1. Walking a Fragile Line: Precious and the Politics of Racialized Representation in Hollywood
Cinema
Candidate Number: 75705
Professor Sadie Wearing
GI 410
April 27, 2015

2. 1
Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin’s chapter on “The Concept of Whiteness and
American Film” identifies an insidious contradiction between the recent gains of non-white
people and characters in Hollywood vis-à-vis the unrelenting circulation of racialized
representations that stabilize the hegemonic position of whiteness.1 The work of these two
scholars offers a provocative starting point for considering the linkages between Hollywood
cinema as an ideological apparatus and the politics of representation. The cultural theorist
Stuart Hall further highlights how the media serves as a crucial site for the production and
transformation of racist ideologies that constructs “a definition of what race is, what meaning
the imagery of race carries, and what the ‘problem of race’ is understood to be.”2 It is
precisely this growing concern over the perpetuation of racist representations in Hollywood
films that framed the controversy surrounding the ‘crossover’ success of the 2009 film
Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire. Set in Harlem, 1987, the film follows the
story of Claireece “Precious” Jones, an obese, illiterate 16-year old incest survivor who
survives on welfare with her abusive mother, Mary. This paper will critically assess the ways
in which the derogatory stereotypes of blackness in Precious raise complex issues regarding
the politics of racialized representations in mainstream cinema. Before it is possible to
produce a nuanced analysis of Precious, it is necessary to first outline the socio-political
dilemmas of the burdens imposed on racialized representations in relation to Hollywood’s
recent string of successful ‘crossover black’ films. This paper will then move to apply the
work of black feminist film theory to interrogate particular scenes of Precious as sites of
resistance to racialized representations of dominant cinema. Following this, the paper will
address the significant cultural interventions Precious articulates by representing the bare life
existence of a subaltern community. Finally, this paper will consider the ways in which the
film’s ambiguous ending serves to strengthen the significance of Precious’s ambivalent and
contradictory representational strategies.

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Black Cultural Productions and the ‘Burden of Representation’
Almost every year following the critical acclaim and box office profits experienced
by Precious in 2009, Hollywood has released another successful ‘crossover black’ film: The
Help (2011), Django Unchained (2012), The Butler (2013), 12 Years A Slave (2013), and
Selma (2014). Importantly, this is not to suggest a casual argument whereby the success of
Precious must be taken as evidence of a greater acceptance of ‘black’ films in mainstream
white cinema. Rather, these films can be connected through the ways in which their explicitly
political content is contradicted by how their narratives reproduce racialized and colonial
controlling images of blackness, such as the mammy, Jezebel and slave.3
The discursive representations of blackness in these films become hypervisible in a
mainstream cultural context dominated by white patriarchal capitalist ideologies. In this way,
the heightened sensitivity towards racial stereotypes as speaking on behalf of an entire group
of people derives from what has been called the “burden of representation.”4 The burden of
representation facing particular social groups can be contextualized within broader
ideological media processes of ‘symbolic annihilation’ that invisibilize the voices and stories
of marginalized social groups as a representable group.5 Thus, the aforementioned films
directly oppose the limited historical and contemporary presence of leading non-white
characters (both male and female) in Hollywood cinema. In other words, when confronted
with representations of black people in mainstream media, “the analysis of images has a
heightened political inflection, since representations of black people are always deemed to
‘mean’ something, to be laden with symbolism in regard to ‘race’ in racially stratified
societies.”6 This representational burden held by ‘black’ Hollywood films propagates a
binary opposition that demarcates such films on the basis of whether or not their portrayals of
black people are positive or negative.

