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In the spring semester of 2000, when I taught my first Introduction to Women's Studies course, I introduced Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" during a unit on images of women in popular culture. To illustrate Mulvey's analysis of the scopophilic instinct, in which she defines "looking... [as] a source of pleasure," I showed my class a clip from Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window, since she had examined in her essay how the male voyeuristic gaze was used in this film.1 In a "point of view" shot, the camera's gaze frames a close-up of Grace Kelley as she bends down to kiss James Stewart, the character we assume to hold the point of view. My students at least understood how the "look"-as it entailed the power dynamic of "woman as image, man as bearer of the look"-was constructed in cinema once we established this gender paradigm.
However, when I assigned Julie Dash's groundbreaking black feminist film Daughters of the Dust for a screening, my students were unable to comprehend how Dash altered not only the essential gender paradigm but also the racial paradigms of looking relations.2 Somehow, they could not interpret Dash's techniques of African aesthetics: her use of visuals and sounds, her focus on images of black people-specially close-ups of African American women-and her revolutionary form of narrative and cinematography that displaced the white male gaze as "bearer of the look." It was not just that Dash removed this prix ileged gaze from her frame of reference; she also challenged the "visual pleasure" we expect to gain from watching a film. In short, my students, who were primarily white, middle class, and female (give or take three male students) were "visually" challenged by the shift from Hollywood filmmaking models. The three African American female students in this class were an exception; while "confused" by the narrative, they were nonetheless appreciative of the "beautiful" appearances of the black women in this film.
Although I realize that a viewing of Daughters of the Dust would have been difficult for any student unused to such projects as Dash's in restructuring the racial and gender hegemonic practices of filmmaking, I did not prepare them well for Dash's radical departure, even with a feminist film critique such as Mulvey's....