[37][10], In the context of feminist theory, the absence of discussion of racial relations within the totalizing category [of] Women is a sociological denial that refutes criticism that feminist film critics concern themselves only with the cinematic presentation and representation of white women. The male gaze and the idea that men are entitled to women's bodies remain threaded throughout society. Therefore, in the narrative of the story (screenplay) the actress does not portray a female protagonist whose actions directly affect the outcome of the story or propel the plot. Think of Fish Tank (2009), a coming-of-age story about a disadvantaged girls vulnerability, or In the Cut (2003), a story about a womans sexual discovery. Mulvey wrote her essay some 50 years ago, so she was mostly referring to the Classical era of mainstream cinema. Rather than linger lovingly on the parts it wants most to penetrate, it looks, assumes, and moves on. In the male gaze, woman is visually positioned as an object of heterosexual male desire. The same way the male gaze promotes a certain ideology about females characters, other stereotypes also persist. In Theorizing Mainstream Female Spectatorship: The Case of the Popular Lesbian Film (1988) the academic Karen Hollinger queered male-gaze theory to develop and explain the gaze of the lesbian woman,[19] which is a mutual gaze between two women neither of whom is the subject or the object of the lesbian gaze. [37], The Black woman spectator identifies "with neither the phallocentric gaze nor the construction of white womanhood as lack [of the Other]", thus, "critical Black female spectators construct a theory of looking relations where cinematic visual delight is the pleasure of interrogation",[37] which originates from a negative emotional response to the cinematic representation of women that "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". [10] 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. This is exactly what the problem with the cinematic male gaze is. 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. [16][10], 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). Who is consuming these images and what do they see when they look at them? [35], In the article From Her Perspective (2017), photographer and academic Farhat Basir Khan said that the female gaze is inherent to photographs taken by a woman, which is a perspective that negates the stereotypical male-gaze look inherent to "male-constructed" photographs, which, in the history of art, usually have presented and represented women as objects, rather than as persons. Given the prevalence of the male gaze in a patriarchal society, the social conventions of conservative traditionalism implicitly teach girls and women how to behave when scrutinized by the male gaze; thus instructions in the social graces for girls include to stand straight and not slouch, to speak politely, not coarsely, and to groom-and-dress themselves in consideration of the opinions of other people, etc. [35] The important aspect of the male gaze is its subdued, unquestioned existence, which is disrupted by the female gaze when women acknowledge themselves as the object of the gaze, and reject such sexual subordination by objectifying the gazing man with their female gaze. 2018;565(7737):126-126. doi:10.1038/d41586-018-07512-9, Reuben E, Sapienza P, Zingales L. How stereotypes impair womens careers in science. In the genre film, Point Break (1991) the female gaze of the woman director presents and analyses homoerotic attraction between the policeman protagonist and the bank-robber antagonist. Roman Emperor Caligula's massive party ships were not burned by the Nazis during World War II, researchers say. [19], Male-gaze theory also proposes that the male gaze is a psychological "safety valve for homoerotic tensions" among heterosexual men; in genre cinema, the psychological projection of homosexual attraction is sublimated onto the women characters of the story, to distract the spectator of the film story from noticing that homoeroticism is innate to friendships and relationships among men. Plus, when you are consuming (or producing) various types of media, you can do so with your eyes wide open to the ways the male gaze may be playing a part in the narrative and visual landscape. 2018;48(1):56-70. doi:10.1080/00064246.2018.1402256, Mukkamala S, Suyemoto KL. Ninja Thyberg wants to change the way you watch porn. Men are considered the active do-ers of the world, while women are expected to take a more passive role supporting the men and/or mens goals. The male gaze takes many forms, but can be identified by situations where female characters are controlled by, and mostly exist in terms of what they represent to, the hero. With this in mind, how can we subvert the male gaze in our filmmaking choices? [34]:84, In the essay, Medusa and the Female Gaze (1990), Susan Bowers explores the Medusa theory about the feminization of the male gaze, that women who assume the female gaze are societally perceived as psychologically dangerous women, because men both desire and fear the gaze that sexually objectifies a man in the way that the male gaze objectifies a woman. [39], Using three story-plots in which the male gaze voids the homoerotic gaze in the relationships among the male characters in the story, Schuckmann shows that the visual and thematic purpose of women characters in a movie is to validate heterosexuality as the social norm. To the villain Jafar (Marwan Kenzari), Jasmine is a valuable commodity to be obtained for greater power and influence. [5][6], The concept of the gaze (le regard) was first used by the English art critic John Berger in Ways of Seeing (1972), which presents analyses of the representation of women as passive objects to be seen in advertising and as nude subjects in European art. [37] Accounting for the social signifiers of difference that lie outside the exclusivity of perpetuated lines of sex-and-sexuality, hooks curated an organic pleasure in looking, which is not related to the scopophilia originally presented and explained in Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. [10] 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. The term "male gaze" was coined by Laura Mulvey, a feminist film critic, in her 1975 essay titled "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema." Mulvey describes the male gaze as the way women are viewed and portrayed as sexual objects that solely exist for the pleasure of heterosexual men. With Tijmen Govaerts, Gabriel Omri Loukas, Vincent Xi Chen, Piotr Biedron. Portrayals that bend to the male gaze show women as passive, vapid, highly sexualized, or other stereotypical versions of womanhood. She has done just about every job on set, from PA to Producer. 