Nikki A. Greene

Homi K. Bhabha suggests in his chapter, “The Other Question: Stereotype, Discrimination, and the Discourse of Colonialism” in The Location of Culture, that because stereotype becomes accepted as social reality due to the fetishistic repetition and accepted commonness of images, words, and actions of the “other,” preventative and reactionary measures against the other are justifiable (and legally) regulated within colonial discourse.

Renée Stout’s gun imagery in Point of View addresses head-on the conflict of one person encountering the “other.” Stout views guns as symbols of revolution. In 1998, inspired by a poetry-reading discussion that she attended on the struggle of channeling one’s emotions into art, she woke up the next morning and decided to “wrestle with the question about how to make anger translate into art.”[1]  Though she is not an advocate of violence, she made guns for “people who were revolutionaries trying to change the system or any inequitable system.”[2] The gun in Point of View is real, but Stout later made guns for historical figures like Harriet Tubman, John Brown, Geronimo, and Che Guevera. Stout made Baby’s First Gun as a response to school shootings. Using a real toy gun at the bottom and a box with the two political parties symbols of the elephant and donkey at the top, the middle portion contains a baby doll with the inscription: “Society prepares the crime, the criminal commits it.” Stout specifically addresses the contradictory nature of how the widespread access and acceptance of guns in our society has not been sufficiently dealt with.  I believe that in Point of View, the assemblage’s objects explicate why the gun is there, and the viewer must be willing to be “held up” upon viewing the photograph. This visual pause, as it were, is exactly the type of rupture that Homi Bhabha describes as necessary to disrupt ambivalence within colonial discourse in order to agitate accepted stereotypes, unraveling them before their construction. Bhabha claims that if one deconstructs the stereotype before its production then one destroys and reduces the power of colonial discourse.[3] The stereotype is a formation based on fixity due to repetition and a construction of meaning based on the excess of what cannot be empirically proven or logically construed. The stereotype of the “other” (normally the colonized in opposition to the colonizer) is constructed through a paradigm of ambivalence that lies at the very core of the colonial discourse.  In Point of View, Renée Stout pushes the boundaries of stereotyping by forcing a careful analysis of the work as a complex construction of miscellaneous objects that work together to engender an unambivalent response.