å Monday, October 16th, 2017

In “Eating The Other”, Bell Hooks uses the term “the other” as the race which you are not.  The other is basically about people who are not white because the term was used mostly by white people who are looking down other races as inferior. In this piece, she explains the relationship between white people and “the other”. To begin with, she brings up white boys who had sexual interaction with non white girls, but they are interacted by them just because they are not white. White people were thought to be absolutely superior to the others at that time.  For them, they were thought to be inferior, but they thought it would be a different and interesting experience. This is because the boys thought they are more sexually active and experienced just because of non white people’s culture are though to be behind and they were looking for excitement with the others that white girls don’t have. It was obviously just for fun, but as the more they intact with non white girls, the more they understand non white cultures and they started thinking as the old norm, that white people have interaction with white people, is old and few steps behind to them. In this case, she thinks it is a productive relationship to “Otherness” because they went over the racial boundary because they used to think non white people are superior to “the other”, but it was an opportunity for them to think about racial equality. It was not the idea that could threaten white supremacy, but it could add “flavor” to the idea of diversity. I think why she called it productive is even though the first intention was irrelevant which they thought sexual interaction with non white females would be better because they should be more experienced, the outcome of that action was positive because they no longer see them as inferior.

In Hook’s essay, “Eating the Other”, she uses the phrase ‘the other’ to symbolize something. In this case the usage of this word by her meant, ‘something different’. She describes differences as the other because, everything considered as the other is somehow taboo or something unknown that everyone is scared to get to know. The way she utilized the phrase, made it more obvious for the readers to really understand how everyone really looks at differences in the world, which is in a very degrading way. But she was also able to point out how people were staring to considerate a new side to everything that would be different and new. She describes how the relationship to “the other” was something productive. it opened people’s choices to new things and allowed them to use it to better themselves as people too. In most cases, society has started to use the other to their advantage, where they are starting to get some type of personal or professional benefit from it. Like many advertisements do today. These companies have taken the acknowledgment of difference, to make their brand more appealing to everyone in the public. They would collect data that would inform them who is more likely to buy certain brands of soda, as they found that black people are more likely to buy Pepsi, so they include more people of color to their commercials which would attract even more people to their brand. The recognition of the other allows for a more positive relationship to develop in our society. Whether it is about sexuality or race, “the other” will always be that side of the spectrum that most people are afraid to address because they don’t really know much about it. But once we acknowledge it, change will occur for the better.

When analyzing bell hooks’s “Eating the other,” at first, I thought the identity of the specter of the “other” was obvious: it was anyone who doesn’t conform to the ideals of straight white heteropatriarchy—from the unfortunate Native American girl who had to fend off the advances of those blond white jocks on Page 368 to the queer, brown English major writing this essay. However, as hooks advances her discourse on the “consumption” of the other, I felt as if I was slowly but surely gaining insight into her interpretation of “consumption.” In this case, the other is exotified and seen as something beautiful and glorious to behold, something to be appreciated and observed, something to be immersed into and commodified for the sake of its foreignness compared to the heteropatriarchal white norm—which is a vast difference from the colonialist structures that sought to subdue the other in the name of religious or racial domination. Rather than destroy us or change us into their image, the “non-other” (a.k.a. the white man) wishes to commodify and consume us for the following: 1) to cross an “imaginary boundary into an exotic land” by interacting with our non-whiteness to come out the other side “changed” by the experience 2) to, as hooks says on page 380, be offered up and consumed to add flavor to the mayonnaise-laden palate of white mediocrity and 3) to strip our cultural artifacts of their meanings, both ethnically and politically significant, in the name of perpetuating hegemonic white dominance.

That being said, why does hooks call this interaction of “non-other” to “other” productive? I believe it is because within this modern context of multiculturalism and openness to other identities, that otherness is no longer seen as a deviant identity but as something to be explored and connected with, which flies directly in the face of hegemonic white patriarchal dominance. That being said, those of the dominant group (a.k.a. yet again, white people) or anyone outside of a given group should tread carefully and realize that cultural exploration can easily be transformed into cultural appropriation without intentionality and a willingness to listen to others within the non-dominant group.

Bell Hooks often uses the term “the other” in her essay. For many years there has been a need of superiority within races and sex. As discovery of other races there needed to be a comprehension of how to handle the diversity and possibly the need to be in power. Anything that was not a white male was considered to be different and this difference impacted the modern society. Commodity culture in the United States took advantage of the orthodox concept of race, gender and sexual desire through racial difference and racial sexual encounters (Hooks:367).

Anything that was not white and male was different and was considered to be called “the other”. According to Hooks, during her time teaching at Yale university, the white boys would shop for women the same way you would shop for classes (Hooks:368). Race was a key role on ranking these females. Black was top priority along with Asians. Hispanics would not be seriously considered because there was not a significant number of them in the area. Hooks further develops why these men felt strongly having sexual relations with women from other races. By doing so, these men would no longer feel restricted in one universe. Instead, race was visualized as experience. Women from other races were as exotic and they wanted to enhance their experience. Color in this sense was not negative but productive because it contributed to being sexually experienced.

The relationship “the other” that Hooks is describing is not supposed to be bad but a way of escaping from a small-minded world and experience. Sex just happened to play a major role on that. “The other” would become gain superiority in a sense when it came to the modern times because white men wanted to know what it was to be a part of other races and sex was an easy way to grasp that.