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In
aired in January 1972, and later a book, as part of his analysis of the treatment of women as objects in advertising and nudes in European painting. It soon became popular among
The existentialist philosopher
Pdf via Amherst College.
In the fields of
In the television series and book ''
Pdf.
/ref> using the example of
In feminist theory
Feminist theory is the extension of feminism into theoretical, fictional, or philosophical discourse. It aims to understand the nature of gender inequality. It examines women's and men's social roles, experiences, interests, chores, and feminist ...
, the male gaze is the act of depicting women
A woman is an adult female human. Prior to adulthood, a female human is referred to as a girl (a female child or Adolescence, adolescent). The plural ''women'' is sometimes used in certain phrases such as "women's rights" to denote female hum ...
and the world
In its most general sense, the term "world" refers to the totality of entities, to the whole of reality or to everything that is. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the worl ...
in the visual arts
The visual arts are art forms such as painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, ceramics, photography, video, filmmaking, design, crafts and architecture. Many artistic disciplines such as performing arts, conceptual art, and textile arts al ...
and in literature
Literature is any collection of written work, but it is also used more narrowly for writings specifically considered to be an art form, especially prose fiction, drama, and poetry. In recent centuries, the definition has expanded to include ...
from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual
Heterosexuality is romantic attraction, sexual attraction or sexual behavior between people of the opposite sex or gender. As a sexual orientation, heterosexuality is "an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attractions" to ...
male
Male (symbol: ♂) is the sex of an organism that produces the gamete (sex cell) known as sperm, which fuses with the larger female gamete, or ovum, in the process of fertilization.
A male organism cannot reproduce sexually without access to ...
viewer. In the visual and aesthetic presentations of narrative cinema, the male gaze has three perspectives: (i) that of the man behind the camera, (ii) that of the male characters within the film's cinematic representations; and (iii) that of the spectator gazing at the image.
The gaze
In critical theory, sociology, and psychoanalysis, the gaze (French ''le regard''), in the philosophical and figurative sense, is an individual's (or a group's) awareness and perception of other individuals, other groups, or oneself. The concept ...
was a concept developed in 20th-century French philosophy. The term "male gaze" was first used by the English art critic John Berger
John Peter Berger (; 5 November 1926 – 2 January 2017) was an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His novel '' G.'' won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism ''Ways of Seeing'', written as an accompaniment to the ...
in ''Ways of Seeing
''Ways of Seeing'' is a 1972 television series of 30-minute films created chiefly by writer John Berger and producer Mike Dibb. It was broadcast on BBC Two in January 1972 and adapted into a book of the same name.
The series was intended as a ...
'', a series of films for the BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...feminist
Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes. Feminism incorporates the position that society prioritizes the male po ...
s, including the British film critic Laura Mulvey
Laura Mulvey (born 15 August 1941) is a British feminist film theorist. She was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She previously taught at Bulmers ...
, who used it to critique traditional media representations of the female character in cinema and coined the phrase.
The psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud ( , ; born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 6 May 1856 – 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating psychopathology, pathologies explained as originatin ...
and Jacques Lacan
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (, , ; 13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, and pu ...
are foundational in Mulvey's development of a male gaze theory, as they provide a lens through which Mulvey was able to interpret the "primordial wish for pleasurable looking" satisfied through the cinematic experience. As a way of seeing women and the world, psychoanalytic theorizations of the male gaze involve Freudian and Lacanian concepts such as scopophilia
In psychology and psychiatry, scopophilia or scoptophilia ( grc, σκοπέω , "look to", "to examine" + , "the tendency towards") is an aesthetic pleasure drawn from looking at an object or a person. In human sexuality, the term scoptophilia des ...
or the pleasure of looking. The terms ''scopophilia'' and ''scoptophilia'' identify both the aesthetic joy and the sexual pleasures derived from looking at someone or something.
The male gaze is conceptually contrasted with the female gaze
The female gaze is a feminist theory term referring to the gaze of the female spectator, character or director of an artistic work, but more than the gender it is an issue of representing women as subjects having agency. As such all genders can cre ...
.
Background
The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre
Jean-Paul Charles Aymard Sartre (, ; ; 21 June 1905 – 15 April 1980) was one of the key figures in the philosophy of existentialism (and phenomenology), a French playwright, novelist, screenwriter, political activist, biographer, and litera ...
introduced the concept of ''le regard'', the gaze
In critical theory, sociology, and psychoanalysis, the gaze (French ''le regard''), in the philosophical and figurative sense, is an individual's (or a group's) awareness and perception of other individuals, other groups, or oneself. The concep ...
, in ''Being and Nothingness
''Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology'' (french: L'Être et le néant : Essai d'ontologie phénoménologique), sometimes published with the subtitle ''A Phenomenological Essay on Ontology'', is a 1943 book by the philosoph ...
