[8]:14[9]:127, As an ideological basis of patriarchy, socio-political inequality is realised as a value system, by which male-created institutions (e.g the movie business, advertising, fashion) unilaterally determine what is "natural and normal" in society. There are two categories of pleasurable viewing: (i) voyeurism, 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, wherein the viewer's pleasure is in self-recognition when viewing the image of another person. [16] 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 relationships between women. The theory of the male gaze has been hugely influential in feminist film theory and in media studies. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) offers a famous example of the male gaze. "[26], 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, 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. [32] 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 and with it a phallocentric spectatorship where the woman to be looked at and desired is white". "[9] From the male perspective, a man possesses the gaze because he is a man, whereas a woman possesses the gaze only when she assumes the role of a man, and thus possesses the male gaze when she objectifies other people, by gazing at them as would a man. The feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey coined the concept of the ‘male gaze’ in 1975. . The two women are more sakhis than employer and employee, and they are looking at one another, not out at a viewer. For starters, let’s start off by defining what a gaze is. [31] Bowers uses the example of George Grosz'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. We are actively viewing ourselves from the lens of our camera. Despite Mulvey's contention that "the gaze" is a property of one gender or if the female gaze merely is an internalized male gaze remains indeterminate: "First, that the 1975 article 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' was written as a polemic, and, as Mandy Merck has described it, as a manifesto; so I had no interest in modifying the argument. One can look at paintings such as Venus of Urbino by Titian and see the elongated features, welcoming smile, and (obviously) nude position of the woman. Audiences are forced to view women from the point of view of a heterosexual male, even if they are heterosexual women or homosexual men. [8] In order to mitigate this unpleasantness, Mulvey theorizes that women are transformed into passive recipients of male objectification in media representations. ), Visual and other pleasures (2nd ed. [16] 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 male gaze is a penetrating force every woman has dealt with in her life. 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-emerge… [15], Two forms of the male gaze are based upon the Freudian concept of scopophilia, the "pleasure that is linked to sexual attraction (voyeurism in the extreme) and [the] scopophilic pleasure that is linked to narcissistic identification (the introjection of ideal egos)", which show how women have been forced to view the cinema from the perspectives (sexual, aesthetic, cultural) of the male gaze. Clearly, I think, in retrospect, from a more nuanced perspective, [the article is] about the inescapability of the male gaze. [8]:807 As a way of seeing women and the world, psychoanalytic theorizations of the male gaze involve Freudian and Lacanian concepts such as scopophilia, or the pleasure of looking. [8] The rigidity by which the male gaze is defined along lines of gender/sexuality subjects only female characters to a permanently passive position where their to-be-looked-at-ness is their primary cinematic role. [8] These concepts of voyeurism and narcissism translate to psychoanalytic concepts of object libido and ego libido, respectively. The gaze is a technical term which was used in the film theory in the 1970s; it simply defines how others look at certain subjects in a particular light. This painting is what inspired me to write this blog and this meme is totally fitting for Titian’s intention. The Male Gaze theory, in a nutshell, is where women in the media are viewed from the eyes of a heterosexual man, and that these women are represented as passive objects of male desire. [20] There is also Heathcliff's character, who is the great love of Catherine's life, and "through Heathcliff, then, Wuthering Heights suggests that the woman's gaze as an object of male perception is simultaneously feared and desired, desired because it offers the possibility of lost wholeness, feared because it insists that the subject is not whole, that wholeness has indeed been lost". The history of British art is similarly full of intriguing women who played about with the male gaze, using their art to comment and subvert the limits of femininity often imposed from above. [34] 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". [18] From this perspective, cinematic female characters can take up the male gaze, subverting the male characters to a submissive, objectified position; but, Kaplan observes that in doing so the female character is likely to lose all of her traditionally feminine characteristics. The male gaze is a relatively recent concept in feminist theory, and this quiz/worksheet combo will teach you about its origins and meaning. The male gaze was first used to describe how the audience for a movie is required to observe from the perspective of a heterosexual male; in almost all movies woman exist for men to enjoy, and the message is you too could have this. Berger didn’t want to put an end to advertising, and he certainly didn’t want us to stop looking at classical art – but with his collaborators and a late night TV slot, he helped to kickstart a quiet revolution in the way we view the world around us. ), Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire England New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. In the Renaissance, Artist and Model in the Studio by Albrecht Dürer, equates the male gaze with the invention of linear perspective. The examples outlined here are selective and many other relevant artists/artworks can be chosen to discuss the themes in this lecture, based on your own syllabus. The fashion industry is built on selling a female ideal, and the Angels are a strong but not singular example of this. [28], In "Networks of Remediation" (1999), Jay David Bolter 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. [20] Catherine’s character also exhibits what theorists have conceptualized as the female gaze, and "in assuming the role of spectator, she seeks a 'masculine' position that because she is a woman, redefines her as a 'monster' or 'witch'". [8] Fetishistic scopophilia involves reducing the threat of castration fear associated with the female presence by fragmenting and hypersexualizing parts of the female body. It was written, produced, and directed by women and is shot almost entirely in the female gaze, one of the few movies to ever achieve this. Here a gaze can transcend the medium in which it is produced and contains social implications beyond its function within the work of art. [11] 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 proposes that sexual inequality — the asymmetry of social and political power between men and women — is a controlling social force in the cinematic representations of women and men; and that the male gaze (the aesthetic pleasure of the male viewer) is a social construct derived from the ideologies and discourses of patriarchy.

Mining Up Site, Yours Truly Cape Town Menu, Fortnite E 11 Blaster Rifle, Missing Emulator Engine Program For 'x86' Cpu Error, Sffma Certification Codes, Mantas Armalis Instagram, Redmond Fire Department, Barber String Quartet, Delhi University College Canteen Tenders, Heniff Transportation Reviews,