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Male gaze
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Male gaze
In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world in the visual arts and in literature from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer. The concept was first articulated by British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". Mulvey's theory draws on historical precedents, such as the depiction of women in European oil paintings from the Renaissance period, where the female form was often idealized and presented from a voyeuristic male perspective.
Art historian John Berger, in his work Ways of Seeing (1972), highlighted how traditional Western art positioned women as subjects of male viewers' gazes, reinforcing a patriarchal visual narrative. The beauty standards perpetuated by the male gaze have historically sexualized and fetishized black women due to an attraction to their physical characteristics, but at the same time punished them and excluded their bodies from what is considered desirable.
In the visual and aesthetic presentations of narrative cinema, the male gaze has three perspectives: that of the man behind the camera, that of the male characters within the film's cinematic representations, and that of the spectator gazing at the image.
Concerning the psychologic applications and functions of the gaze, the male gaze is conceptually contrasted with the female gaze.
The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre introduced the concept of the gaze in his 1943 book Being and Nothingness; the idea is that the act of gazing at another human being creates a subjective power difference, which is felt both by the "gazer" and by the "gazed", because the person being gazed at is objectified – perceived as an object, not as a human being. In Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", she presents, explains, and develops the cinematic concept of the male gaze. 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. The male gaze (the aesthetic pleasure of the male viewer) is a social construct derived from the ideologies and discourses of patriarchy.
In the fields of media studies and feminist film theory, the male gaze is conceptually related to the behaviors of voyeurism (looking as sexual pleasure), scopophilia (pleasure from looking), and narcissism (pleasure from contemplating one's self). Parting from the Freudian concept of male castration anxiety, Mulvey said that because the woman does not have a penis, her female presence provokes sexual insecurity in the unconscious of the male, wherein women are passive recipients of male objectification. The on-screen presence of a woman's body is notable, because "her lack of penis, [implies] a threat of castration and hence unpleasure", which the male gaze subverts through the over-sexualization of femininity. As the passive subjects and objects of the male gaze, the hypersexualization of women thwarts the man's castration anxiety with the sexual practises of voyeurism-sadism and fetishization of the female body. The practice of voyeurism-sadism is the "pleasure [that] lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness", which aligns more with the structure of narrative cinema than does the fetishization component of scopophilia. Psychologically, fetishistic scopophilia reduces the man's castration anxiety — induced by the presence of women — by fragmenting the woman's personality and hypersexualizing the parts of her body.
In narrative film, the visual perspective of the male gaze is the sight-line of the camera as the perspective of the spectator — 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: as an erotic object of desire for the characters in the filmed story; and 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 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, an aesthetic choice based upon the inequality of sociopolitical power between men and women.
As an ideological basis of patriarchy, sociopolitical inequality is realized 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. 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.
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Male gaze
In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world in the visual arts and in literature from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer. The concept was first articulated by British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". Mulvey's theory draws on historical precedents, such as the depiction of women in European oil paintings from the Renaissance period, where the female form was often idealized and presented from a voyeuristic male perspective.
Art historian John Berger, in his work Ways of Seeing (1972), highlighted how traditional Western art positioned women as subjects of male viewers' gazes, reinforcing a patriarchal visual narrative. The beauty standards perpetuated by the male gaze have historically sexualized and fetishized black women due to an attraction to their physical characteristics, but at the same time punished them and excluded their bodies from what is considered desirable.
In the visual and aesthetic presentations of narrative cinema, the male gaze has three perspectives: that of the man behind the camera, that of the male characters within the film's cinematic representations, and that of the spectator gazing at the image.
Concerning the psychologic applications and functions of the gaze, the male gaze is conceptually contrasted with the female gaze.
The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre introduced the concept of the gaze in his 1943 book Being and Nothingness; the idea is that the act of gazing at another human being creates a subjective power difference, which is felt both by the "gazer" and by the "gazed", because the person being gazed at is objectified – perceived as an object, not as a human being. In Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", she presents, explains, and develops the cinematic concept of the male gaze. 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. The male gaze (the aesthetic pleasure of the male viewer) is a social construct derived from the ideologies and discourses of patriarchy.
In the fields of media studies and feminist film theory, the male gaze is conceptually related to the behaviors of voyeurism (looking as sexual pleasure), scopophilia (pleasure from looking), and narcissism (pleasure from contemplating one's self). Parting from the Freudian concept of male castration anxiety, Mulvey said that because the woman does not have a penis, her female presence provokes sexual insecurity in the unconscious of the male, wherein women are passive recipients of male objectification. The on-screen presence of a woman's body is notable, because "her lack of penis, [implies] a threat of castration and hence unpleasure", which the male gaze subverts through the over-sexualization of femininity. As the passive subjects and objects of the male gaze, the hypersexualization of women thwarts the man's castration anxiety with the sexual practises of voyeurism-sadism and fetishization of the female body. The practice of voyeurism-sadism is the "pleasure [that] lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness", which aligns more with the structure of narrative cinema than does the fetishization component of scopophilia. Psychologically, fetishistic scopophilia reduces the man's castration anxiety — induced by the presence of women — by fragmenting the woman's personality and hypersexualizing the parts of her body.
In narrative film, the visual perspective of the male gaze is the sight-line of the camera as the perspective of the spectator — 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: as an erotic object of desire for the characters in the filmed story; and 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 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, an aesthetic choice based upon the inequality of sociopolitical power between men and women.
As an ideological basis of patriarchy, sociopolitical inequality is realized 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. 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.
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