'' (1943), wherein the act of gazing at another human being creates a subjective power difference, which is felt by the gazer and by the gazed because the person being gazed at is perceived as an object, not as a human being. The cinematic concept of the male gaze is presented, explained, and developed in the essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975), in which Laura Mulvey
Laura Mulvey (born 15 August 1941) is a British feminist film theorist. She was educated at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She is currently professor of film and media studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She previously taught at Bulmers ...
proposes that sexual inequality — the asymmetry of social and political power
Power most often refers to:
* Power (physics), meaning "rate of doing work"
** Engine power, the power put out by an engine
** Electric power
* Power (social and political), the ability to influence people or events
** Abusive power
Power may a ...
between men and women — is a controlling social force in the cinematic representations
''Representations'' is an interdisciplinary journal in the humanities published quarterly by the University of California Press. The journal was established in 1983 and is the founding publication of the New Historicism movement of the 1980s. It ...
of women and men. The male gaze (the aesthetic pleasure of the male viewer) is a social construct derived from the ideologies and discourses of patriarchy
Patriarchy is a social system in which positions of dominance and privilege are primarily held by men. It is used, both as a technical anthropological term for families or clans controlled by the father or eldest male or group of males a ...
.
''Also available as'':Pdf via Amherst College.
In the fields of
media studies
Media studies is a discipline and field of study that deals with the content, history, and effects of various media; in particular, the mass media. Media Studies may draw on traditions from both the social sciences and the humanities, but mostly ...
and feminist film theory
Feminist film theory is a theoretical film criticism derived from feminist politics and feminist theory influenced by Second Wave Feminism and brought about around the 1970s in the United States. With the advancements in film throughout the years ...
, the ''male gaze'' is conceptually related to the behaviors of voyeurism
Voyeurism is the sexual interest in or practice of watching other people engaged in intimate behaviors, such as undressing, sexual activity, or other actions of a private nature.
The term comes from the French ''voir'' which means "to see". A ...
(looking as sexual pleasure), scopophilia
In psychology and psychiatry, scopophilia or scoptophilia ( grc, σκοπέω , "look to", "to examine" + , "the tendency towards") is an aesthetic pleasure drawn from looking at an object or a person. In human sexuality, the term scoptophilia des ...
(pleasure from looking), and narcissism
Narcissism is a self-centered personality style characterized as having an excessive interest in one's physical appearance or image and an excessive preoccupation with one's own needs, often at the expense of others.
Narcissism exists on a co ...
(pleasure from contemplating one's self).
Another critical part of Mulvey's theory is built upon a Freudian psychoanalytic concept of male castration anxiety. Because the woman lacks phallus, her presence evokes unpleasantness in the male unconsciousness. To mitigate this unpleasantness, Mulvey theorizes that women are transformed into passive recipients of male objectification in media representations. The mere presence of a female body on screen, "her lack of penis, mpliesa threat of castration and hence unpleasure," which is subverted through the over-sexualization of her femininity. For Mulvey, there are two ways in which women, as the passive recipients of the male gaze, can be sexualized to avert castration fear: voyeurism-sadism and fetishization. In Mulvey's analysis, voyeurism-sadism references that “pleasure lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness,” which is noted by Mulvey to align more with a narrative cinematic structure than does scopophilia fetishization. Fetishistic scopophilia reduces the threat of castration fear associated with the female presence by fragmenting and hypersexualizing parts of the female body.
In a narrative film, the visual perspective of the male gaze is the sight line of the camera as the spectator's perspective — that of a heterosexual man whose sight lingers upon the features of a woman's body. In narrative cinema, the male gaze usually displays the female character (woman, girl, child) on two levels of eroticism: (i) as an erotic object of desire for the characters in the filmed story; and (ii) as an erotic object of desire for the male viewer (spectator) of the filmed story. Such visualizations establish the roles of the dominant male and dominated female, by representing the female as a passive object for the male gaze of the active viewer. The social pairing of the passive object (woman) and the active viewer (man) is a functional basis of patriarchy, i.e., gender roles
A gender role, also known as a sex role, is a social role encompassing a range of behaviors and attitudes that are generally considered acceptable, appropriate, or desirable for a person based on that person's sex. Gender roles are usually cent ...
that are culturally reinforced in and by the aesthetics (textual, visual, symbolic) of the mainstream, commercial cinema; the movies of which feature the male gaze as more important than the female gaze
The female gaze is a feminist theory term referring to the gaze of the female spectator, character or director of an artistic work, but more than the gender it is an issue of representing women as subjects having agency. As such all genders can cre ...
, an aesthetic choice based upon the inequality of socio-political power between men and women.
As an ideological basis of patriarchy, socio-political inequality is realized as a value system
In ethics and social sciences, value denotes the degree of importance of something or action, with the aim of determining which actions are best to do or what way is best to live (normative ethics in ethics), or to describe the significance of dif ...
by which male-created institutions (e.g. the movie business, advertising, fashion) unilaterally determine what is "natural and normal" in society. In time, the people of a community believe that the artificial values of patriarchy, as a social system, are the "natural and normal" order of things in society because men look at women and women are looked at by men. The Western hierarchy of "inferior women" and "superior men" derives from misrepresenting men and women as sexual opponents, rather than as sexual equals.
Gazing at the nude woman
In the television series and book ''Ways of Seeing
''Ways of Seeing'' is a 1972 television series of 30-minute films created chiefly by writer John Berger and producer Mike Dibb. It was broadcast on BBC Two in January 1972 and adapted into a book of the same name.
The series was intended as a ...
