The Male Gaze - Laura Mulvey with the example of Bad Teacher. Hobson, J. The objectification of women has prompted extensive debate in modern media and film theory. [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. [8] Fetishistic scopophilia involves reducing the threat of castration fear associated with the female presence by fragmenting and hypersexualizing parts of the female body. [35] 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. During the scene, Monroe’s character is subject to the male gaze in a way that treats her like an ornamental object. Film and the Masquerade: Theorising the Female Spectator. [35] 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. Laura Mulvey’s Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema analyzes the “male gaze” to be a theory of patriarchal cinematic gaze that entices male audiences towards scopophilia or … [8], 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. [35], Also available as: Mulvey, Laura (2009), "Visual pleasure and narrative cinema", in Mulvey, Laura (ed. "[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. In Thornham S. Clearly, I think, in retrospect, from a more nuanced perspective, [the article is] about the inescapability of the male gaze. "(Film works with) socially established interpretation of sexual difference which controls images, erotic ways of looking and spectacle." [25], The cultural analyst Griselda Pollock said that the female gaze can be visually negated;[26] using the example of Robert Doisneau's photograph Sidelong Glance (1948) Pollock describes a bourgeois, middle-aged couple viewing artworks in the display window of an art gallery. While Mulvey’s definition of the male gaze in “Visual Pleasure” is the earliest use of the term for this concept, it has actually been applied to more than film today. [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. This bibliography was generated on Cite This For Me on Thursday, March 10, 2016 [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". This page was last edited on 12 March 2021, at 21:58. [7], The psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan 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. [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. Here are some interesting quotes from her essay. One of Mulvey’s examples is the first appearance of actress Marilyn Monroe in the 1954 film, The River of No Return. For the purposes of 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. [14], Research by Calogero has shown that the male gaze can have detrimental effects on women's self-esteem and self-objectification, leading to increased body shame and a worsened mental state. Abstract. [32] From her interpretation of Mulvey's essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975),[33] 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. [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". [20] Overall, the novel Wuthering Heights plays with the different dimensions in which the male gaze enacted, between characters as well as between the narrator of the storyline and the characters. Thus, the audience cannot reject 'male gaze' because all 'mise-en-scene' are men. [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". Language, Discourse, Society. That the male gaze applies to literature and to the visual arts: Łuczyńska-Hołdys, Małgorzata (2013). Laura Mulvey is a British film theorist who wrote "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" in 1973, articulating the problematic relationship between (film) media and gender equality. In a 1983 essay by E. Anne Kaplan, titled "Is the Gaze Male," Kaplan states that "men do not simply look; their gaze carries with it power of action and possession which is lacking in the female gaze". [22], 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. In terms of professional writing, understanding the male gaze today offers professional writers an insight into the female perspective and teaches us to be conscientious of this segment of our audience so not to perpetuate the harmfulness of gender objectification. Pollock's analysis of the Sidelong Glance photograph is that: "She [the wife] is contrasted, iconographically, to the naked woman. It quickly became commonly known as 'Male Gaze' theory and has been discussed widely since. Focusing on the ground-breaking work of Laura Mulvey, Kaja Silverman, Teresa de Lauretis and Barbara Creed, this book explores how, since it began in the 1970s, feminist film theory has revolutionized the way that films and their spectators can be understood. "It is said that analysing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. [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. These are the sources and citations used to research Laura Mulvey male gaze. Copy link Link copied. This term can also be linked to models of voye… [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 concept has subsequently been prominent in feminist film theory, media studies, as well as communications and cultural studies. The woman is looking at another artwork, which is not in view of the spectator. Laura Mulvey’s Male Gaze Theory • Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema - Laura Mulvey. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the female form which is styled accordingly. [28][8] Doane concludes that female spectators are afforded two options, or what she called a "transvestite 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. 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. