male gaze examples in art

[28] 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. 14–30, ISBN 9780230576469. The terms scopophilia and scoptophilia identify both the aesthetic pleasures and the sexual pleasures derived from looking at someone or something. [18] Therefore, the degree to which women who practice the male gaze are masculinized demonstrates the rigidity of associated gender roles and characteristics in media representations of heterosexual romantic relationships. LOCATING FEMINISM (USING MARXISM) • Marxism taught us that social structures are based in Economic relations • Ownership of CAPITAL (money) leads to POWER and AUTONOMY • DIVISION OF LABOR: Men : Paid work, the “breadwinners” Women: Unpaid work, the “homemakers” • Consequence: Women are economically dependent on … According to Merriam Webster Dictionary, to “gaze” means “to fix the eyes in a steady, intent look often with eagerness or studious attention”. Women were portrayed in various mediums in order to please the male client purchasing/viewing the piece. The Ads: The ads below constitute all of the levels of the male gaze that I have described. Please include examples of each of the movements within modernism and examples of postmodern art. [9] 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 develop gender inequality in service to a patriarchal sexual order. [8] 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 decisive female character whose actions directly affect the outcome of the plot or impel 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. It treats the women at its center with nuance, depicting their complicated relationships and motivations, rather than portraying them one-dimensionally, and the film avoids using a leering gaze … A new London exhibition titled âFeminist Avant-Garde of the 1970sâ revisits a time when most women were regarded as passive muses instead of authoritative subjects and makers, in control of their bodies, identities and work. society', by reassuring the [male] viewer of his male privilege, as the possessor of the objectifying [male] gaze. [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. 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, representational) of 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 socio-political power between men and women. In the Renaissance, Artist and Model in the Studio by Albrecht Dürer, equates the male gaze with the invention of linear perspective. "[9]:128 Moreover, in the power dynamics of human relationships, the gazer can gaze upon members of the same gender for asexual reasons, such as comparing the gazer's body image and clothing to the body and clothes of the gazed-upon person.[9]:127[19]. The tranquil, almost divine nature of the scene – the celebration of … The first Twilight movie is also a good example of the female gaze, but not in a good movie. Now what is the male gaze you ask. Oxford-educated, Mulvey is a highly praised and credible critic known for her theories in film and most popular for her early essayâ¦ In this chapter, Barrett writes that in 1972, British art critic John Berger presented a thesis (from the 1972 television series and accompanying published book "Ways of Seeing") that became famous as the identification and explanation of "the male gaze." Another important part of Mulvey’s theory built upon a Freudian psychoanalytic concept of male castration anxiety, where because the woman is phallus lacking, her presence evokes unpleasantness in the male unconsciousness. As a part of the feminization of the male gaze, many scholars refer to what is known as the Medusa 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. Archived 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine, Depiction of girls and women as sexual objects for the pleasure of a male, heterosexual viewer. Notably, women function as objects of this gaze far more often than as proxies for the spectator. The female reader or viewer must experience the narrative secondarily, by identification with the male. [35] This genre is usually complemented by a marginal female character who serves no other plot purpose besides to affirm heterosexuality. The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre introduced the concept of le regard, the gaze, in Being and Nothingness (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. [32] 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 . A male gaze. (2002). industry would change it forever. [16] 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. 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… Firstly, these movies have a huge difference in the male/female character ratio, instantly making it an unrepresentative movie as it â¦ Pdf via Amherst College. The concept of the male gaze was first used by the English art critic John Berger in Ways of Seeing, a series of films for the BBC aired in January 1972, and later a book, as part of his analysis of the treatment of the nude in European painting. 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. [8] The perspective common to the three types of look 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. [32] 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. [32], 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". Or take the example of a film still from Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 film, Rear Window. and womenâs cinema is the idea of the male gaze. [31] As such, just as in Greek mythology, 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. The woman is looking at another artwork, which is not in view of the spectator. "[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. [35] The second plot describes the buddy movie 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. [18] 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. Typi… The male gaze refers to how the world – and women in particular – are looked at and presented from a cisgender, straight, frequently white male perspective. Doane, M. (1999). The definition of gaze has thus evolved from just a âlookâ into an âintentâ look (i.e. The feminist concept of the âmale gazeâ Posted at 17:27h in art history , courtesans , Metropolitan Museum , nasty women by Professor Andrew Lear The concept originally comes from film studies, where it is used to discuss the fact that men traditionally controlled â¦ Bracha Ettinger criticized the male gaze with the matrixial gaze, 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". In these paintings, the men gaze upon the female figures as possessions. Eva-Maria Jacobsson concurs with Paul's description of the female gaze as "a mere cross-identification with masculinity", yet evidence of women's sexual objectification of men — the existence of a discrete female gaze — can be found in the boy toy adverts in teen magazines. [8] 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 Snitow A., Stansell C., & Thompson S. And these camera lenses reflect and recreate a male gazed recognition of the world regardless of the audience we hope to reach. This page has been accessed 33,884 times. [35] In other words, women in film are not just objects of desire, they are objects of displaced desire. [24], In the production of art, the conventions of artistic representation connect the objectification of a woman, by the male gaze, to the Lacanian theory of social alienation — the psychological splitting that occurs from seeing one's self as one is, and seeing one's self as an idealized representation. Her mutilated body is a symbol of how men have been able to deal with women by relegating them to visual objectivity". Gaze and feminist theory . To informally analyze, we can see that this is pretty much 16th century Italian porn, more tastefully termed in art history classes as for the male gaze. The stunning show celebrates 48 radical women artists who used their [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. [35] 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. Laura Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" gave one of the most widely influential versions of this argument. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) offers a famous example of the male gaze. [15] For most women, it is not a physical interaction with a man which causes such internalised feelings of self-objectification and negative mental states, but is simply anticipating being the subject of the male gaze. This page was last modified 11:14, 14 July 2014. In the following scene from Fast Five, Gisele (Gal Gadot) and Han (Sung Kang) have been tasked with getting the bad guy’s fingerprints. The male gaze is a penetrating force every woman has dealt with in her life. "[29]:79 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.[29]:84. Male gaze and art 1. [8]:815, The male gaze is conceptually contrasted with the female gaze.[9][10]. The female gaze in Twilight is on lingering looks, touches, and facial expressions. Laura Mulvey, in her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", introduced the concept of the male gaze as a symptom of power asymmetry, hypothesizing about what she called the "male gaze." Community Laura Mulveyâs famous 1975 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, describes an old Hollywood sexual style and how both women and men â¦ Responses to "male gaze" See female gaze. All media is produced in similar ways using a standardized way of advertising a women through a way that men would find her 'attractive'. [8] In describing the relationships between the characters of the novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), by Jean Rhys, Nalini Paul said that when the character of Antoinette gazes at Rochester, and places a garland upon him, she makes him appear heroic, yet: "Rochester does not feel comfortable with having this role enforced upon him; thus, he rejects it by removing the garland, and crushing the flowers. The fashion industry is built on selling a female ideal, and the Angels are a strong but not singular example of this. Examples in art. [35], Also available as: Mulvey, Laura (2009), "Visual pleasure and narrative cinema", in Mulvey, Laura (ed. The male gaze. 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. Sex and the City: Shifting Past the Male Gaze … It establishes the dynamic of men as the spectators, and women as the objects of their gaze. [8] In order to mitigate this unpleasantness, Mulvey theorizes that women are transformed into passive recipients of male objectification in media representations. The novel is narrated by Lockwood, embodying "the narrator as voyeur defending himself against the threat of the feminine by objectifying a woman, by telling her story, writing it down in his diary, and seeking in this oblique way to make it – and her – his own". Berger didnât want to put an end to advertising, and he certainly didnât want us to stop looking at classical art â 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. [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. Audiences are forced to view women from the point of view of a heterosexual male, even if they are heterosexual women or homosexual men. In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world, in the visual arts[1] and in literature,[2] from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer. 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. In the context of feminist theory, the absence of discussion of racial relations, within the "totalizing category [of] Women", is a process of denial which refutes the reality that the criticism of many feminist film critics concerns only the cinematic presentation and representation of white women. The couple are looking in directions different from that of the spectator. "[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. [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. [13] 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. These in terms objectify women. ), African-American women's suffrage movement, Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, "6 Female Artists on What the Male Gaze Means to Them", "This is Not Sex: A Web Essay on the Male Gaze, Fashion Advertising, and the Pose", "A Test of Objectification Theory: The Effect of the Male Gaze on Appearance Concerns in College Women", "Theorizing Mainstream Female Spectatorship: The Case of the Popular Lesbian Film", "Transgender Women and the Male Gaze: Gender, the Body, and the Pressure to Conform [Thesis]", "Masculinity, the Male Spectator and the Homoerotic Gaze", "Male gays in the female gaze: women who watch m/m pornography", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Male_gaze&oldid=1011797396, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. If you continue browsing the site, you agree to the use of cookies on this website. [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. Mulvey's essay was one of the first to articulate the idea that sexism can exist not only in the content of a text, but in the way that text is presented, and in its implications about its expected audience. [8], 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. I would choose ads 13 and 22 as the epitomes of the male gaze, especially as the image of the woman (image 22), taken by the man, is projected on multiple screens; and in ad 13 in which men watch the woman while the woman enjoys it. Photographer Farhat Basir Khan said that the female gaze is inherent to photographs taken by a woman, which perspective negates the stereotypical the 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. [18] In Kaplan’s words, "the gaze is not necessarily male (literally), but to own and activate the gaze, given our language and the structure of the unconsciousness, is to be in the masculine position". Some excellent examples of this are Sophia Coppola’s films. [18], In the television series and book Ways of Seeing (1972), the art critic John Berger addressed the sexual objectification of women in the arts by emphasizing that men look and women are looked-at as the subjects of art. From the feminist perspective, this theory can be viewed in three ways: How men look at women, how women look at themselves and finally, how women look at other women. British pop artist Pauline Boty's Colour Her Gone depicts Marilyn Monroe set against a bed of roses, relaxing in a light blue loose shirt and a blissful smile. It's also believed that because women are … ….. Today, the male gaze of the camera has clearly persisted. Laura Mulvey coined the term âMale Gazeâ in 1975. 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. Theoretical discussions emphasize how the camera lens is a surrogate of the male gaze. Woman is “spectacle”, and man is “the bearer of the look”. She believes that in film audiences have to âviewâ characters from the perspective of a heterosexual male; Features of the Male Gaze The male gaze, described by John Berger in Ways of Seeing, is a certain way men view women in paintings or cinema. [8] These concepts of voyeurism and narcissism translate to psychoanalytic concepts of object libido and ego libido, respectively. Here a gaze can transcend the medium in which it is produced and contains social implications beyond its function within the work of art. Image Source: YouTube A womanâs affirmation to male gaze-driven visualisation is celebrated through likes and followers and any dissidence is punished through a drop in her social media audience reach.