'' (1972), where the term was first used, the art critic John Berger
John Peter Berger (; 5 November 1926 – 2 January 2017) was an English art critic, novelist, painter and poet. His novel '' G.'' won the 1972 Booker Prize, and his essay on art criticism ''Ways of Seeing'', written as an accompaniment to the ...
addressed the sexual objectification
Sexual objectification is the act of treating a person solely as an object of sexual desire. Objectification more broadly means treating a person as a commodity or an object without regard to their personality or dignity. Objectification is most ...
of women in the arts and advertising by emphasizing that men ''look'' and women are ''looked at'' as the subjects of images. For art-as-spectacle, men act, and women are acted-upon according to the social conditions of spectatorship, which are determined by the artistic and aesthetic conventions of objectification, which artists have not transcended.
In the genre of the Renaissance nude, the woman who is the subject of the image often is aware of being looked at, either by others in the painting or by the spectator who is gazing at the painting in which she is the subject. Berger analyzes two of Tintoretto's paintings of Susanna and the Elders
Susanna (; : "lily"), also called Susanna and the Elders, is a narrative included in the Book of Daniel (as chapter 13) by the Catholic Church, Oriental Orthodox Churches and Eastern Orthodox Churches. It is one of the additions to Daniel, plac ...
, a story of a woman falsely accused of adultery after two men discover one another spying on her while she bathes. In the first, she "looks back at us looking at her." In the second, she is looking at herself in a mirror and thus joining the elders and us as a spectator of herself. Susanna's lack of distress and even nonchalance at being observed naked in both paintings and others by male artists have been contrasted to the apparent pain shown in the depiction of the same scene by Artemisia Gentileschi, a female artist, whose Susanna shows she is clearly in distress at being watched by the two men.
In the production of art, the conventions of artistic representation connect the objectification
In social philosophy, objectification is the act of treating a person, as an object or a thing. It is part of dehumanization, the act of disavowing the humanity of others. Sexual objectification, the act of treating a person as a mere object of sex ...
of a woman, by the male gaze, to the Lacan
Jacques Marie Émile Lacan (, , ; 13 April 1901 – 9 September 1981) was a French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist. Described as "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud", Lacan gave yearly seminars in Paris from 1953 to 1981, and ...
ian theory of social alienation
Social alienation is a person's feeling of disconnection from a group whether friends, family, or wider society to which the individual has an affinity. Such alienation has been described as "a condition in social relationships reflected by (1) ...
. The psychological splitting that occurs from seeing oneself as one is and seeing one's self as an idealized representation. In Italian Renaissance painting
Italian Renaissance painting is the painting of the period beginning in the late 13th century and flourishing from the early 15th to late 16th centuries, occurring in the Italian Peninsula, which was at that time divided into many political stat ...
, especially in the nude-woman genre, that perceptual split arises from being both the viewer and the viewed and from seeing one's self through other people's gaze.
Effects of the male gaze
Research by Calogero has shown that the male gaze can affect women's self-esteem and self-objectification, leading to increased body shame and a worsened mental state. For most women, it is not a physical interaction with a man which causes such internalized feelings of self-objectification and negative mental states but is simply anticipating being the subject of the male gaze. It is not only a worsened mental state and self-objectification, which is a potential effect of the male gaze, but also feelings of anxiety about physiques and body shape. According to Snow's research, male gaze has gradually evolved into a patriarchal theory, despite being an abstract idea, the masculine gaze has actual psychological impacts. Women experience real impacts from being asked to perform for others all the time. In comparison to individuals who anticipated a female look or no gaze at all, the mere anticipation of a male gaze increased self-objectification in young women and resulted in greater body shame and social physique anxiety. Because the male gaze is prevalent, women have been implicitly taught how to behave in its presence. Never slouch or curse, wear nice clothes in case you run into someone, and present yourself the way people want. Women are held to these standards, and if they somehow fail to meet them, they are at blame.Concepts
Scopophilia
Two forms of the male gaze are based on the Freudian concept of ''scopophilia
In psychology and psychiatry, scopophilia or scoptophilia ( grc, σκοπέω , "look to", "to examine" + , "the tendency towards") is an aesthetic pleasure drawn from looking at an object or a person. In human sexuality, the term scoptophilia des ...
''. This "pleasure that is linked to sexual attraction (voyeurism
Voyeurism is the sexual interest in or practice of watching other people engaged in intimate behaviors, such as undressing, sexual activity, or other actions of a private nature.
The term comes from the French ''voir'' which means "to see". A ...
in the extreme) and hescopophilic pleasure that is linked to narcissistic identification (the introjection of ideal egos)," shows how women have been forced to view the cinema from the perspectives (sexual, aesthetic, cultural) of the ''male gaze''. In such cinematic representations, the male gaze denies the female's agency
Agency may refer to:
Organizations
* Institution, governmental or others
** Advertising agency or marketing agency, a service business dedicated to creating, planning and handling advertising for its clients
** Employment agency, a business that ...
and human identity, thus dehumanizing a woman, transforming her from person to object, to be considered only for her beauty, physique, and sex appeal
Sex is the trait that determines whether a sexually reproducing animal or plant produces male or female gametes. Male plants and animals produce smaller mobile gametes (spermatozoa, sperm, pollen), while females produce larger ones (ova, oft ...
, as defined in the male sexual fantasy of narrative cinema.
