Free Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (Routledge Classics) by Bell Hooks

woman went to such measures to ensure that she had the space to continue being who she wanted to be, and at the same time, it felt very violent and very violating of the daughter. I’ve always liked Camille Billops’s films. Suzanne Suzanne is one of my favorite films because more than any other films by independent black filmmakers, she really compels people to think about the contradictions and complexities that beset people. We’re not used to women artists of any race exerting that kind of relationship to art.
MFA:
Billops did what she thought she had to do. You know, “A woman’s gotta do what a woman’s gotta do.”
bh:
It’s funny. I was reading this interview with Susan Sarandon about Thelma and Louise, another very powerful film that turns into a farce.
MFA:
Thelma and Louise is a reactionary film. The women might be feisty for a while but at the end they’ve got to off themselves. These women would have been heroic if they’d refused to disappear. Imagine the story of two male outlaws who, when the going gets tough decide to hold each other’s hand and dive into oblivion. How cool is that? But somehow it is cool to think of women disappearing, killing themselves. Maybe it’s a collective unconscious wish.
bh:
But there is this one scene at the beginning. When Susan Sarandon’s character says, “When a woman is crying, she’s not having a good time.” There is that sense that she doesn’t shoot him because of the attempted rape, she shoots him because of his complete and utter fucking indifference. In that moment, a lot of men saw how this indifference fucking hurts, but then, it’s all undermined by everything that happens after that scene. That’s the tragedy of Thelma and Louise: it doesn’t offer empowerment by the end, it’s made feminism a joke, it’s made rebellion a joke, and in the traditional patriarchal manner, it’s made death the punishment.
MFA:
Yet many feminists—lesbian and straight—stood up and cheered when the two protagonists decide to commit suicide.
bh:
Filmmaker Monika Treut said something similar to what I’m about to say, which is that if people are starving and you give them a cracker they’re not going to say, “Gee, this cracker is limited. It’s not what I deserve. I deserve a full meal.” As a feminist, I think it’s pathetic that people want to cheer Thelma and Louise, a film so narrow in its vision, so limited. But I hear that from black people about black films that I critique: This is all we have. So, we’ve got to celebrate something magical and transformative in a film and at the same time discuss it critically.
MFA:
Artist Lawrence Weiner calls that flirting with madness.
bh:
A lot of women have found themselves falling into madness when the world does not recognize them and they cannot recognize themselves in the world. This is exemplified in the lives of people like Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Virginia Woolf, and Zora Neale Hurston. That’s because there’s a lot that happens to women of all races—and black women in particular—who become stars. There’s envy. I was just home recently at a family reunion, and people said such mean and brutal things to me that I started to think, “What’s going on here?” And my brother said that a lot of what’s going on here is envy. There’s a part of me that says, “I don’t want to go further with my life, further with my creativity, because if people envy me, they’ll torture me.” It’s not so much a sense of not being able to handle anything; it’s a sense of not being able to handle torture. We hear all these statistics about how many women are raped and beaten every so many seconds yet when we talk about having fear in patriarchy, we’re made to feel that that’s crazy. What incredible women today—especially those who are feminists—aren’t talked about in many contexts as mad? We fall into periods of critical breakdown, because we often feel there is no world that will embrace