The Male Gaze

Movies and entertainment outlets speak volumes about the current state of a nation’s culture. Cinematic creations in the United States allow small voices to be heard and controversial issues to be addressed. However, a repetitive and monumental issue continues to be addressed, yet continues to persist in our 21st century culture, racial inequalities. Since the inception of the United States, black men and women alike have been disenfranchised at the hands of the “white man” in America. Instead of continuing the conversation today, the issue is continually silenced referencing the successes and achievements of the Civil Rights Movement in the 20th century. Nonetheless, an unfortunate reality looms upon this great land; racially based systems and structures continue to exist in 2015 the in United States. This paper synthesizes three films focused on racial inequalities in different time periods. Separate but Equal (1991), Selma (2015), and Crash (2005) illustrate how influential the Civil War amendments are, while serving as an uncanny reminder of how the racial prejudices during the 20th century continue to exist in our great nation today. Needless to say our nation has made great strides, but still has a long way to go.

The word Gaze can be defined as:” to look steadily and intently, as with great curiosity, interest, pleasure, or wonder.” When using this definition in a theatrical sense it is imperative to determine who is the one gazing and who is being gazed at. In the instance of David Bowie and Enter Achilles the gaze and subsequent objectification varies due to the performers wished effect. For instance they each use techniques to garner their desired gaze from the audience through the use of clothing and semiotics. Both examples have interesting undertones of sexuality in relation to their objectification from the audience members. Stereotypically, the male gaze has connotations of men staring and objectifying women but the two examples create a way for themselves to be gazed upon as opposed to being the one who gazes.

The gaze has been used within social psychology for the representation of gender and sexual identity within the media. An example of this is seen when using the

She argues that black female spectators neither wish to identify with a white woman subject objectified by the “male gaze” nor identify with a black male perpetrator of this “male gaze”. hooks asserts that black men, unconcerned with gender, were able to “repudiate the reproduction of racism in cinema…even as they could feel as though they were rebelling against white supremacy by daring to look”, specifically at white women (118). By being allowed to look at white women, black male spectators were able to ignore inherent racism in cinema in order to participate in a form of the “male gaze”, hooks states. Because black female spectators were unwilling or unable to ignore both the racism and sexism of this “gaze”, hooks states that “black female spectators construct a theory of looking relations where cinematic visual delight is the pleasure of interrogation” (126). While black female viewers may not take pleasure in the film narrative, hooks argues that through the “oppositional gaze” they are able to take pleasure in resisting this narrative

“I can remember a dinner where I talked about the book and one person, in a big booming voice choking with laughter exclaimed, ‘what is there to be said about black women!” I had written… the existence of black women was often forgotten, that we were often ignored or dismissed…” (Hooks).

bell hooks, renowned black feminist and cultural critic criticizes the lack of racial awareness in her essay, Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination (1992). ‘bell hooks’ is written in lower case to convey that the substance of her work reigns more important than the writer. From a marginalized perspective, hooks argues that sites of dominance, not otherness is problematic and critiques the lack of attention that white scholars pay to the representation of whiteness in the black imagination. Critical feminist scholars Peggy McIntosh and Ruth Frankenberg identify their own whiteness as a dominant discourse, but share a critical departure from hooks with the notion of whiteness as terror. hooks aim is not to reverse racism, but discuss her position to authentically inform readers about how she experiences racism. Furthermore, systems of oppression are manufactured by human thought and thus the site of the Other is always produced as a site of difference. Gender, race, sex, class, disability, and geography are situated differently in social structure, but dominant groups assume they share the same reality though they cannot experience it. In consequence, the Other cannot hold a singularized identity of their own and the binary structure succeeds in containing racialized bodies in place. What happens to those bodies when they cross boundaries of the binary? hooks recounts being routinely disciplined back into place when crossing the border; however, dominant white

In the final chapter of his 2012 book, Winn aggregates his analyses of these films and states that every one of them presents African Americans as being inferior to whites in all ways and as being a threat to white authority and society. Winn (2012) ends his discourse with a discussion in critical media pedagogy, and states, “By studying how racist ideologies affected specific media productions in the past, we can better learn how to consume, interrogate, and interpret current media and use that understanding to encourage change” (p.128). “Therefore, now, more than ever before, people need to be able to understand, question, challenge, and evaluate media for themselves. One way to address this need is through critical media literacy” (p. 129). Critical media literacy can help audiences understand how underlying ideologies can effect communications of institutions and shape their views of the world.