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Within this recent string of mainstream black cultural productions, Precious remains
distinctive in the way it has elicited a contentious debate over the politics of its representation
of black welfare recipients. Unlike the other ‘historical’ dramas based on the real events and
triumphs of black people, Precious is a fictional story that has been forcefully criticized in
reaffirming for mainstream white audiences the most derogatory stereotypes of the rapacious
black male and the ‘Welfare Queen.’ 7 Implicit in these discussions is a Foucauldian
understanding that the discursive representations of the welfare queen and Precious’s
sexually abusive father operate within unequal relations of power that regulate knowledge
and social conduct. 8 As Precious’s representations seemingly support ideological and
historical controlling images of blackness, the film has consequently, polarized critics,
audiences, and the black community over how black people are represented in movies.9 For a
marginalized community that has been historically denied control over how they are
represented, Precious has incited discussion over the need for ‘positive’ representations in
mainstream black cultural productions.
Critically, this paper seeks to avoid reproducing the binary framing of the film’s
stereotypes in terms of moralizing judgments of ‘positive’ or ‘negative.’ This is because, as
bell hooks has argued, the policing of images by black audiences to push for more “positive”
images limits what can be created and thus, forecloses opportunities for diverse
representations of blackness.10 In order to move away from these binary oppositions, it is
necessary to incorporate black feminist scholarship that invokes the visual pleasure of the
“oppositional gaze” to reposition black female subjectivity in relation to stereotyped
cinematic constructions of black female bodies.11 Therefore, a more productive analysis of
Precious moves away from reductive debates over stereotypes and instead examines how the
film’s representations of black women simultaneously reinforces and destabilizes the
centrality of whiteness in mainstream cinema.

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Complicating Precious: ‘You Think You Know Who I Am’
The purpose of applying black feminist film theory and the oppositional gaze is to
draw attention to the cinematic language, practices and techniques used throughout Precious
to intervene in and complicate hegemonic discussions of the politics of racialized
representation. Specifically, the oppositional gaze is a site of resistance for colonized black
spectators, whereby “the ability to manipulate one’s gaze in the face of structures of
domination that would contain it, opens up the possibility of agency.” 12 Critically
interrogating Precious concerns exploring the moments in the film that disrupt the spectator’s
enjoyment of the stereotypically degrading and dehumanizing representations of the black
‘other.’ First, this paper will illustrate how Precious disrupts the dominance of whiteness by
juxtaposing scenes where the ‘savior’ light-skinned characters pathologize Mary with
Precious’s fantasies of deracination. Secondly, this paper will address scenes in which
Precious and Mary acknowledge their existence as bare life under the auspices of white
supremacist capitalist patriarchy.
The narrative of Precious develops a stark contrast between the light-skinned and
dark-skinned characters through their treatment of Precious. The light-skinned characters of
Ms. Rain (the teacher preparing Precious for her GED) and Ms. Weiss (Precious’s social
worker) are discursively positioned as saviors and symbols of safety.13 When Ms. Rain and
Ms. Weiss learn of the abuse Precious has endured at the hands of her mother and father, the
close-up shots of their disgusted reactions reiterates the controlling image of the welfare
queen that criminalizes Black motherhood.14 In these scenes, the compassion expressed by
the light-skinned characters function to interpellate the audiences as benevolent witnesses to
Precious’s suffering. Furthermore, Ms. Rain and Ms. Weiss can be read as personifying a
white colonial gaze that orchestrates the vilification of the monstrous black female ‘other.’15
Black women on welfare do not simply transgress boundaries of normative behavior, but also

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signify the ‘other’ against which the black middle class and white society are measured.16 By
oppositionally defining the light- and dark-skinned characters Precious appears to be reifying
social and cultural understandings of racial difference. However, such a narrow critique
obscures the more nuanced and complex moments in which the dark-skinned characters re-
orient their gaze to articulate their awareness of and disturb hegemonic ideologies of
whiteness.
A fundamental aspect of this film’s complicated position vis-à-vis the politics of
racialized representation are the instances where its stereotyped characters subvert,
interrogate, and counter conventionalized representations. In other words, Precious
exemplifies an incisive clash of gaze whereby the main characters are shown to be “painfully
aware of the dominance of whiteness, precisely because they are repeatedly excluded from its
privileges.”17 Nowhere is this more clearly captured than when Precious is getting ready for
school and she imagines herself in the mirror as a pretty, white, blonde-haired skinny girl.18
Set in her dark room with low-key lighting, the close-up of Precious’s disappointed face
reflects the hopelessness of Precious’s desire to fit into discourses of idealized white
femininity. In this scene, Precious’s fantasy of deracination orients her black female gaze
directly at the white girl’s (colonizing) eyes in a way that emphasizes how Precious’s
“blackness was there, dark and unarguable. And it tormented [her], pursued [her], disturbed
[her], angered [her].”19 This intersubjective encounter between the fantasy of whiteness and
Precious’s body articulates a “talking back” against norms of whiteness that challenges the
mainstream spectatorial positioning of audiences towards Precious as abnormal. Existing at
the margins of representation, Precious’s racialized body constructs her as an abject and
marginal subject who is oppressed by regulatory discourses of whiteness.20
Precious’s derogatory representations of blackness supplies a critique of the processes
through which the stigmatizing of blackness is naturalized by the privileging of whiteness. It

