Dark Skin Tone In Film

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The feminist inquiry regarding race and representation has long been muddled with questions of how to consider race and gender without using models that are hegemonic in nature. The focus has also surrounded how to break reliance on dominant and/or old understandings of patriarchy, how to account for racial and sexual difference beyond the closed Oedipal world” (psychoanalytic models), without placing the subject under a “strict gender divide under patriarchy” (Marx). According to Janet McCabe, “attempts to understand the theoretical difficulties revealed an unconscious institutional oppression within the feminist discourse: namely, a style of thought involving white feminism and the Black woman” (67).
According to bell hooks, while considering feminism and the “inferior status accorded women under …show more content…
Due to issues of colorism, the privileging of light skin tone over dark skin tone in a racial group, we often find black actresses in Hollywood, especially women with dark skin like actress Viola Davis, are limited to playing certain characters. In this paper, I am arguing that dark skinned actresses have not been granted access to the same roles that other actresses and even other African American actresses have been granted because of their skin tone, and apparently, when they are, they are met with hostility and criticism, as we will come to see. In films, the dark skinned woman is often “oppressively unique”, left playing stereotypical and/or oppressed roles that leave their characters without love, relationships, families of their own and ultimately without any agency or power. As Rebecca Wanzo says, “…they have walked a fine line between minstrelsy and grace, between depicting stereotype and suggesting complex personhood despite confining narratives” (136). They become quite peculiar in films, lost between challenging authority or submitting to it all
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