Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: My paper critiques aspects of psychoanalytic film theory using the historical and contemporary image of film star Diahann Carroll. This paper is part of a larger interrogation into the historical nature of looking relations within cinema and how this speculative (fantasy) relationship impacts our understanding of the other that can be both female and non-white. Using the image of Carroll, my paper begins to theorize the cinematic practices of looking at African American women in the context of a broader and deeper alteration of looking relations the civil rights movement engendered whereby discourses on race and gender were transformed by an organized push for social change. 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. Although I find myself drawn to many of the issues raised by psychoanalytic feminist film critics such as Kaja Silverman concerning how suture operates to encode sexual difference, as a black woman I am a bit wary. Two main concepts within the frame of psychoanalytic film theory cause me to worry: the way in which the theory does not account for agency within the system of the look and the notion of the male gaze.