The Marxist Foundations of the Oppositional Gaze

This book provides a foundational study of bell hooks’s groundbreaking theory of the oppositional gaze, which is first introduced in her book, Black Looks (1992), by placing the oppositional gaze on Marxist footing for the first time. While situating hooks’s oppositional gaze within an intellectual tradition of the contemporary gaze emerging with French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault, The Marxist Foundations of the Oppositional Gaze intervenes in the dominant accounts of the gaze, as it appears in and proliferates Western thinking, which largely overlook racialized, gendered, and classed dynamics.

This book also foregrounds hooks’s oppositional gaze as an intersectional concept attuned to hooks’s conceptualization of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Through this foregrounding, Woodson allows the oppositional gaze to traverse cultural studies, black feminism, black studies, queer studies, and literary studies, putting the concept in conversation with how thinkers and scholars such as Jacques Derrida, Jose Esteban Muñoz, Toni Morrison, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Cedric Robinson have all theorized looking, subjectivity, and power. In effect, this book repurposes hooks’s Marxist theorization of the oppositional gaze as that which expands, retools, complicates, and transforms looking relations into a site of resistance and counter-agency, intent on questioning the capitalist moment.