Reading: Stuart Hall - The Spectacle of the Other

"Stereotypes refer as much to what is imagined in fantasy as to what is perceived as 'real'"

In this reading Stuart Hall investigates various stereotypes especially regarding the representation of black people, masculinity and sexuality. He also explores the origins of the stereotypes and what they mean.

There were four main points to his argument

• The construction of otherness and exclusion
• Stereotyping and power
• Role of fantasy
• Fetishism

Hall refers to Richard Dyer's theory that we understand the world by categorising people in to types.

"A type is any simple, vivid, memorable, easily grasped and widely recognised characterisation in which a few traits are foregrounded" (Dyer, 1977, p.28)

Stereotypes focus on a few select traits and then exaggerates them, excluding any other features of a person. Hall suggests that stereotypes are used to maintain social order.

As a suggestion to the origin of black male stereotypes, Staples (1982) argues that white male slave masters denied black male slaves of their masculinity e.g. having authority. Black males therefore adopted patriarchal values as a means of survival. Nowadays the stereotype of black youth is that they are violent criminals; hall suggests that they resort to toughness as a defence to the aggression that they face.

"This cycle between reality and representation makes the ideological fictions of racism empirically 'true'" (mercer and Julian, 1994, pp. 138)

Hall defines Fetishism as a substitution of an object for something that is dangerous and powerful, but forbidden.