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism : Introductory Readings.Eds. [34], Some scholars have also hypothesized that cinematic male gaze acts as a "safety valve for homoerotic tensions," where these sexual tensions are projected onto female characters as a negation of male homoeroticism in popular genres like action movies or buddy comedies. It was split into three areas of viewing. [16] 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. [8] In order to mitigate this unpleasantness, Mulvey theorizes that women are transformed into passive recipients of male objectification in media representations. [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". . [15] 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. Pdf via Amherst College. [8] As an expression of sexuality, scopophilia refers to the pleasure (sensual and sexual) derived from looking at sexual fetishes and photographs, pornography and naked bodies, etc. [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'". Ultimately, the male gaze is a theoretical concept that explores the nuanced ways our culture influences media and, in turn, the way media perpetuates troubling gender dynamics in our culture. It helps to be aware of the concept and to learn from it. Mulvey, p. 833 . [28] In intentionally creating space between the subject (spectator) and the object (screen), the male gaze perpetuates an "infinite pursuit of an absent object". The theory of ‘the male gaze’ first appeared in a 1975 essay entitled, Visual Pleasure and Narrative … [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. The terms scopophilia and scoptophilia identify both the aesthetic pleasures and the sexual pleasures derived from looking at someone or something. [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". It can be something as simple as choices of clothing, the way a female character speaks or moves, or where a still camera angle falls that centralizes sexualized areas of the body. [35] In other words, women in film are not just objects of desire, they are objects of displaced desire. [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 Male Gaze - Laura Mulvey with the example of Bad Teacher. [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. Throughout the work, Mulvey explores the phenomenon of the male gaze, a perspective that serves to segment the female body into pieces that dehumanize the woman and subjects all viewers to a presumed heterosexual male viewpoint. [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. [8] These concepts of voyeurism and narcissism translate to psychoanalytic concepts of object libido and ego libido, respectively. . Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen. Download citation. society', by reassuring the [male] viewer of his male privilege, as the possessor of the objectifying [male] gaze. [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. It can just as easily be applied to other media such as video games and television where it can be much more subtle than panning camera angles. Mulvey posits that gender power asymmetry is a controlling force in cinema and constructed for the pleasure of the male viewer, which is deeply rooted in patriarchal ideologies and discourses. [34] 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. A 'Male Gaze' In the Way Laura Mulvey Describes Introduction Scholars of visual and cultural studies based on British screen theory made use of Lacan's psychoanalytic theory of the gaze throughout the 1970's in cinematic writings appearing in the journals Screen and Screen Education. ", is to see a transfer without transformation;[32] therefore, the oppositional gaze encompasses intellectual resistance, and understanding and awareness of the politics of race and of racism via cinematic whiteness, inclusive of the male gaze. Laura Mulvey quotes Showing 1-8 of 8. [8], Two types of spectatorship occur whilst viewing a film, wherein the viewer either unconsciously or consciously engages in the typical, ascribed societal roles of men and women. Viewing in the Dark: Toward a Black Feminist Approach to Film. [31] 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. At its heart, it is about portraying the woman as an object to be viewed and, by extension, the man as a subject doing the viewing and acting. [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 term the ‘male gaze’ is usually attributed to film critic Laura Mulvey who was writing in the 1970s. 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". Mulvey discusses women’s objectification in popular cinema by identifying the presence of a “male gaze”. [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. Let’s try to break down her main points, one by one. [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. In other words, scopophilia refers to the… Book synopsis: The essays republished in this new edition of Laura Mulvey's 1989 collection Visual and Other Pleasures reflect the high optimism … Mulvey argues that the pleasure we take in Hollywood cinema–the pleasure of losing ourselves in the film, for example, or of experiencing the protagonist’s victories as our own–is possible because the camera’s gaze obscures the conditions of the film’s production (the fact that is … Mulvey brought psychoanalysis, the experience of pleasure, and the idea of the male gaze into the mainstream of feminist film criticism. In relation to phallocentrism, 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. It soon became popular among feminists, including the British film critic Laura Mulvey, who used it to critique traditional media representations of the female character in cinema,[6] and coined the phrase. The cinematic concept of the male gaze is presented, explained, and developed in the essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975), in which Laura Mulveyproposes t… Laura Mulvey, born August 15, 1941, is a feminist film critic. Here Mulvey introduces and explains her use of Freudian psychoanalysis in the paper. To account for the fascination of Hollywood cinema, Mulvey employs the concept of scopophilia. ), 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. [14] In time, the people of a society 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; hence the Western hierarchy of "inferior women" and "superior men" derives from misrepresenting men and women as sexual opponents, rather than as sexual equals. [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. [35] The movie Point Break 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. 