), 90.
78 Jane Gaines
modities - perfume. In one of the fullest considerations of Bla

female sexuality to date, Hortense J. Spillers correlates the grea
lence on this subject with the unmarked territory that has not yet
designated as culture. Paradoxically, the Black female is though
have ". . . so much sexual potential that she has none at all that a
body is ready and able to recognize at the level of culture."47 B
women's sexuality remains unfathomed, Spillers goes on, because
opportunity to codify one's sexuality belongs only to those in po
even as feminists have theorized women's sexuality, they have unive
salized from the particular experience of white women, thus effect
"deadly metonomy."48
While white feminists theorize the female image in terms of obje
tification, fetishization, and symbolic absence, their Black coun
parts describe the body as the site of symbolic resistance and
"paradox of non-being."49 What strikes me immediately in this c
parison is the stubbornness of the terms of discourse analysis w
cannot be made to deal, for instance, with both what it has historic
meant to be designated as not-human and how Black women w
bodies were not legally their own fought against treatment based on
determination. Further, feminist analysis of culture as patriarchal c
not conceive of any connection between the female image and class
racial exploitation which includes the male. Historically, Black
and women, although equally endangered, have been simultaneou
implicated in incidents of interracial brutality. During two diffe
periods of Afro-American history, sexual assault, ". .. symbolic of t
effort to conquer the resistance the blackwoman could unloose," was
47. "Interstices: A Small Drama of Words," in Pleasure and Danger, 85.

48. Spillers, 78. It is very tempting to contrast the colonized (the body or o
cultural terrain) with a notion of the "authentic," as though something has escap
eluded colonization. We often argue for the integrity of people's indigenous cultu
alternative experience by characterizing it as "pure"; we hope that the colonizer
find the alien culture incomprehensible or "unfathomable." Feminists have rec
slipped into this position as they have created a new mystique based on women's
realized" sexuality - a wild place as yet uncharted by the dominant culture. The
lem is that even this space is filled out with well worn notions of pleasure
fulfillment. Given the opportunity to symbolize, to codify sexuality, the sexual s
dinate can never represent or experience in complete cultural isolation. In borro
Spillers's argument, I have made a case for Black women's sexuality that I would n
have made for female sexuality as a whole. Brackette Williams has correcte
here again.
49. Spillers, 77.
warning to the entire Black community.50 My frustration with the

feminist voice that insists on change at the level of language is that this
position can only deal with the historical situation described above by
turning it into discourse, and even as I write this, acutely aware as I am
of the theoretical prohibitions against mixing representational issues
with real historical ones, I feel the pressure to transpose people's
struggles into more discursively manageable terms.
A theory of ideology which separates the levels of the social forma-
tion in such a way that it is not only inappropriate but theoretically
impossible to introduce the category of history cannot be justified with
Marxism. This has been argued elsewhere by British Marxists,among
them Stuart Hall, who finds the "universalist tendency" found in both
Freud and Lacan responsible for this impossibility. The incom-
patability between Marxism and psychoanalytic theory is insurmount-
able at this time, he argues, because ". .. the concepts elaborated by
Freud (and reworked by Lacan) cannot, in their in-general and universalist
form, enter the theoretical space of historical materialism .. ." What is
needed is "further specification and elaboration - specification at the
level at which the concepts of historical materialism operate (historically-
specific modes of production, specific social formations, ideology as a
determinate and over-determining instance, etc.)."5' In discussions
within feminist film theory, it often seems the other way around - that
historical materialism cannot enter the space theorized by discourse
analysis drawing on psychoanalytic concepts. Sealed off as it is (in
theory), this analysis may not comprehend the category of the real his-
torical subject, but its use will always have implicationsfor that subject.
50. Davis, 11.

51. "Debate: Psychology, Ideology and the Human Subject," Ideology and C
sciousness 2 (October 1977): 118-119.

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White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist Film Theory

Author(s): Jane Gaines

language and strict in its prohibition against making comparison

2. For an overview, see my "Women and Representation: Can We Enjoy Alt

The separation of sociology and psychology is both correct and

In the interest of understanding the social totality, I am suggesting that

4. T.W. Adorno, "Sociology and Psychology," New Left Review 46 (November-

This gender analysis illuminates the condition of white middle-

The feminist commitment to revealing the patriarchal assumptions

ing positions." At issue here is the way these viewing vant

14. "The Straight Mind," Feminist Issues (Summer 1980): 107-111.

obscured the function of gender, the feminist model bas

17. Towards a Black Feminist Criticism (Trumansburg, New York: O

have described race, class, and gender oppression as "interlocking" in

fluidity of the Marxist conception of class.26 The radical femin

32. Omolade, 352.

To explain the ideological function of this film in terms of the co

The connection between gender, class, and race oppression is also

tion and release sells because capitalism cannot deliver we

Here I am drawing on a theory of culture which sees ca

40. Manning Marable, in How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (Boston:

theorized as formally determining. From Afro-American literat

allow us to consider also the prohibitions against homosexuality and

The impetus behind Marxist criticism, whether we want to admit it or

modities - perfume. In one of the fullest considerations of Bla

47. "Interstices: A Small Drama of Words," in Pleasure and Danger, 85.

warning to the entire Black community.50 My frustration with the

50. Davis, 11.

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