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, 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.
Background
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 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, scopophilia, and narcissism. 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, 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 lies in ascertaining guilt, 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 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 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 and the active viewer is a functional basis of patriarchy, i.e., gender roles that are culturally reinforced in and by the aesthetics 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 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.
Concepts
Scopophilia
The Freudian concept of scopophilia produced two types of male gaze: the pleasure that is linked to sexual attraction, and the scopophilic pleasure that is linked to narcissistic identification, and each type of male gaze shows how women have been socially compelled to view the cinema from the perspectives of the male gaze. In cinematic representations of women, the male gaze denies the woman's human agency and human identity to transform her from person to object — someone to be considered only for her beauty, physique, and sex appeal, as defined in the male sexual fantasy of narrative cinema.Spectatorship
Two types of spectatorship occur while viewing a film, wherein the spectator consciously and unconsciously engages in the societally defined-and-assigned roles of men and women. Concerning phallocentrism, the spectator views a film from the perspectives of three different looks: the first look is that of the camera, which photographs and records the events of the filmed story; the second look describes the nearly voyeuristic act of the audience as they view the film proper; and the third look, which is that of the characters who interact with each other throughout the story.The visual perspective common to the three types of look is that the action of looking generally is perceived as the man's active role in the story, while being looked-at generally is perceived as the woman's passive role in the story. Based upon that patriarchal construction, the cinematic narrative presents and represents the women characters as objects of sexual desire possessed of a physical "appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact" upon the male spectator. Therefore, in the narrative of the story the actress does not portray a female protagonist whose actions directly affect the outcome of the story or propel the plot. Instead of representing a female character with personal agency, the actress is in the film for the purpose of visually supporting the actor portraying the male protagonist, by her "bearing the burden of sexual objectification" — a condition psychologically unbearable for the actor, the character, and the story.
The condition of woman-as-passive-object of the male gaze is the link to scopophilia, the aesthetic pleasure derived from looking at someone as an object of beauty. Moreover, as an expression of human sexuality, scopophilia refers to the pleasure derived from looking at sexual fetishes and photographs, pornography and naked bodies, etc.; sexual spectatorship is in two categories: 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 narcissism, wherein the viewer's pleasure is in self-recognition when viewing the image of another person. The bases of voyeurism and narcissism are in the concepts of the object libido and of the ego libido.
From the perspectives of male spectatorship, Mulvey said that in order for women to enjoy cinema, they must choose to identify with the male protagonist and assume his male-gaze perspective in looking at the world and at women. In the essay "If Her Stunning Beauty Doesn't Bring You to Your Knees, Her Deadly Drop-kick Will: Violent Women in Hong Kong Kung fu Film", the dramaturg Wendy Arons said that the hyper-sexualization of the bodies of female characters symbolically diminishes the threat of emasculation posed by violent women, hence: "The focus on the body — as a body in an ostentatious display of breasts, legs, and buttocks — does mitigate the threat that women pose to 'the very fabric of... society', by reassuring the viewer of his male privilege, as the possessor of the objectifying gaze."
Gazing at the nude woman
In the television series and book Ways of Seeing, the art critic John Berger used the term the male gaze to discuss and explain the sexual objectification of women in the arts and in advertising — by distinguishing that men look at and that women are looked at as the subject of an image, as a representation. Regarding the social function of art-as-spectacle, that men act and that women are acted-upon, accords with the social practices of spectatorship, which are determined by the aesthetic conventions of the artistic objectification of men and women, which artists have not transcended in their production of works of art.In the genre of the Renaissance nude, the nude woman who is the subject of the painting is often depicted being aware that she is being observed, either by other people within the scene portrayed in the painting or by the spectator gazing at the painting. Berger analyzes the male-gaze perspectives of two Tintoretto paintings about Susanna and the Elders, a biblical story about a pretty woman falsely accused of adultery by two old men who discover each other spying on Susanna whilst she bathes. In the first painting, Susanna and the Elders, Susanna "looks back at us looking at her"; in the second painting, Susanna and the Elders, Susanna is looking at herself in a mirror, and thus joins the two old men and the spectator in looking at Susanna-as-spectacle. 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, 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.
In the production of a work of art, the conventions of artistic representation connect the male-gaze objectification of women to Lacan's theory of social alienation: the psychological splitting that occurs from seeing oneself as one is and seeing one's self as an idealized representation. In Italian Renaissance painting, especially in the nude-woman genre, psychological splitting arises in the objectified woman from the condition of being both the spectator and the spectacle; social alienation arises from seeing herself through the gaze of the spectator.