Hooks coins the term “sexist silencing,” which happens with the tacit complicity of audiences who have over time learned to think always of race within blackness as a male thing and to assume that the real political leaders will always be male. Because of this, the political discourse on race and feminism suffers. Hooks thinks that extreme expression of sexism made visible becomes a dysfunctional response to racism rather than a perspective that exists independent and dependent with racism. As a result of this way of thinking, black males are enabled to assume no direct responsibility for the politics of sexism – which in reality does not have its origin in racist aggression. The way of thinking of our society needs to change according to Hooks, because black females subjugation is seen as natural and the status quo, not something that black men create, just exploit.

Laura Mulvey understands Sherman’s Untitled Film Stills as to be rehearsing this structure of the ‘male gaze’, “The camera looks; it captures the female character in a parody of different voyeurisms. It intrudes into moments in which she is ungraded, sometimes undressed, absorbed into her own world in the privacy of her own environment. Or it witnesses a moment in which her guard drops and she is suddenly startled by the presence, unseen and off-screen watching her.”[v]

Today’s filmmakers have three areas to focus on: the event or theme of the film, the audience who will be watching the film, and lastly, the individual characters and the roles they play and how they are portrayed and interpreted. Many of these films bottom line objectives are to focus on the “erotic needs of the male ego.” The focus on fetishistic scopophilia tend to slant the view such that we see the world as being dominated by men and that woman are

While bell hooks’, Bone Black, did contain many situations depicting racial injustices, I related more to the situations that focused on gender issues. For example, in chapter twenty-five, women are not allowed to enter the pulpit simply because of their gender. Similarly, double standards of gender are represented in chapter thirty-eight when hooks confronts the issue of sexuality. Boys and men are allowed to engage in sexual activities with pride and pleasure as an important moment in their life on the way to manhood (hooks 112). However, the girls are taught to fear sexual encounters as something being done to them, rather than something they equally enjoy and engage in. When hooks discovers a certain aspect of her sexuality that she

Quentin Tarantino’s film Jackie Brown, released in 1997, challenges the pervasive stereotyping of not only blacks but specifically black women. Nowhere is the cinematic devaluation of African Americans more evident than in images of black women which, in the history of cinematography, the white ideal for female beauty has overlooked. The portrayal of black women as the racial Extra has been fabricated through many semblances in the history of American film. Film scholars and feminists alike have long been plagued with lament for the negativity and stereotyping that sticks with black women in American cinema. In this paper, I will argue that Jackie Brown highlights and stresses the racial variance of the female African American protagonist,

The dominant readers or viewers of the scene might have inferred the actual meaning of the male gaze in the movie i.e. the inferiority and objectification of females. The dominant viewers will be the Americans who do not have any cultural conflict with the culture of the producer and the characters in the story. The negotiated viewers may not agree on this, as this could be a minute part of his cultural background. On the other hand, the oppositional reader or viewer of those scenes might not even take a heed of the male gaze. This is quite possible that the viewer may have the dominant idea of female gaze in the culture.

In the Feminist Theory, bell hooks provide vivid examples and assertions on how mainstream feminism exclude the issues of women of color. Mainstream feminism in America pertains to the ideals of “white, middle-class privileged woman” as they “reinforce white supremacy by negating the issue of race and class amongst woman of color” (hooks, 2000, pg. ). Due to not fulfilling the attempt to gain equality, as they may claim to do, it also can be an organization that displays “narcissism, insensitivity, sentimentality, and self-indulgence” (hooks, 2000, pg. 3). As mainstream feminism shuns the needs and interests of African-American women, it allows current social issues and inequalities to persist.

The male gaze puts his fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled, in a unique sort of way. In this traditional exhibitionist, role women are continuously being looked at and their appearance is delivered to the male gaze in such a way as a strong visual and erotic impact and provides male desire. The presence of a woman in a normal narrative film is the key of the movie. However, the key of the narrative film works against the development of the story-line and stops the action due to the erotic gaze. Butt Boetticher said: “What counts is what the heroine provokes, or rather what she represents. 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. In herself the woman has not the slightest importance”.