This entry discusses an extract from the book Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices.
In it, Stuart Hall examines stereotyping and how this practice is employed to construct negative representations of people and groups.
We routinely make sense of the world using types – broad categories of things with common characteristics. This allows us to categorise things in a meaningful way, and in turn draw conclusions and extrapolate information about something based on previous experience of things of the same, or similar, type. This is commonly done with people and is not by definition negative.
For example, we assign certain traits to roles such as parent, businessperson, pensioner and so on.
Stereotypes on the other hand, while classifying people in a similar manner,
a) reduce the person to those simplified and exaggerated characteristics,
b) admit no possibility of change, and
c) insist that these characteristic are natural.
Any complexity is ignored and denied, and it is implied that everything that is necessary to know about the person can be known by referring to the traits of the stereotype.
In essence a stereotype declares “this is what you are, and this is all you are”.
Stereotyping also deploys a strategy of splitting – where those who do not fit society’s norms are excluded, and their exclusion is copper-fastened by fitting them to a set of stereotypes deemed unacceptable – the ‘Other’. This denies the possibility of any meaningful discourse about them or with them, and ensures their continued exclusion. This proves most effective when gross inequalities of power allow the dominant group to employ the strategy without challenge.
Hall goes on to examine the nature of this power in more detail, describing how it encompasses various forms of symbolic power as well as the more obvious economic and military ones.
For example, Edward Said has described in detail how representation of the Orient (Orientalism) and Islam (Covering Islam) constitute a form of mass stereotyping that has aided the West in its exertion of hegemonic control over the East. Theorists such as Gramsci and Foucault have dissected the nature of this power at length and would agree that it involves far more than simple force and coercion, and that representational practices such as stereotyping form a key part of the process too. Interestingly Foucault’s view of how power operates at all levels of society and culture, and radiates around in a complex web of directions, would indicate that stereotyping is at work in many subtle ways, and not just from the dominant group downwards.
Hall develops this theme by looking at how racist stereotypes of black males operate. Historically, white slave masters exerted power by denying black men the attributes of grown-up adults – responsibility, authority, sexuality – and this is nowhere more evident than in the practice of referring to them as ‘boy’. This infantilization was often resisted by black males by adopting a code of overly macho behaviour which in turn fed into white fantasies of the excessive sexual appetites and prowess of black men – the ultimate expression of which being the idea that black men are endowed with overly large sexual organs.
While it may seem that a defense against one stereotype merely ends up reinforcing another one, Hall suggests that what is actually happening is more complex than this.
He describes the situation as a stereotypical representation that has both a conscious and an unconscious level:
a) The conscious level – ‘blacks are childlike and are not to be given adult responsibility’ – is a cover-up for the deeper and more troubling
b) unconscious level – ‘blacks are insatiable sexual supermen’.
By rebelling against the conscious level, black men are merely reinforcing the deeper stereotype and hence are caught up in Foucault’s circularity of power.
If such stereotypes are based on deeply suppressed fantasies, and such fantasies cannot be openly expressed, how do they find expression?
Hall answers this by turning to the notion of fetishism – where an object or thing is employed as a substitute for something else that cannot be openly considered.
So, Victorian England could not openly express sexual desire for African women, but instead expressed it by means of supposed scientific contemplation of the anatomy of the so-called Hottentot Venus. In this case, an African woman named Saartjie Baartman was paraded around Europe as an object of curiosity. She was not just subjected to the process of stereotyping but essentially symbolically reduced to a collection of body parts. These body parts served as fetishistic objects standing in for the taboo area of sexual fascination with the ‘Other’.
——————————-////———————————
Cultural representations and signifying practices
Stuart Hall, Open University
The Spectacle of the “Other” summary
According to this chapter, Stereotyping is part of maintenance of social and symbolic order. It is to set up a symbolic frontier between the normal and the deviant, the normal and the pathological, the acceptable and the unacceptable, what belongs and what does not is the ‘OTHER’. Stereotyping is reducing to a few essentials fixed in nature. (example: afro, flat nose, big lips for blacks in comic books)
Stereotyping facilitates binding or bonding together all of us who are ‘normal’ into one imagined community and it sends a symbolic exile to all of them- “the others” who are in some way different.
Who sets the standards and who is responsible for those stereotypes?
According to Gramsci (Italian philosopher) stereotype is a form of struggle for hegemony.
