ABSTRACT
The "gaze" has been and is a site of resistance for colonized black people globally. When most black people in the United States first had the opportunity to look at film and television, they did so fully aware that mass media was a system of knowledge and power reproducing and maintaining white supremacy. It was the oppositional black gaze that responded to these looking relations by developing independent black cinema. Black films were also subject to critical interrogation. Constructing feminist film theory along the lines enables the production of a discursive practice that need never theorize any aspect of black female representation or spectatorship. Black female spectators have gone to films with awareness of the way in which race and racism determined the visual construction of gender. Black female spectators actively chose not to identify with the film's imaginary subject because such identification was dis-enabling.