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is by juxtaposing these two scenes that it is possible to appreciate how Precious embodies
Stuart Hall’s notion of “double movement” that describes how “popular culture can
accommodate the possibility of both containment and resistance.”21 This is because Precious
interpellates the audience in a contradictory manner as social subjects, whose shifting
identifications with the light-skinned characters and Precious, render the spectators complicit
in the (re)production of the ideology of whiteness that constructs particular bodies as subjects
and others as objects.22 The audience is thus, addressed by the disturbing recognition that the
identity of Precious (and by extension, blackness) is relationally understood through what it
lacks (whiteness). In this moment, the story affectively shapes the viewer in a discomforting
manner through explicitly addressing the ‘unnamed’ dimension of whiteness. Furthermore,
Precious complicates the politics of racialized representation through deploying
identificatory mechanisms of mainstream cinema on behalf of the colonized, racialized
other.23
This turning back of the white colonial gaze articulates the struggle between
competing identifications and discourses of racialized representation that exist at the very
core of the contentious nature of Precious. 24 Black feminist film theory opens up the
possibility for Precious to intervene in the politics of representation by obliging its audience
to view themselves through colonizing eyes. Specifically, the Black female spectator is
interpellated into a contradictory position where she is at once drawn to identify with the
light-skinned characters and Precious, yet must resist racist readings of Mary and Precious’s
father as dangerous threats. 25 This critical reading of Precious demonstrates how these
moments of contradiction negate the traditional enjoyment spectators receive from films
premised upon dehumanizing representations of blackness. As Stuart Hall has written, black
popular culture itself is a site of contradiction and strategic contestation as it attempts to
negotiate the dominance of “European ideologies, cultures and institutions, alongside… a

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very profound set distinctive, historically defined black experiences.”26 Thus, Precious denies
commodifying race and ethnicity as resources of pleasure by linking Precious’s suffering to
the dominating structures of white supremacist patriarchy.27 By capitalizing on the instability
of cinematic identification, Precious challenges assumption that representations of
derogatory stereotypes cannot perform important cultural work.
Subaltern Stories and Cinema’s Third Space: ‘Who was gonna love me?’
As it stands, this paper has focused on the ways in which the cinematic techniques of
Precious manipulates the gaze of its characters and audience to expose whiteness as a
phenomenology that shapes how bodies ‘take up’ space and affect what they ‘can do.’28 Now,
this paper turns to address the crucial cultural work Precious performs by disrupting the
racially informed silences of real peoples struggles that are obfuscated by systemic
dehumanization.29 As a movie that places the lives of black welfare recipients at the heart of
its narrative, Precious’s burden of representation centers on its depiction of a social group
whose voice is rarely heard, but is often spoken about by dominating social groups. The
protagonists of Precious represent “bare life, that is, the life of homo sacer (sacred man), who
may be killed and not yet sacrificed.”30 The concept of bare life is implicated in the
differential recognizability of one’s precarious life whereby grievability is contingent on
assumptions that the life matters.31 Precious and Mary Jones symbolize the ‘faces’ of black
welfare recipients who are suffering subjects that exist outside the realm of full political
subjectivity. By confronting the demonizing political discourses of race, class, and gender
that shape the image of black women on welfare, Precious operates at the ambiguous level of
political affect with an aim “to move audience[s] to recognize the enormous inequalities that
divide ‘them’ from ‘us’.”32
Throughout the film, voiceover narration and close-up shots to interpellate the
audience to emotionally invest in the historically marginalized struggles of bare life in the

