The Marxist Foundations of the Oppositional Gaze: A Paradigm Shift in Questioning the Capitalist Moment

This book provides a foundational study of bell hooks’s groundbreaking theory of the oppositional gaze, which is first introduced in her book, Black Looks (1992), by placing the oppositional gaze on Marxist footing for the first time. While situating hooks’s oppositional gaze within an intellectual tradition of the contemporary gaze emerging with French philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault, The Marxist Foundations of the Oppositional Gaze intervenes in the dominant accounts of the gaze, as it appears in and proliferates Western thinking, which largely overlook racialized, gendered, and classed dynamics.