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assignment 6: Bell Hooks

In the essay of Bell Hooks “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance” she mentions the term the Other. Personally, I fell that the Other is people that are from other races and how white people are intrigued by them, even in a sexual aspect. The Other would be people of  African,  native american, Asian decent, basically anyone outside of the white race. Otherness can be seen as productive due to the fact that it can add spice to the white culture. With this being said Otherness in a sense can change the status quo, which disturbs the equilibrium of the norm. Hooks mentions how when she was teaching in Yale she over heard how the white boys wanted to fuck the Other. To the white boys the Other would give them an opportunity to enter the world of experience. You would think that by the white boys wanting to fuck the Others would be a sense of them dominating the Other since that is how it worked back in the day, but the boys did not even see it in that way which is a sense of some form of Otherness being productive. Otherness lets the people to explore a world of difference which make a more intense pleasure since they are discovering something new and out of the ordinary. Hooks also mentions how Otherness lures a combination of  pleasure and danger, which could mean that it creates excitement to relationships. It leads to a society becoming more common with diversity. The cultural appropriation  of the Other helps ease the feeling of oppression that the Others faced. The relationship of whites  being sexually intrigued of the Other does not seem like a bad thing in this reading. The concept of Otherness can help break through the challenge of white supremacy and finally bring some sense of unity.