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film. A primary example of this is in the beginning of the film when Precious takes an
assessment test and in a voiceover professes that “[t]hese tests paint a picture of me and my
mother, my whole family as less than dumb. Just ugly, black grease to be wiped away.”33
Precious is not speaking of simply feeling inferior, but rather expressing her feelings of
nonexistence.34 In essence, Precious is articulating an awareness of that her experiences of
vulnerability and suffering are erased through systemic processes of exclusion. As such,
Precious offers mainstream white audiences insight into the abject “unlivability” of life at the
margins of representation.35 However, the politics of Precious’s racialized representation
become increasingly complex in the film’s penultimate scene where Mary delivers a
powerful and moving speech that targets the trope of the welfare queen.
When confronted by Ms. Weiss to explain the abuse Precious endured at home, Mary
delivers a powerful, humanizing testimony of her lived experience as a person society has
reduced to the status of a ‘monster.’ In attempting to blame Precious for her own suffering,
Mary challenges Ms. Weiss to “write notes about who you think I am, and why you think I
did and all of that, because I didn’t have nobody.”36 By using close-up shots of an emotional
Mary, the film produces an uncomfortable identification in the audience through
contradicting its previous depiction of Mary as a monster. In contesting society’s demonizing
image of black women on welfare, Mary is re-signified as a tragic figure whose exclusion
from society is both humiliating and sad.37 It is precisely in these moments of subversion,
where issues such as the reedemability of Mary are complicated, that Precious intervenes into
prevailing cultural discourses. Thus, Mary’s interrogating gaze directed at Ms. Weiss’s image
of Mary as a welfare queen is symbolic of racial ideologies that blame “black women for
economic deprivation, political disenfranchisement, and social isolation and deflects attention
away from broader structural issues such as unemployment, low wages… [and] a poor public
school system.”38 By placing the hypervisible, but culturally underrepresented, black women

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receiving welfare at the centre of Precious, the film engages with and attempts to destabilize
stereotyped images of the welfare queen in its contradictory moments that encourage
spectators to adopt a critical position.39 Such a critical position should not entail normative
judgments on whether or not the stereotypes in Precious are positive or negative, but rather
considers the politics of cultural representations that hold this ‘crossover’ film accountable
for what is shown to mainstream white audiences.
Although Precious follows a familiar Hollywood trajectory with its affective
dynamics, these moments of rupture demonstrate an awareness of the film’s inherent burden
in its representation of black welfare recipients. A crucial element underlying this burden is
recognizing how Precious negotiates the asymmetrical power and knowledge relations
between those with the privilege to watch the suffering of the ‘others.’ 40 It is the
contradictions within the film that opens a third space that unsettles the racial, colonial
discourses of blackness through its unstable processes of identification that subjects the
dominating powers to the gaze of the subaltern.41 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak introduces the
subaltern as a social group whose voices are suppressed by their systematic exclusion from
political representation. Therefore, Mary’s speech is significant in the way it speaks to a
cultural identity whose present precarious lived experience must be articulated through
Therefore, Mary’s speech is significant because it speaks to the history of a cultural
identity whose present conditions remain fundamentally shaped by the past experiences and
discourses of black women. The complex interpellation of Mary as a lamentable welfare
recipient is constituted through her testimony of her traumatic experience as the racialized,
colonized other and a recognition of the relational differences that constitutes “what we have
become.”42 Although there is a strong case to be made for the problematic dimensions of
Mary’s representation, what is of greater critical concern is how her presence and voice
provides access to an untold and hidden history of a suppressed social group. Thus, an

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analysis of Precious’s racialized representations that shifts its focus away from “images” to
that of “voices” and “discourses” is able to identify with and restore a voice to the
voiceless. 43 Put another way, embedded in the contradictions of Precious’s racialized
representation is a struggle over the power to narrate for colonized people to assert their own
identity and existence.ß 44 The chief underlying element that complicates the politics of
Precious’s representations is its very resistance to a Hollywood narrative that attempts to
bridge the gap between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ This uncomfortable identification has helped
Precious strike a chord of profound recognition in the black community that share in an
“anger at a world that [they] know holds [them] in subtle and not-so-subtle contempt.”45 As
such, Precious exemplifies Stuart Hall’s vital insight that cultural identity is simultaneously
constituted through processes of both “becoming” and “being.”46 However, it is imperative to
address how the ambiguity of Precious’s final scene contributes to the film’s ambivalent set
of representational strategies.
Precious: Ambiguity and Ambivalence in its Final Scene
As a melodrama focused on subjects of suffering, Precious exposes broad issues of
injustice that it cannot be properly or neatly resolved.47 Nowhere is this more evident than in
the film’s final scene that depicts Precious severing ties with Mary, taking custody of both
her children and planning on completing her GED. While the playing of “It Took A Long
Time” in the background supports this hopeful message, it is also undercut by the knowledge
that the newly diagnosed HIV-positive Precious must negotiate her survival in a racist system
that scarcely recognizes her humanity.48 The absence of a clear indication that Precious will
thrive in the future reifies the marginal social status that Precious and other black female
welfare recipients continue to occupy. Here it is necessary to apply the work of José Esteban
Muñoz on disidentification strategies to illustrate how Precious functions to “works on and
against dominant ideology” by neither directly assimilating nor opposing such structures.49 In

