TEXT CHOSEN:
I have chosen to write about bell hook’s piece “Is Paris Burning?” and how Livingston’s film Paris is Burning, displays a marginalized community.
DESCRIPTION/SUMMARY:
The text is meaningful to me because it is from a black feminist perspective. Furthermore, hooks actively advocates for a more critical and engaged form of spectatorship, in which the audience is active and engaged in the media they consume, and is able to think critically about the content they are viewing. As a black aspiring filmmaker, it’s important to me that viewers and filmmakers both actively question harmful stereotypes and ideologies in cinema.
AUDIENCE SPECULATION:
The intended audience I am imagining for my close-reading essay is white filmmakers, enthusiasts, or casual filmmakers. As consumers with power, it is important to be aware of representations that create a “spectacle” that distracts from the underlying issues and allows dominant groups to maintain their dominance.
FORMAL AND GENERIC CONVENTIONS:
Two generically similar texts to this piece are Manthia Diawara’s piece “Black Spectatorship and Problems of Identification and Resistance” and Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure in Cinema”
Diawara’s work challenges the idea that all black viewers challenge depictions of themselves in typical Hollywood narratives. Diawara also proposes that some white spectators resist the racial representation of themselves. Diawara further discusses the issues with color-blind gender analysis with spectatorship in cinema. Mulvey’s piece describes the paradox of phallocentrism and its manifestation through film. Just like society, filmmaking centers on men and their pleasure.
CONTENT:
I intend to talk about my object in relation to a standard film/text analysis.
COURSE THEMATICS:
I think that my reading intersects/overlaps with class in these ways: racialization & intersectionality
QUESTIONS:
I am struggling with figuring out what aspects of hooks’ argument to focus on and how to effectively organize my argument.
Sources:
Diawara, Manthia. “[PDF] Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance: Semantic Scholar.” Screen, 1 Jan. 1988, https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Black-Spectatorship%3A-Problems-of-Identification-and-Diawara/4a6c1c1ab87378ea6075adb5e68d2a330c4b987a.
Mulvey, Laura. “VISUAL PLEASURE IN NARRATIVE CINEMA.” Luxonline, Screen, Vol. 16, 1975, https://www.luxonline.org.uk/articles/visual_pleasure_and_narrative_cinema(printversion).html.