A Hybrid Gaze: Women, Racial Heterogeneity, and Contemporary U.S. Visual Culture

• In Event: Popular Culture in the Ambivalent Construction of Race and Hybridity

Abstract

I analyze verbal rhetoric about Halle Berry’s “visuality.” Berry is envisioned with a “hybrid gaze.” However, this hybrid gaze produces ocular anxiety, simultaneously re-objectifying Berry as “black.” Such a myopic visuality of Berry as just black retains a critique of the dominant racial order, but the conventional (hetero)sexist gaze also returns, objectifying hyper black female sexual anatomy and acts. Furthermore, the proposed solution is a “colorblind” lens. This study has implications for racial progress today.

Author

• Jamie Landau, University of Georgia