Racializing “the Male Gaze”: Images of Black Women in American Cinema
and the Limits of Feminist Film Theory
In this paper I would like to draw from cultural studies a means of analyzing the
relationships between film, audiences and social contexts, interrogating specifically the nature of
cultural texts representing not only racial difference but gender This effort is part of my larger
examination of filmic instances of African American women being constituted as a racialized
other and to interpret the process by which such representations become part of a totalizing
hegemonic discourse within feminist film criticism, especially psychoanalytic modes of film
theory. I would like to examine the presence and meaning of Diahann Carroll's star image in
television and film. Carroll who played the widowed nurse Julia Baker in the 1968 TV series
Julia also starred in several films beginning in the mid 1950s and into the 1970s. Using
biographical and archival materials, I want to look at how a veteran African-American
entertainer through her on-screen and off-screen persona contributed to a fundamental change in
the traditional discourse not only of sitcoms but cinematic representations of black women in
general. I propose to study how Carroll is situated within the ideological discourse of these films
and how they act as a commentary on a larger discourse of race and gender in America. Her
televisual image was reflexive and came to redefine Carroll’s off-screen persona. Her image
aligned her with a “respectable” upper-class social type that positioned her outside the
boundaries of the emerging politics of the Black Nationalist movement of the era, an ascendant
discourse that had a role in getting her on Prime-time TV in the first place.
As a star, Carroll represented at once a convergence of media signs that signified
“preferred,” negotiated, and oppositional hegemonic discourses on race, socio-economic class,
and gender.
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