Spectatorship
Two types of spectatorship occur while viewing a film, wherein the viewer either unconsciously or consciously engages in the typical, ascribed societal roles of men and women. Concerningphallocentrism Phallocentrism is the ideology that the phallus, or male sexual organ, is the central element in the organization of the social world. Phallocentrism has been analyzed in literary criticism, psychoanalysis and psychology, linguistics, medicine and ...
, a film can be viewed from the perspectives of "three different looks": (i) the first look is that of the camera, which records the events of the film; (ii) the second look describes the nearly voyeuristic act of the audience as they view the film proper; and (iii) the third look is that of the characters who interact with one another throughout the filmed story. The perspective common to the three types of looks is the idea that ''looking'' generally is perceived as the active role of the male while being looked at generally is perceived as the passive role of the female. Therefore, based upon that patriarchal construction, the cinema presents and represents women as objects of desire, wherein women characters have an "appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact"; therefore, the actress is never meant to represent a strong female character whose actions directly affect the outcome of the plot or propel the events of the filmed story, but, instead, she is in the film to visually support the actor, portraying the male protagonist, by "bearing the burden of sexual objectification," a condition psychologically unbearable for the male actor.
A woman being the passive object of the male gaze is the link to scopophilia, to the aesthetic pleasure derived from looking at someone as an object of beauty. As an expression of sexuality
Human sexuality is the way people experience and express themselves sexually. This involves biological, psychological, physical, erotic, emotional, social, or spiritual feelings and behaviors. Because it is a broad term, which has varied ...
, scopophilia refers to the pleasure (sensual and sexual
Sex is the biological distinction of an organism between male and female.
Sex or SEX may also refer to:
Biology and behaviour
*Animal sexual behaviour
**Copulation (zoology)
**Human sexual activity
**Non-penetrative sex, or sexual outercourse
** ...
) derived from looking at sexual fetish
Sexual fetishism or erotic fetishism is a sexual fixation on a nonliving object or nongenital body part. The object of interest is called the fetish; the person who has ''a fetish'' for that object is a fetishist. A sexual fetish may be regard ...
es and photographs, pornography
Pornography (often shortened to porn or porno) is the portrayal of sexual subject matter for the exclusive purpose of sexual arousal. Primarily intended for adults,
and naked bodies, etc. There are two categories of pleasurable viewing: (i) voyeurism
Voyeurism is the sexual interest in or practice of watching other people engaged in intimate behaviors, such as undressing, sexual activity, or other actions of a private nature.
The term comes from the French ''voir'' which means "to see". A ...
, wherein the viewer's pleasure is in looking at another person from a distance, and he or she projects fantasies, usually sexual, onto the gazed upon person; and (ii) narcissism
Narcissism is a self-centered personality style characterized as having an excessive interest in one's physical appearance or image and an excessive preoccupation with one's own needs, often at the expense of others.
Narcissism exists on a co ...
, wherein the viewer's pleasure is in self-recognition when viewing the image of another person. These concepts of voyeurism and narcissism translate to psychoanalytic concepts of object libido and ego libido, respectively. Mulvey theorizes that in order for women to enjoy cinema, they must learn to identify with the male protagonist and assume his perspective, the male gaze. In the genre of action film
Action film is a film genre in which the protagonist is thrust into a series of events that typically involve violence and physical feats. The genre tends to feature a mostly resourceful hero struggling against incredible odds, which include life ...
s, the dramaturg Wendy Arons
Wendy Arons (born 1964) is an American dramaturg, drama professor, and critic who specializes in ecodrama and German translation. She is currently a Professor of Dramatic Literature in the College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University. She h ...
said that the hyper-sexualization of female characters symbolically diminishes the threat of emasculation posed by violent women, hence: "The focus on the oman'sbody — as a body in an ostentatious display of breasts, legs, and buttocks — does mitigate the threat that women pose to 'the very fabric of . . . society', by reassuring the ale
Ale is a Type of beer, type of beer brewed using a Warm fermentation, warm fermentation method, resulting in a sweet, full-bodied and fruity taste. Historically, the term referred to a drink brewed without hops.
As with most beers, ale typicall ...
viewer of his male privilege
Male privilege is the system of advantages or rights that are available to men solely on the basis of their sex. A man's access to these benefits may vary depending on how closely they match their society's ideal masculine norm.
Academic studi ...
, as the possessor of the objectifying ale
Ale is a Type of beer, type of beer brewed using a Warm fermentation, warm fermentation method, resulting in a sweet, full-bodied and fruity taste. Historically, the term referred to a drink brewed without hops.
As with most beers, ale typicall ...
gaze."
The female gaze
The female gaze is conceptually similar to the male gaze; that is, when women take up the male gaze, they view other people, and themselves, from the perspective of a man. The male gaze is a manifestation of unequal social power, between the gazing man and the gazed-upon woman; and also is a conscious or subconscious social effort to developgender inequality
Gender inequality is the social phenomenon in which men and women are not treated equally. The treatment may arise from distinctions regarding biology, psychology, or cultural norms prevalent in the society. Some of these distinctions are empi ...
in service to a patriarchal
Patriarchy is a social system in which positions of Dominance hierarchy, dominance and Social privilege, privilege are primarily held by men. It is used, both as a technical Anthropology, anthropological term for families or clans controll ...
sexual order. From either perspective, a woman who welcomes the sexual objectification
Sexual objectification is the act of treating a person solely as an object of sexual desire. Objectification more broadly means treating a person as a commodity or an object without regard to their personality or dignity. Objectification is most ...
of the male gaze might be perceived as conforming to social norms established for the benefit of men, thereby reinforcing the objectifying power of the male gaze upon women; or, she might be perceived as an exhibitionist
Exhibitionism is the act of exposing in a public or semi-public context one's intimate parts – for example, the breasts, Sex organ, genitals or buttocks. The practice may arise from a desire or compulsion to expose themselves in such a mann ...
woman taking social advantage of the sexual objectification inherent to the male gaze, in order to manipulate the sexist norms of the patriarchy to her personal benefit.