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other words, Precious contests the social subordination of black women on welfare through
the transgressive representations of Mary and Precious that illuminate the contradictory
impulses embedded in ideological discourses of blackness.50 Meaning that the competing
narratives of hope and despair in the final scene reflect the film’s broader exploration of
Precious and Mary’s struggle to claim an individual identity against socially constituted
racialized and colonial stereotypes of black women. The previously discussed moments of
resistance in the film capture this struggle by drawing attention to the dominance of white
norms and ideologies in shaping the lived experiences of both Precious and Mary.
Furthermore, this unsettling ending contravenes the traditional expected ‘feel-good’
ending of mainstream Hollywood cinema. In doing so, Precious functions to deny the
conventional pleasures provided by spectatorial identification through a “narrative pattern of
Blacks playing by hegemonic rules and losing.”51 Therefore, Precious attempts to construct a
critical, rather than cathartic, spectator position in relation to its complex representation of the
suffering of black women on welfare. This is not to assert that Precious will interpellate all of
its spectators in a monolithic manner. Rather, this is meant to emphasize the ways in which
the contradictions in Precious and its representations reinforce the mutually constitutive
dialogue produced through the spectator and the text. 52 It is these moments of
“interdiscourse” where subjects bring their own sets of discourses and histories to a text that
produces different (and in the case of Precious, highly divisive) reactions.53 Acknowledging
the potentiality for multiple meanings and readings of Precious reiterates the need to
interrogate film analyses that approach stereotypical representations through the binary logic
of positive or negative. The diversity of ways in which a text, the cinematic apparatus, and
discourses interacts with and is shaped by cross-cultural spectatorship creates a dialogue that
reflects the unequal relations of power in society. As a consequence, when Stephen Pimpare
argues that Precious is less a film about black welfare recipients and more a film about the

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redemption of the white middle-class, he has missed considering the complex politics rooted
in the film’s racialized representations. 54 Or when Alison Hallet contends that the real
success of Precious is that it makes a poor, fat, black girl a sympathetic protagonist, she
obscures the film’s disidentificatory processes that make the difference between the lives of
black women on welfare and mainstream white audiences palpable and significant.55
The privileging of critiques against Precious that make the case for positive images of
blackness elides the significant potential for derogatory racialized representations to make
critical interventions in such discourses. Drawing again from Muñoz’s work, the
representations of black welfare recipients in Precious is a mode of counterpublicity that
contradicts white normativity in the service of subaltern voices.56 Such a reading of Precious
clearly articulates the means by which the visible racial ‘otherness’ of the dark-skinned
characters in Precious uncomfortably challenges American culture’s difficulties in
acknowledging its traumatic history.57 It is this emphasis on difference that undergirds the
complicated nature of the politics surrounding the racialized representations in Precious.
More to the point, the ambivalence of the representational strategies in Precious demands a
“[m]utual recognition of racism [and] its impact both on those who are dominated and those
who dominate.”58 Therefore, the contradictions contained within this narrative of black
welfare recipients destabilize essentialized and exploitative assumptions surrounding
stereotypes of blackness.
Conclusion
The purpose of this paper has been to consider the dilemmas surrounding issues of
racialized representation in mainstream cinema vis-à-vis the story of black welfare recipients
in Precious. The controversy surrounding mainstream cinema favoring stereotypical tropes of
blackness is ongoing and has gained greater prominence since the release of the Martin
Luther King Jr. film, Selma. After David Oyelowo failed to garner an Oscar-nomination for