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. Archived 2016-03-04 at the Wayback Machine, Depiction of girls and women as sexual objects for the pleasure of a male, heterosexual viewer. 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. The concept was first developed by feminist film critic Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay entitled "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". This conversation between Laura Mulvey and Roberta Sassatelli offers a historical reconstruction of Mulvey’s work, from her famous essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ to her most recent reflections on male gaze, film technology and visual culture. 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. Cite this chapter as: Mulvey L. (1989) Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. [27], 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, 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”. → Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Set Impossible Goals To Achieve Your Actual Goals, How to Organize Your Ideas in Notion as a Writer & Increase Your Output, Workbuddy: Improving Our Reading Culture Through Gamification, How I became a morning person (and why I decided to make the change), Why It’s Silly For Chinese to Worry About ‘Sissy’ Young Men. Is the Gaze Male? [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. (Eds.). In their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic … this essay: the “male gaze.” In 1985, feminist critic Laura Mulvey coined the concept of the male gaze in her magnum opus, the essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Although the theory was created specifically for film criticism, it has been used more generally in academia [12][8] In the fields of media studies and feminist film theory, the male gaze is conceptually related to the behaviours of voyeurism (looking as sexual pleasure), scopophilia (pleasure from looking), and narcissism (pleasure from contemplating one's self). Laura Mulvey did not invent feminist film criticism, but her short piece "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" is a seminal essay, cited more often than almost any other single article on the movies. [8] In the genre of action films, the dramaturg Wendy Arons said that the hyper-sexualization of female characters symbolically diminishes the threat of emasculation posed by violent women, hence: "The focus on the [woman's] body — as a body in ostentatious display of breasts, legs, and buttocks — does mitigate the threat that women pose to 'the very fabric of . 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. [16], Another scholar, Danielle Lefebvre, suggests that there is a degree of affirmation found in the everyday manifestation of the male gaze for trans women. [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. [32] In relation to Lacan's mirror stage, 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. [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. Mulvey concludes her seminal essay by the statement that it was hard to escape from 'fetishistic scophopilia' and 'voyeuristic sadistic' over women in the traditional Hollywood films (p. 755). [28] 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. [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. [8]:815, The male gaze is conceptually contrasted with the female gaze.[9][10]. A key idea of feminist film theory, the concept of the male gaze was introduced by scholar and filmmaker Laura Mulvey in her now famous 1975 essay, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. [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 . Her theory was that female actresses in films were often portrayed as sexual objects for heterosexual males to view for their pleasure. 14–30, ISBN 9780230576469. [16] 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". 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". (2002). ), Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire England New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. "[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. Laura Mulvey has 33 books on Goodreads with 4852 ratings. 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. [8] The mere presence of a female body on screen, "her lack of penis, [implies] a threat of castration and hence unpleasure," which is subverted through the oversexualization of her femininity. Kaplan, E. (1983). The term “male gaze” was first coined in 1975 by Laura Mulvey i n her essay “Visual Pleasure”. [4][5], The concept 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. 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. Laura Mulvey’s Male Gaze Theory Frequently quoted but often misunderstood, the work of Laura Mulvey on ‘the Gaze’ is at the heart of feminist film theory, and has been hugely influential since the mid-1970s.