Lookin Ass and the Oppositional Gaze

Going off of Melissa’s initial posting of Nicki Minaj’s music video, “Lookin Ass,” I was immediately reminded of Bell Hooks’s, “The Oppositional Gaze.” I was particularly struck by Melissa’s analysis, “In Nicki’s video, close ups of her body, specifically her butt, represent the typical sexualization of black women. This makes the critique that follows in […]

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Women’s March Speech Calls on and for Intersectionality

I choose to examine Tamika Mallory’s speech at the Women’s March on Washington. The march is receiving a lot of criticism in regards to the number of white women who attended the march and focused on single-axes issues and were not inclusive of all women identities. This critique thus focuses itself around the principle of […]

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African American Women in Music Videos

In her essay “The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators,” bell hooks discusses the relationship of black women to mass media that renders them invisible. Whereas previous scholarship by Laura Mulvey put forward a binary of possible viewing positions centered on identification with either the male/dominant or the female/submissive viewpoint put forward in media, hooks discusses […]

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YouTube to The UN

This YouTube video is from Ingrid Nilsen, who is a popular YouTube personality, and has become more exploratory in the realms of politics and social issues in the recent years. Ingrid publicly came out as a lesbian on her YouTube channel in June of 2015 to her large audience, and the entire Internet. More recently, […]

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Intersectionality in Bend it Like Beckham

This clip relates to Kimberle Crenshaw’s article on intersectionality in American culture. In this clip, Jess, the young Punjabi Sikh soccer aficionado gets a talking to from her parents for violating religious, cultural, and gender norms. For this movie, a white feminist interpretation is not sufficient. While one might try to analyze Jess’s religiously and […]

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If I Were A Boy – Beyoncé. Does It Do Enough?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWpsOqh8q0M (Links to an external site.) In the music video for Beyonce’s 2009 song, If I Were A Boy, Beyonce switches gender roles with her boyfriend for one day. She becomes a police officer who ignores her partner’s breakfast in the morning and flirts with her co-worker. Meanwhile, her partner sits at his desk job looking at wedding […]

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Intersectionality in Gaming

I wanted to take a look at how intersectionality could apply to something that isn’t as widely critiqued as other forms of media, video games. The video mentions that there’s been a very recent increase in the realization of sexism in mainstream video games, however even with this progress being made there is little to […]

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Black Feminism is a Necessity | Crenshaw & Cohen

This video pertains to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s writings about the condition of black women and intersectional feminism and Cathy Cohen’s piece about queer politics. As mentioned in this video clip (and as we did in class), black women stand at a unique intersection in which they fall into two distinct subsets of minority: black and female. Thusly, […]

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