Homo-sapiens can be redefined as homo-reflectus i.e. beings living by and for refined reflections of the self. And the 'reflections element' of the species is inherent in what each person ultimately accepts as being human. Examination of this inherent and common reality that one can't avoid living by and can’t imagine life without leads us to the inevitability of transaction of reflection through the currency of given, received, refuted or accepted gazes. An examination into the language we speak, the religion we follow, the philosophies we cherish, the dresses we wear, the lifestyle we follow, the things we feel free to see and the eyes we allow to be seen by, the cinema we prefer to watch, the way we prefer to be seen in the cinema, everything that made us who we are homo-reflectus is a manifested gaze.
As bell hooks in the Oppositional Gaze, puts it,” there is power in looking” because, she quotes Fanon, “This “look’ from - so to speak - the place of the other - fixes us, not only in its violence, hostility, and aggression but in the ambivalence of its desire.” Thus, an act of viewing a film is not just an act of participation in the gaze but also a participation in the power relation, a participation in the manifestation of how one is gazed at and thus defined, aggrieved, glorified and or fixed in the accepted grammar of the community. The gaze becomes as Fanon said more “oppressing “and “fixing” when it is compounded by the vocabulary of race introduced into it. The masculine, patriarchal gaze that sanctions a defined rendition for what 'the woman image' should be and this image is one that takes the woman as reflections of the wishes of the man. The oppression becomes more when the woman factor is coupled with color and racism.
Before cinema or other forms of projected images exercised the power of 'sanctioned looking’, language is the first mirror that the homo-reflectus is introduced into the exercise of the privileges of gaze. Each member of the community of language is offered preordained sets of eyes and perspectives with the grammar as spectacles into the self and into the world and into others. And all languages are statements of the power relations in a community. Language is a power relation manifest in the binaries between the strong and the weak, the privileged and the dispossessed, the man and the women and the master and the slave. It is thus evident to notice that the language of a patriarchal mode of thinking and sanctions a patriarchal mirror as the way of viewing the world in spite of the gender differences of its members.
As a result of the grammar of patriarchy, a woman for millennia, 'should teach' herself to see herself in terms of the secondary station she is given. She is an extension of a man a wo-man, she is the secondary, almost accidental being in the thought of the gods who happen to create her out of the man and for the man. In the patriarchy, religion is the first technology that gave the technical definition for the woman. And every subsequent technology both in ideas and in 'forms' have perpetuated the male gaze as 'the gaze,' the defining gaze that coffers on one the right of acceptance and conformity to be recognized as sane. A catalog of laws and rights that women were not part of the beneficiaries are numerous and are still many. The male universal gaze is the most common mirror awaiting any homo-reflectus as truth if it chose to comply, bow down and rhythm with the system. This is how the gaze works in cinema.
What is true for the man-woman binary is also true for the black-white binary. It is compounded when the double layered identification of black and woman come together into the gaze scene dominated by the patriarchal eyes. In the complex and yet fully unresolved racial scene of motion pictures in the west, where the black body in general and black women’s bodies, in particular, were subject of the centuries of defined set of conjugation in the grammar of the white-male-racist, gaze, the cinema not only projects the same but insists to impose it too. Hooks to this end writes that “Critical interrogating black looks were mainly concerned with issues of race and racism, the way racial domination of blacks by white overdetermined representation.”
That anything produced by the patriarchal grammar being a way to perpetuate its gaze is one thing while adding gender, race, and class makes the gazing dynamics even more complex. That is why a simple act of being at a movie theatre is enough an exercise of projected, accepted, resisted gazes in play both by self and others attesting to our tendency to seek refined reflections of self.
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