2014;111(12):4403-4408. doi:10.1073/pnas.1314788111, Lundy AD. This concept is not just about how women (and their bodies) are used to satisfy male fantasy but also how this gaze, whether it's directed at them or others, makes women feel about themselves. Does it reinforce or challenge the idea of the female form as an object to be had or as a stepping stone? Verywell Mind's content is for informational and educational purposes only. So in their own work, they're taking steps to avoid that trap. Monash University provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU. She is denied the picturing of her desire; what she looks at is blank for the spectator. Her work has been published in numerous magazines, newspapers, and websites, including The Spruce, Activity Connection,Glamour, PDX Parent, Self, Verywell Fit, TripSavvy, Marie Claire, and TimeOut New York. [33] That the voyeuristic gaze and the fetishistic gaze each is a "pleasurable transgression" of looking depends on the spectator's physical proximity to the person who is the spectacle. In the course of chasing and evading each other, each man has opportunity to exercise his homoerotic gaze at the Other man, both as object and as subject of desire, personal and professional. We wish to make him ours, to keep and to hold forever, but will the boy reciprocate? The couple are looking in directions different from the sight-line of the spectator. A visual medium requires visual methods. In order to understand the male gaze, you need to recognize it. This results in a spectrum of problems. The Male Gaze: Nocturnal Instincts: Directed by Dean Anderson, Roberto F. Canuto, Nicolas Graux, Gabriel Omri Loukas, Gustav Hugo Olsson, Xiaoxi Xu. [13] The cinematic concept of the male gaze is presented, explained, and developed in the essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"[14] (1975),[15] 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. The term "male gaze" was coined in 1975 by film theorist Laura Mulvey; the "female gaze" is a more recent, less-explored theory, but is not necessarily the exact opposite. [37] In relation to Lacan's mirror stage, during which a child develops the capacity for self-recognition, and thus the Ego ideal, the oppositional gaze functions as a form of looking back, in search of the Black female body within the cinematic idealization of white womanhood. Sarah Vanbuskirk has over 20 years of experience as a writer and editor, covering a range of health, wellness, lifestyle, and family-related topics. There should be no shame in dressing provocatively and owning your sexuality. Female celebrities pose provocatively on the covers of magazines, male stars (usually fully dressed) pose alongside minimally-dressed models or simply on their own. [37] Now that we have a sense of what to look for, lets practice being able to recognize the male gaze. For more mental health resources, see ourNational Helpline Database. [37] In the course of being interviewed by hooks, a working-class Black woman said that "to see Black women in the position [that] white women have occupied in film forever" is to witness a transference without transformation; therefore, in the real world, the oppositional gaze includes intellectual resistance and understanding and awareness of the politics of race and of racism by way of cinematic whiteness, inclusive of the male gaze. Naturally, the influence of the male gaze seeps into female self-perception and self-esteem. The "female gaze" is a term used in recent years to describe art that subverts the ubiquitous male perspective. A US artillery unit was to blame. [39] Thematically completing the plot and resolving the story requires that the policeman and the criminal seek the definitive masculine confrontation, the physical combat that will express and resolve their homosexual attraction, and the crime. It frames the female body in sections and dehumanizes her. 2017;15(4):451-455. doi:10.1080/17400309.2017.1377937, Glapka E. If you look at me like at a piece of meat, then thats a problem women in the center of the male gaze. After all, isnt Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford) as sexy as Gilda Mundson (Rita Hayworth) in Gilda (1946)? Films like The Piano, In The Cut or Marie Antoinette show that cinema can use music, erotic scenes and visual aesthetics to express a feminine point of view. APA handbook of the psychology of women: History, theory, and battlegrounds. [10], The visual perspective common to the three types of look (camera, spectator, characters) is that the action of looking generally is perceived as the man's active role, while being looked-at generally is perceived as the woman's passive role in the story. Filmmakers often attempt to avoid presenting female characters as mere sexual objects by giving them complex back stories, strong motivations and an active role in the plot of their story. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider . 1430, ISBN9780230576469. In the following scene from Fast Five, Gisele (Gal Gadot) and Han (Sung Kang) have been tasked with getting the bad guys fingerprints. [18], The Freudian concept of scopophilia produced two types of male gaze: (i) the pleasure that is linked to sexual attraction (voyeurism in the extreme), and (ii) the scopophilic pleasure that is linked to narcissistic identification (the introjection of Ego ideal), and each type of male gaze shows how women have been socially compelled to view the cinema from the perspectives (sexual, aesthetic, cultural) of the male gaze. We subvert something by taking away its power, especially in the context of a long-accepted social construct, like the Patriarchy. 