Read Online Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge Classics) by Bell Hooks - Free Book Online Page A

can gross $138 million is that people are fascinated right now with questions of otherness and difference. Both Kevin Costner and Neil Jordan repeatedly said that their films had nothing to do with race. Kevin Costner said that “it would be a pity if people went to see The Bodyguard and thought it was about race.” Well, why the fuck does he think millions of people want to see it? Nobody cares about white men fucking black women. People care about the idea of a rich white man—the fictional man, Frank Farmer, but also the real Kevin Costner—being fascinated by Whitney Houston. They went to see a film about love, not about fucking, because we can see any number of porno films where white men are fucking black women. The Bodyguard is about a love so powerful that it makes people transgress certain values. Think again about how it compares with The Crying Game, where once again, we have this theme of desire and love so powerful that it allows one to transcend national identity, racial identity, and finally, sexual identity. I find that to be the ultimate reactionary message in both of these films: We don’t need politics. We don’t need struggle. All we need is desire. It is desire that becomes the place of connection. This is a very postmodern vision of desire, as the new place of transgression that eliminates the need for radical politics.
MFA:
In their introduction to Angry Women, Andrea Juno and V. Vale explained the current fascination with gender bending and sexual transgression as a reaction to over-population. In other words humans know they’ve outgrown a certain system and “are starting to exercise their option to reinvent their biological destinies.” Could that be why desire has become so important?
bh:
That’s a mythopoetic reading that I don’t have problems with, but I think the interesting thing about it is that it returns us to a dream that I think is very deep in this society right now, which is a dream of transformation— of transforming a society—that doesn’t have to engage in any kind of unpleasant, sacrificial, political action. You know a film I saw recently that was very moving to me— and I kept contrasting it to Menace II Society—was the film Falling Down. There is a way to talk about Falling Down as describing the end of Western civilization. Black philosopher Cornel West talks about the fact that part of the crisis we’re in has to do with Western patriarchal biases no longer functioning, and there is a way in which Falling Down is about a white man who’s saying, I trusted in this system. I did exactly what the system told me to and it’s not working for me. It’s lied to me.” That doesn’t mean you have the right to be so angry that you can attack people of color or attack other marginal groups. In so many ways, though, that’s exactly how a lot of white people feel. There’s this sense that if this white supremacist capitalist patriarchy isn’t working for white people—most especially for working-class white men, or middle-class white men—it’s the fault of some others out there. It’s in this way that the structure has fed on itself. The fact is when you have something that gets as fierce as the kind of greed we have right now, then white men are going to have to suffer the fallout of that greed as well. That’s one of the scary things about Bosnia and Croatia: we’re not seeing the fallout played out on the field of the bodies of people of color—which is what America is used to seeing on its television. The dead bodies of color around the world symbolize a crisis in imperialism and the whole freaky thing of white supremacy. It’s interesting that people don’t talk about ethnic cleansing as tied to mythic notions of race purity and white supremacy which are so much a part of what this country is struggling with. What South Africa is struggling with—that myth of white supremacy—is also being played out by black Americans when we overvalue those who