It is not simply the fact that women are eroticized and objectified because this is a phenomenon that seems to be a component of both male and female eroticism in western culture. Kaplan argues that it is the fact that “men do not simply look; their gaze carries with it the power of action and of possession which is lacking in the female gaze. Women receive and return a gaze, but cannot act upon it” and “the sexualization and objectification of women is not simply for the purposes of eroticism; from a psychoanalytic point of view, it is designed to annihilate the threat that women pose”. Kaplan emphasizes that while the gazes are similar, the female gaze is not able to possess the same power as that of the male gaze. The male gaze will always undermine the women’s position and demean her very presence into a position of subjectivity and submission.
Criticism
Rejection
The theory is not without criticism as feminist academicCamille Paglia
Camille Anna Paglia (; born April 2, 1947) is an American feminist academic and social critic. Paglia has been a professor at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, since 1984. She is critical of many aspects of modern cultur ...
has rejected the concept of the cinematic male gaze: From the moment feminism began to solidify its ideology in the early '70s, Hitchcock became a whipping boy for feminist theory. I've been very vocal about my opposition to the simplistic theory of "the male gaze" that is associated with Laura Mulvey (and that she herself has moved somewhat away from) and that has taken over feminist film studies to a vampiric degree in the last 25 years. The idea that a man looking at or a director filming a beautiful woman makes her an object, makes her passive beneath the male gaze which seeks control over woman by turning her into mere matter, into "meat" -- I think this was utter nonsense from the start. It was formulated by people who knew nothing about the history of painting or sculpture, the history of the fine arts. It was an a priori theory: First there was feminist ideology, asserting that history is nothing but male oppression and female victimization, and then came this theory -- the "victim" model of feminism applied wholesale to works of culture.
Matrixial gaze
Bracha Ettinger
Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger (born March 23, 1948) is an Israeli people, Israeli artist, painter and writer, visual analyst, psychoanalyst and philosopher, living and working in Paris and Tel Aviv. She is regarded as a major French people, French ...
criticized the male gaze with the ''matrixial gaze
''The Matrixial Gaze'' is a 1995 book by artist, psychoanalyst, clinical psychologist, writer and painter Bracha L. Ettinger.Ettinger Bracha L. (1995). ''The Matrixial Gaze.'' Feminist Arts & Histories Network, It is a work of feminist film theory ...
'', which is inoperative when the male gaze is opposite to the female gaze, wherein both perspectives constitute each other from a lack, which is the Lacanian definition of " The Gaze". The matrixial gaze does not concern a subject and its object existing or lacking, but concerns "trans-subjectivity" and shareability, and is based upon the feminine-matrixial-difference, which escapes the phallic opposition of masculine–feminine, and is produced by co-emergence. Parting from Lacan's latter work, Ettinger's perspective is about the structure of the Lacanian subject, itself, which is deconstructed, and thus produces a perspective of feminine dimension with a hybrid, floating matrixial gaze.
E. Anne Kaplan's theorizing also suggests that the male gaze constructs a falsely hypersexualized feminine in order to dismiss the sensual feminine which all people are connected to through their innate relationship to a maternal figure.Kaplan, E. (1983). Is the Gaze Male? In Snitow A., Stansell C., & Thompson S. (Eds.), ''Powers of Desire: The Politics of Sexuality'' (pp. 309-327). New York: NYU Press. doi:10.2307/j.ctv12pnr6v.28 Kaplan states that "the domination of women by the male gaze is part of men's strategy to contain the threat that the mother embodies, and to control the positive and negative impulses that memory traces of being mothered have left in the male unconsciousness," though she also theorizes that the mutual gaze which neither seeks subordination or domination of the looker or the looked-at originates in the mother-child relationship. She also discusses hows “our culture is deeply committed to myths of demarcated sex differences, called 'masculine' and 'feminine, which in turn revolve first on a complex gaze apparatus and second on dominance-submission patterns. This positioning of the two sex genders in representation clearly privileges the male (through the mechanisms of voyeurism and fetishism, which are male operations, and because his desire carries power/action where woman’s usually does not)”. This is why the matrixial gaze functions the way it does, because feminine and masculine expressions are constantly in juxtaposition.
The female gaze
The cultural analystGriselda Pollock
Griselda Frances Sinclair Pollock''The International Who's Who of Women''; 3rd ed.; ed. Elizabeth Sleeman, Europa Publications, 2002, p. 453 (born 11 March 1949) is an art historian and cultural analyst of international, postcolonial feminist stud ...
said that the female gaze can be visually negated;
* ''Abridgement available at'':Pdf.
/ref> using the example of
Robert Doisneau
Robert Doisneau (; 14 April 1912 – 1 April 1994) was a French photographer. From the 1930s, he photographed the streets of Paris. He was a champion of humanist photography and with Henri Cartier-Bresson a pioneer of photojournalism.