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his performance, he stated that the Academy favors “subservient” black roles of the slave,
domestic servant, and criminal, and ignores films that depict black characters as leaders.59 On
the one hand, Oyelowo should be praised for highlighting the lack of diverse representations
of blackness in Hollywood cinema. Cultural theorists have demonstrated that such
representation is crucial for processes of identification and how a social group is depicted
affects how that group may represent themselves. 60 On the other hand, one must caution
against assuming that such roles (as seen in Precious) do not contain critical elements of
resistance that help to provide a voice to historically subordinated social groups. As such,
Precious is able to raise complicated and uncomfortable questions about representation and
exclusion precisely because it is a film that vividly depicts for mainstream (white) audiences
the struggle of marginalized black people to survive within a white supremacist capitalist
patriarchy. What remains at stake then, is the need to confront how the epistemic violence of
colonial history affects not only if, but also how, the subaltern can both speak and be heard.61

15. 14
Notes
1 Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin, America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender,
and Sexuality at the Movies (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 53.
2 Stuart Hall, “The Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media,” in Gender,
Race, and Class in Media: A Text-Reader, ed. Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez (Thousand
Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2003), 19.
3 Jean-Luc Comolli and Jean Narboni, “Cinema/Ideology/Criticism,” in Film Theory and
Criticism Introductory Reading, ed. Leo Baudry and Marshall Cohen (Oxford: OUP, 2004),
815.
4 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media
(London: Routledge, 1996), 182.
5 Cynthia Carter and Linda Steiner, Critical Readings: Media and Gender Reader
(Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2004), 13.
6 Lola Young, Fear of the Dark: ‘Race’, Gender and Sexuality in the Cinema (London:
Routledge, 1996), 7.
7 Stephen Pimpare, “The Welfare Queen and the Great White Hope,” New Political
Science 32, no. 3 (2010): 453, accessed February 2, 2015, doi:
10.1080/07393148.2010.498215.
8 Stuart Hall, Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practice (London:
SAGE, 1997), 47.
9 Erin Aubry Kaplan, “Black Viewers are Divided on Film’s ‘Precious’-ness,” Los Angeles
Times, last modified November 29, 2009,
http://articles.latimes.com/2009/nov/29/entertainment/la-ca-precious29-
2009nov29.
10 bell hooks, Real to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies (New York, NY: Routledge,
1996), 105.
11 Janell Hobson, “Viewing in the Dark: Toward a Black Feminist Approach to Film,”
Women’s Studies Quarterly 30, no. 1 (2002): 54, accessed April 3, 2015,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/40004636.
12 bell hooks, Black Looks: Race and Representation (London: Turnaround, 1992), 116.
13 Rachel Alicia Griffin, “Pushing into Precious: Black Women, Media Representation, and
the Glare of the White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchal Gaze,” Critical Studies in Media
Communication 31, no. 3 (2014): 187, accessed February 3, 2015, doi:
10.1080/15295036.2013.849354.
14 Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire, directed by Lee Daniels (2009; United
States, Lionsgate, 2009), DVD.
15 Rachel Alicia Griffin, “Pushing into Precious,” 183.
16 Premilla Nadasen, “From Widow to ‘Welfare Queen’: Welfare and the Politics of Race,”
Black Women, Gender + Families 1, no. 2 (2007): 54, accessed April 5, 2015,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/blacwomegendfami.1.2.0052.
17 Benshoff and Griffin, America on Film, 53.
18 Precious, Lee Daniels, DVD.
19 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto
Press, 2008), 88.
20 Stuart Hall, “Who Needs ‘Identity’?” in Questions of Cultural Identity, ed. Stuart Hall
and Paul du Gay (London: SAGE Publications, 1996), 15.