Hegemony is the political, economic, ideological or cultural power exerted by a dominant group over other groups, regardless of the explicit consent of the latter.
So the habit of the ruling group is to establish normalcy. The ruling group has in fact, power (not physical power) but mostly the power to represent someone or something in a certain way within a regime of representation. For example, we live today in a world of Western Hegemony, where the westerns have the power to stereotype the rest of the world, like for example the stereotyping of the Orient (Arabs ride camels, are terrorists, live in the desert…)
Basically, the ‘other’ is someone different and difference is such a compelling theme in the area of representation. Race in fact, became acknowledged as one of the most significant themes of American life and times and this has rooted itself into all sorts of visual representations: advertising which uses black models, newspaper reports about immigration, racial attacks or urban crime, films and magazines which deal with ‘race’ and ethnicity as significant themes.
This chapter pays particular attention to representational practices of blacks to portray difference and stereotypes. It also explains the origins and the history behind the dominant way by which we perceive blacks and represent them. As much as we try to hide it, the repertoire of stereotypical figures drawn from the slavery days has never entirely disappeared. We claim that we consider blacks as non-different from us, but every time a black person is represented, it is over analyzed and over explained by both the white and black community. We still perceive the black masculinity and sexuality as something different. The authors explained the starting point behind the representation of blacks as ‘others’ and their implications.
It all began with the white slave owners (the ruling group). Typical of this racialised regime of representation, is the practice of reducing the black cultures to nature or naturalizing the difference. The logic behind it is that if the difference between black and white is culture then it is subject to change. But if the difference is natural – as the slaveholders believed, then it is fixed in history, thus secure forever. When we talk about natural difference then we are talking about the black body, the black masculinity and sexuality and that is why we are prone to use the black body in our forms of representation. The mentality started with the white slave owner who fantasized about “the big black penis”.
They fantasized about the sexual appetites and prowess of black men. This was a troubling fantasy and improper to express and that is why it took form in black representation.
Whites resorted to infantilizing meaning to treat the black slave as an infant (giving him absolutely no responsibilities for example) in order to “castrate” him and deprive him from his masculinity (it even became a literal castration in the lynching of black men).
This for example explains why whites used to call blacks: BOY! This “infantilization” created a counter reaction in the black community. Black men have had to resort to “toughness” as a defensive response. Thus when black men act as macho they seem to challenge the stereotype (that they are only children) to only create another form of stereotype that is a black is a rioter, a mugger, a villain and so on and so forth.
The problem today is that blacks are trapped by the binary structure of the stereotype. A black is either an infant (blacks represented for example as waiters, or cocktail servants) or a macho (a black represented as a pimp or gangster) thus blacks are both childlike and oversexed and have to struggle between the two.
This racialised regime of representation has been contested several times.
Blacks and whites have tried to reverse the stereotype representing the blacks as heroes.
Blacks were sometimes neither worse nor better than whites (thus eliminating difference). They were represented in the usual human shapes – good bad and non-different. These counter forms of representation have gained success among black and white communities. Nevertheless among some critics, the judgment on their success as a representational counter strategy has come to be seen as blaxploitation forms.
We today, still use black people in our forms of representation. We attempt to make the stereotypes work against themselves by deliberately working on the idea of black sexuality through the use of the black body instead of avoiding the dangerous terrain of its controversial use. Some other times, we also refer to blacks in our forms of representation to celebrate diversity and difference by showing blacks in a positive situation (for example a black man taking care of his kids or a black woman in a political background) or in ads (like Benetton). But here again, critical reception has been mixed. The black person is still portraying difference and we are still using him to sell a product or an idea.
Sonali Fernando (Filmmaker, 1992) suggests that the imagery today cuts both ways:
a) it suggests on one hand the complex racial identity of our world that is full of similarities and differences
b) but on the other hand it homogenizes all non- white cultures as “other” (seen by the continuous use of racial figures in our forms of representation for example: Asians, latinos in ads etc…)
In conclusion, the “other” is a fascinating subject and that is why we use it in the dominant regime of representation in order to create intended and unintended meanings. The “other” still catches your attention whether you are racist or not because he/she is simply different.
Different from whom?
Well, different from the norms that the ruling groups have created.
This makes us challenge the way we perceive the other on an individual matter and what we consider or what they made us consider being normal or different. This chapter, explains “the spectacle of the other” and pushes us to question and analyze things we were indifferently accustomed to see.