Dois ...
's photograph ''Sidelong Glance'' (1948) Pollock describes a bourgeois
The bourgeoisie ( , ) is a social class, equivalent to the middle or upper middle class. They are distinguished from, and traditionally contrasted with, the proletariat by their affluence, and their great cultural and financial capital. They ...
, middle-aged couple viewing artworks in the display window of an art gallery. In the photograph, the spectator's perspective is from inside the art gallery. The couple is looking in a different direction than that of the spectator. The woman is speaking to her husband about a painting at which she is gazing, whilst her distracted husband is gazing at a painting of a nude woman, which also is in view of the spectator. The woman is looking at another artwork, which is not in view of the spectator. The man's gaze has found someone more interesting to gaze at, thus ignoring his wife's comment. Pollock's analysis of the ''Sidelong Glance'' photograph is that: "She he wife
He or HE may refer to:
Language
* He (pronoun), an English pronoun
* He (kana), the romanization of the Japanese kana へ
* He (letter), the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets
* He (Cyrillic), a letter of the Cyrillic script called ''He'' ...
is contrasted, iconographically, to the naked woman. She is denied the picturing of her desire; what she looks at is blank for the spectator. She is denied being the object of desire, because she is represented as a woman who actively looks, rather than s a woman passivelyreturning and confirming the gaze of the masculine spectator."
In "Watching the Detectives: The Enigma of the Female Gaze" (1989), Lorraine Gamman said that the female gaze is distinguished from the male gaze through its displacement of the power of scopophilia
In psychology and psychiatry, scopophilia or scoptophilia ( grc, σκοπέω , "look to", "to examine" + , "the tendency towards") is an aesthetic pleasure drawn from looking at an object or a person. In human sexuality, the term scoptophilia des ...
, which creates the possibility of multiple viewing angles, because "the female gaze cohabits the space occupied by men, rather than being entirely divorced from it"; therefore, the female gaze does not appropriate the "voyeurism" of the male gaze, because its purpose is to disrupt the phallocentric power of the male gaze, by providing other modes of looking at someone.
Mary Anne Doane's 1982 essay "Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator" continues an analysis of the male gaze in feminist film theory, highlighting how psychoanalytic theory
Psychoanalytic theory is the theory of personality organization and the dynamics of personality development that guides psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology. First laid out by Sigmund Freud in the late 19th century, psyc ...
, specifically Freud's, discounted the importance of the female spectator because “too close to herself, entangled in her own enigma, she could not step back, could not achieve the necessary distance of a second look”.Doane, M. (1999). Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator. In Thornham S. (Ed.), ''Feminist Film Theory: A Reader'' (pp. 131-145). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. doi:10.3366/j.ctvxcrtm8.17 Doane also deepened the understanding of the voyeuristic or fetishistic gazes to imply a "pleasurable transgression" of looking which greatly depends on the spatial proximity of the spectator to the spectated. In intentionally creating space between the subject (spectator) and the object (screen), the male gaze perpetuates an "infinite pursuit of an absent object". Such distanced spatial proximity is denied to the female spectator on the account that there is a "masochism of over-identification or the narcissism entailed in becoming one's own object of desire," which is the opposite of what Mulvey proposed had prevented men from being objectified by the cinematic gaze. Doane concludes that female spectators are afforded two options, or what she called a "transvestite
Transvestism is the practice of dressing in a manner traditionally associated with the opposite sex. In some cultures, transvestism is practiced for religious, traditional, or ceremonial reasons. The term is considered outdated in Western c ...
metaphor": to identify with the passive positions female characters are subject to in cinematic male gaze representation, or to identify with the masochistic position of the male gaze as a sort of defiance to the patriarchal assumptions which define femininity as a closeness.
In "Networks of Remediation" (1999), Jay David Bolter Jay David Bolter (born August 17, 1951) is the Wesley Chair of New Media and a professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His areas of study include the evolution of media, the use of tec ...
and Richard Grusin said that Mulvey's ''male gaze'' coincides with "the desire for visual immediacy" — the erasure of the visual medium for uninhibited interaction with the person portrayed — which is identified in feminist film theory as the "male desire that takes an overt sexual meaning when the object of representation, and therefore desire, is a woman." Bolter and Grusin proposed the term ''hypermediacy'' — drawing the spectator's attention to the medium (or media) and to the process of mediation present in an artwork — to be a form of the female gaze, because it "is multiple and deviant in its suggestion of multiplicity — a multiplicity of viewing positions, and a multiplicity of relationships, to the object in view, including sexual objects"; thus, like the female gaze, hypermediacy disrupts the myopic and monolithic male gaze, by offering more angles of viewing.
Photographer Farhat Basir Khan
Farhat Basir Khan (born 2 August 1957) is an Indian photographer. He has made contributions to photography and media studies in India, both as an academic as well as an industry professional.
Khan has also served as the Professor of Media & Comm ...
said that the female gaze is inherent to photographs taken by a woman, which perspective negates the stereotypical male-gaze perspective inherent to "male-constructed" photographs, which, in the history of art, have presented and represented women as objects, rather than as persons. The female gaze was the subject of the ''Feminigraphy'' exhibition, curated by Khan, at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts
Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), New Delhi is a premier government-funded arts organization in India. It is an autonomous institute under the Union Ministry of Culture (India), Ministry of Culture.
