Pre Class Post 11/30

After reading Bell Hooks “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” it made me think of how pervasive the image of the Other is in mass media on a daily basis. Hooks view on Othering and advertising was what caught my attention the most because I had never viewed advertising in displaying domination over the Other. Hooks says, “For it is the ever present reality of racist domination, of white supremacy, that renders problematic the desire of white people to have contact with the Other. Often it is this reality that is most masked when representations of contact between white and non-white, white and black, appear to mass culture” (371). The problematic aspect of Othering in advertisements is that it gives the illusion of an anti-racist sentiment because, “it offers the promise of recognition and reconciliation” (370). Hooks gives the example of the Bennetton advertisements because of the diverse images that they show.

This allows consumers to feel as though they are getting close to the notion of the Other but also keeps distance at the same time. Hooks says, “One desires “a bit of the Other” to enhance the blank landscape of whiteness” (372). The other represents the extreme different, the possibility of danger, and the break away from the traditional. The consumers take advantage of the Other to improve upon their own lives. Brining the other into their own life “will provide a greater, more intense pleasure than any that exists in the ordinary world of one’s familiar racial group” (369). This is able to occur because from a non-critical perspective it seems like people are merging culturally to make a more united world.