16. 15
21 Jane Gaines, “White Privilege and Looking Relations: Race and Gender in Feminist
Film Theory,” Screen 29, no. 4 (1988): 74, accessed February 2, 2015, https://library-
2.lse.ac.uk/e-lib/e_course_packs/GI410/GI410_58175.PDF.
22 Hall, “Who Needs ‘Identity’?” 5-6.
23 Robert Stam, “Fanon, Algeria, and the Cinema: The Politics of Identification,” in
Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media, ed. Ella Shohat and Robert
Stam (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 25.
24 Ibid., 39.
25 Manthia Diawara, “Black Spectatorship: Problems of Identification and Resistance,” in
Black American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (London: Routledge, 1993), 217.
26 Stuart Hall, “What is this ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” in Representing Blackness:
Issues in Film and Video, ed. Valerie Smith (London: Athlone Press, 1997), 129, 131.
27 hooks, Black Looks, 23.
28 Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness,” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (2007): 149,
accessed January 15, 2015, doi: 10.1177/1464700107078139.
29 Michelle Jarman, “Cultural Consumption and Rejection of Precious Jones: Pushing
Disability into the Discussion of Sapphire’s Push and Lee Daniels’s Precious,” Feminist
Formations 24, no. 2 (2012): 173, accessed April 10, 2015,
http://search.proquest.com.proxy.queensu.ca/docview/1039280613?accountid=6180.
30 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 12.
31 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009), 14.
32 Bruce Bennet and Imogen Tyler, “Screening Unlivable Lives: The Cinemas of Border,”
in Transnational Feminism in Film and Media, ed. Katarzyna Marciniak, Anikó Imre, and
Áine O’Healy (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), 28.
33 Precious, Lee Daniels, DVD.
34 Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 106.
35 Hamid Naficy, An Accented Cinema: Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2001), 31.
36 Precious, Lee Daniels, DVD.
37 hooks, Black Looks, 122.
38 Nadasen, “From Widow to ‘Welfare Queen’,” 71.
39 Karim Murji, “Using Racial Stereotypes in Anti-Racist Campaigns,” Ethnic and Racial
Studies 29, no. 2 (2006): 277, accessed September 28, 2014, doi:
10.1080/01419870500465688.
40 Libby Saxton, “Ethics, Spectatorship and the Spectacle of Suffering,” in Film and Ethics:
Foreclosed Encounters, ed. Lisa Downing and Libby Saxton (London: Routledge, 2010),
74.
41 Kobena Mercer, “Busy in the Ruins of a Wretched Phantasia,” in Frantz Fanon: Critical
Perspectives, ed. Anthony C. Alessandrini (London: Routledge, 1999), 213.
42 Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representations,” in Black British
Cultural Studies: A Reader, ed. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Manthia Diawara, and Ruth H.
Lindeborg (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 212.
43 Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 214.
44 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1994), Xii.
45 Erin Aubry Kaplan, “‘Precious’ in the Age of Obama,” Salon, last modified November
10, 2009, http://www.salon.com/2009/11/10/precious_feature/.
46 Hall, “Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representations,” 212.

17. 16
47 Jacqueline Bobo, “Reading Through the Text: The Black Woman as Audience,” in Black
American Cinema, ed. Manthia Diawara (London: Routledge, 1993), 284.
48 Precious, Lee Daniels, DVD.
49 José Esteban Muñoz, Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performances of
Politics (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 10.
50 Ibid., 115.
51 Diawara, “Black Spectatorship,” 216.
52 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, “From the Imperial Family to the Transnational
Imaginary: Media Spectatorship in The Age of Globalization,” in Global/Local: Cultural
Production and the Transnational Imaginary, ed. Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake
(Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 159.
53 Jacqueline Bobo, “The Color Purple: Black Women as Cultural Readers,” in Gender,
Race and Class in Media: A Text Reader, ed. Gail Dines and Jean M. Humez (Thousand
Oaks: SAGE Publications, 2003), 58.
54 Pimpare, “The Welfare Queen and the Great White Hope,” 457.
55 Alison Hallet, “Precious: Who Wants Some Oprah-Approved Ghetto Tourism?” The
Portland Mercury, last modified November 19, 2009,
http://www.portlandmercury.com/Portland/phat-girl/Content?oid=1854854.
56 Muñoz, Disidentifications, 147.
57 Norma Manatu, African American Women and Sexuality in the Cinema (Jefferson:
McFarland, 2003), 108.
58 hooks, Black Looks, 28.
59 Michele Corriston, “David Oyelowo: Hollywood Only Celebrates ‘Subservient’ Black
Characters,” People, last modified January 2, 2015,
http://www.people.com/article/david-oyelowo-selma-oscar-snub-benedict-
cumberbatch.
60 Hall, “Who Needs ‘Identity’?” 4.
61 Gayatri Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial
Theory: A Reader, ed. Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1994), 78.

18. 17
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