History
The Indira Ga ...
in January 2017.
As a part of the feminization of the male gaze, many scholars refer to what is known as the Medusa
In Greek mythology, Medusa (; Ancient Greek: Μέδουσα "guardian, protectress"), also called Gorgo, was one of the three monstrous Gorgons, generally described as winged human females with living venomous snakes in place of hair. Those ...
theory, or the idea that women who take up the female gaze are characterized as dangerous monsters, for men both desire and fear a gaze that objectifies them in the way a male gaze reduces a woman to a mere object. Scholar Susan Bower's 1990 piece "Medusa and the Female Gaze" more deeply examines this phenomenon, which begins when the woman who sees that she is being seen (by the male gaze) deconstructs and rejects her own objectification. A crucial aspect of the male gaze appears to be its subdued, unquestioned existence, which the female gaze disrupts as women acknowledge themselves as the object and refuse to accept this position by returning an equally objectifying gaze. Bowers uses the example of George Grosz
George Grosz (; born Georg Ehrenfried Groß; July 26, 1893 – July 6, 1959) was a German artist known especially for his caricatural drawings and paintings of Berlin life in the 1920s. He was a prominent member of the Berlin Dada and New Objec ...
's illustration ''Sex Murder on Ackerstrasse (Lustmord in der Ackerstrasse)'' to demonstrate how "without a head, the woman in the drawing can threaten neither the man with her nor the male spectator with her own subjectivity. Her mutilated body is a symbol of how men have been able to deal with women by relegating them to visual objectivity". As such, just as in Greek mythology
A major branch of classical mythology, Greek mythology is the body of myths originally told by the Ancient Greece, ancient Greeks, and a genre of Ancient Greek folklore. These stories concern the Cosmogony, origin and Cosmology#Metaphysical co ...
, it requires the violent dismemberment of women's heads - symbolizing their capacity to return an equally objectifying gaze to the male character - in order to subjugate the female gaze to acceptable heteropatriarchal norms.
Oppositional gaze
In the essay "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators" (1997)bell hooks
Gloria Jean Watkins (September 25, 1952December 15, 2021), better known by her pen name bell hooks, was an American author and social activist who was Distinguished Professor in Residence at Berea College. She is best known for her writings on ...
argues that Black women are placed outside the "pleasure in looking" by being excluded as subjects of the male gaze. Beyond the exclusivity of sex/sexuality as signifiers of difference, bell hooks addresses through oppositional gaze theory how the power in looking is also defined along lines of race. From her interpretation of Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975), hooks said that "from a standpoint that acknowledges race, one sees clearly why Black women spectators, not duped by mainstream cinema, would develop an oppositional gaze" to the male gaze. In relation to Lacan's mirror stage
The mirror stage (french: stade du miroir) is a concept in the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. The mirror stage is based on the belief that infants recognize themselves in a mirror (literal) or other symbolic contraption which induces apper ...
, during which a child develops the capacity for self-recognition, and thus the ideal ego, the oppositional gaze functions as a form of looking back, in search of the Black female body within the cinematic idealization of white womanhood.
As hooks states, the black female spectator identifies "with neither the phallocentric gaze nor the construction of white womanhood as lack," and thus, "critical black female spectators construct a theory of looking relations where cinematic visual delight is the pleasure of interrogation". This pleasure of interrogation stems from a reaction to cinematic representation which "denies the 'body' of the black female so as to perpetuate white supremacy
White supremacy or white supremacism is the belief that white people are superior to those of other races and thus should dominate them. The belief favors the maintenance and defense of any power and privilege held by white people. White su ...
and with it a phallocentric spectatorship where the woman to be looked at and desired is white". Through a perspective that accounts for signifiers of difference that lie outside the exclusivity of previously perpetuated lines of sex/sexuality, hooks is able to curate an entirely organic pleasure in looking, not associated with the scopophilia Mulvey originally outlined.
In the context of feminist theory, the absence of discussion of racial relations, within the "totalizing category fWomen", is a process of denial that refutes the reality that the criticism of many feminist film critics concerns only the cinematic presentation and representation of white women. In the course of being interviewed by hooks, a working-class Black woman said that "to see black women in the position hat
A hat is a head covering which is worn for various reasons, including protection against weather conditions, ceremonial reasons such as university graduation, religious reasons, safety, or as a fashion accessory. Hats which incorporate mecha ...
white women have occupied in film forever . . .", is to see a transfer without transformation; therefore, the oppositional gaze encompasses intellectual
An intellectual is a person who engages in critical thinking, research, and reflection about the reality of society, and who proposes solutions for the normative problems of society. Coming from the world of culture, either as a creator or a ...
resistance, and understanding and awareness of the politics of race and of racism via cinematic whiteness, inclusive of the male gaze.
The oppositional gaze has been the subject of feminist artist like Carrie Mae Weems
Carrie Mae Weems (born April 20, 1953) is an American artist working in text, fabric, audio, digital images and installation video, and is best known for her photography. She achieved prominence through her early 1990s photographic project ''Th ...
, who explores the relationship between audience and object through a racialized scope.