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 twenty-five years. Body Image. Censorship bodies like the Motion Picture Association of America, however, seem to treat cunnilingus as more graphic than other forms of sex. To make things clear, I am only attracted to men, I always have been, I went through a phase where I doubted it for a while, but the break I took from dating since the start of the pandemic has sealed . Reducing a woman's worth to her desirability to men deteriorates her emotional, intellectual and physical self-esteem, while elevating toxic masculinity as well as the men who live up to those masculine standards. Ultimately, the male gaze is a social construct that we can disarm by recognizing it and choosing to either tolerate or ignore itor intentionally take it on and recalibrate it as your own, co-opting its power to define your sexuality, agency, and worth on your own terms. Many male gaze shots come in medium close-up shots of women from over a man's shoulder, shots that pan across and over while fixating on a woman's body, and close-ups on various body parts which show a man actively observing a passive woman. Surely this indicates the presence of a (heterosexual) female gaze. . That the male gaze applies to literature and to the visual arts: uczyska-Hodys, Magorzata (2013). To her Sultan father, Jasmine (Naomi Scott) is a precious artifact locked away for safekeeping. And lets compare these scenes from two different James Bond films. It doesn't break down like that': film-maker Nina Menkes dissects the male gaze New documentary uses hundreds of clips to show how even the most acclaimed classics of cinema have encouraged a . Men are considered the "active" do-ers of the world, while . They watch her from a distance waiting for their chance. ), Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire England New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. Aaron Johnson is a fact checker and expert on qualitative research design and methodology. Using close-ups, the camera forces the viewer to stare at Coras body. Awareness of the influence of the male gaze is key to freeing yourself of its power. [9], The psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan are the foundations from which Mulvey developed the theory of the male gaze and interpreted and explained scopophilia, the "primordial wish for pleasurable looking" that is satisfied by the cinematic experience. 2016;17(1):133-151. According to this logic, it is not Fitzwilliam Darcys wet undershirt that inflames the female viewer in Pride and Prejudice. Nature. The male gaze, is a term that was brought up as a phenomenon by Laura Mulvey in her essay Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema and was elaborated in a cinematic context which implies the way women are portrayed in films from the viewpoint of film directors in most cases, cis-heterosexual men. But what is the underlying motivation? [39] The second plot is from the buddy film genre, which thematically acknowledges the existence of homoerotic tension between the two men who collaborate to realise a job. Even if a viewer isnt attracted to women in real life, the scene still makes sense. She is the one, or rather the love or fear she inspires in the hero, or else the concern he feels for her, who makes him act the way he does. [18] 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. Lets clarify with an example. But its humour derives from the fact that it is unusual to see men sexualised in the same way as women. The term "male gaze" was first popularized in relation to the depiction of female characters in film as inactive, often overtly sexualized objects of male desire. By interpreting objects of art as diverse as paintings of the nude and Hollywood films, these theorists have concluded that women depicted in art are standardly placed as objects of . Read our. Aladdin is a traditional family film that was released in 2019. Master the art of visual storytelling with our FREE video series on directing and filmmaking techniques. She is denied being the object of desire, because she is represented as a woman who actively looks, rather than [as a woman passively] returning and confirming the gaze of the masculine spectator. With Harry Jarvis, Matthieu Lucci, Samuel Theis, Pierre Prieur. [21] The male-gaze perspectives of Tintoretto's paintings represent Susanna as nonchalant at being gazed upon in her nudity, whereas the female-gaze perspective of the painting by Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders (1610), represents the bathing Susanna as greatly humiliated at being subjected to the male gaze of two old men the Elders of the community whose voyeurism has sexually objectified Susanna in the private sphere of her life. [33] Such psychological distance despite physical proximity is denied to the female spectator because of the "masochism of over-identification or the narcissism entailed in becoming one's own object of desire" the opposite of what Mulvey said prevented the cinematic objectification of men. [30] 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. Think also of beer (or just about any other product) advertisements with models in bikinis. Essentially, the male gaze sees the female body as something for the heterosexual male (or patriarchal society as a whole) to watch, conquer, and possess and use to further their goals. Doing something to the love interest is a standard plot point that draws out the hero to the final confrontation. The blonde bombshell (also known as the ditzy blonde or airhead) is another common trope. the movie business, advertising, fashion) unilaterally determine what is "natural and normal" in society. For a modern example, the Transformers film series (2006-2014) presents women as sexual objects to be desired. Certainly, beautiful men abound in cinema. Parting from the Freudian concept of male castration anxiety, Mulvey said that because the woman has no penis, her female presence provokes sexual insecurity in the unconscious of the male,[10] wherein women are passive recipients of male objectification. But when Bond himself emerges from the water in Casino Royale, theres no slo-mo, no binoculars. [37] Parting from her interpretation of the essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975), by Laura Mulvey,[38] hooks said that "from a standpoint that acknowledges race, one sees clearly why Black women spectators, [who are] not duped by mainstream cinema, would develop an oppositional gaze" to counter the male gaze.
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