Queering the gaze
Much theorization of the male gaze has remained inside the heteropatriarchal paradigm concerning only sexual relationships between men and women, but scholars like Karen Hollinger have extended gaze theory to includequeer
''Queer'' is an umbrella term for people who are not heterosexual or cisgender. Originally meaning or , ''queer'' came to be used pejoratively against those with same-sex desires or relationships in the late 19th century. Beginning in the lat ...
cinematic representation, such as the conceptualization of a lesbian
A lesbian is a Homosexuality, homosexual woman.Zimmerman, p. 453. The word is also used for women in relation to their sexual identity or sexual behavior, regardless of sexual orientation, or as an adjective to characterize or associate n ...
gaze. Hollinger conceptualizes the lesbian gaze as a mutual gaze extended between two women, making neither and both the object and subject of a gaze. The absence of a heterosexual male presence to enable a controlling male gaze within the lesbian film genre begins to dismantle the patriarchal hegemony perpetuated by the male gaze. The female gaze is also further developed in lesbian gaze theory, where cinematic lesbians are "simultaneously both subject and object of the look and consequently of female desire". This is especially evident in what Hollinger references as "ambiguous lesbian cinema," where "the sexual orientation of its female characters is never made explicit, and viewers are left to read the text largely as they wish," preventing the fetishization of the lesbian identity by heterosexual male viewers by blurring the line between plutonic and platonic
Plato's influence on Western culture was so profound that several different concepts are linked by being called Platonic or Platonist, for accepting some assumptions of Platonism, but which do not imply acceptance of that philosophy as a whole. It ...
relationships between women.
Another scholar, Danielle Lefebvre, suggests that there is a degree of affirmation found in the everyday manifestation of the male gaze for trans women
A trans woman or a transgender woman is a woman who was assigned male at birth. Trans women have a female gender identity, may experience gender dysphoria, and may transition; this process commonly includes hormone replacement therapy and so ...
. Lefebvre states that "when the male gaze is affirming and one’s identity is validated, it may be a motivator to continue to conform to consistently be correctly gendered and avoid harm for not conforming". Manifestations of the male gaze can be affirming for trans women whose gender performance of femininity gains acceptance when it is subjected to the objectified position of the feminine by a male audience. While Lefebvre points out the ways in which trans women can benefit from the male gaze, she also discusses the negative effects that it can have on cis men. She argues that when cis men exhibit feminine traits they often face backlash, including sexual harassment from their communities. “The goal of sexual harassment is to enforce traditional masculinity and ‘punish’ men who do not conform to these norms”. While these gender norms can benefit trans women they harm cis men due to the cultural basis that men are dominant and masculine while women are submissive and feminine. It is this notion that exacerbates the male gaze.
Some scholars have also hypothesized that cinematic male gaze acts as a "safety valve for homoerotic
Homoeroticism is sexual attraction between members of the same sex, either male–male or female–female. The concept differs from the concept of homosexuality: it refers specifically to the desire itself, which can be temporary, whereas "homose ...
tensions," where these sexual tensions are projected onto female characters as a negation of male homoeroticism
Homoeroticism is sexual attraction between members of the same sex, either male–male or female–female. The concept differs from the concept of homosexuality: it refers specifically to the desire itself, which can be temporary, whereas "homose ...
in popular genres like action movies or buddy comedies. One of these scholars, Patrick Shuckmann, finds that homoerotic gaze theory reframes female objectification in male character's relationship to female characters' existence as an Other, an alternative upon which the homoeroticism can be redirected away from male character relationships. In other words, women in film are not just objects of desire, they are objects of displaced desire. To demonstrate that the purpose of women on the screen is to validate heterosexuality, in a context where it is otherwise subverted by homoerotic images, Shuckmann introduces three plot contexts where the male gaze is crucial in de-eroticizing male character relationships on screen. The first, is an action plot where two men are engaged in close-combat where the homoerotic close-physical contact is repressed through violence and the male gaze objectifying women becomes a "safety valve" for homoerotic conflict. The second plot describes the buddy movie
The buddy film is a subgenre of adventure and comedy film in which two people are put together and are on an adventure, a quest, or a road trip. The two often contrast in personality, which creates a dynamic onscreen different from a pairing of ...
genre, where homoerotic tension is entirely acknowledged in alluded jokes, but denied through a male-gaze objectification of the heterosexual male-female relationship either male character may possess. Lastly, there is the good versus evil plot genre, where two men share an obsessive, borderline homoerotic, fixation with one another as they repeatedly seek each other out. This genre is usually complemented by a marginal female character who serves no other plot purpose besides to affirm heterosexuality. The movie ''Point Break
''Point Break'' is a 1991 American action crime film directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by W. Peter Iliff. It stars Patrick Swayze, Keanu Reeves, Lori Petty and Gary Busey. The film's title refers to the surfing term " point break", wher ...
'' is an example of the third plot genre, and provides context for the analysis of the male gaze as a tool for subverting repressed male homoeroticism on screen.
See also
*Gaze
In critical theory, sociology, and psychoanalysis, the gaze (French ''le regard''), in the philosophical and figurative sense, is an individual's (or a group's) awareness and perception of other individuals, other groups, or oneself. The concept ...
* Imperial gaze
* Screen theory
* White gaze
References
Further reading
* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Male Gaze, The Feminist terminology Feminist theory Feminism and the arts Film theory