The Male Gaze Essay

In the early 1990s Laura Mulvey’s thesis concerning the patriarchal structure of an active male gaze has influenced feminist film critiques and Hollywood. Mulvey’s project is to use psychoanalysis to uncover the power of patriarchy in Hollywood cinema. Patriarchal influence upon cinema is found primarily in pleasure (pleasure in looking) or as Freud’s has put it, scopophilia. Mulvey suggests that it may be possible to create a new for of cinema due to the fact that patriarchy power to control cinematic pleasure has revealed.

The gaze deals with how the audience views the people presented in visual culture, in this case, adverts, magazines and Cinema. The ‘male gaze’ is the male ability to exercise control over women by representing them in visual means as passive, sexual objects of male desire. The power of men over women has always existed. They are seen as the more powerful and clever species. This control over women has been seen predominately in linguistics senses in past times. It is clear that there are more derogatory terms for women than there are for men. Men can also wolf whistle or cat-call in order to harass a woman but

Although the best reasons for “going to the movies” are to be entertained and eat popcorn, understanding a film is actually quite complex. Movies are not only a reflection of life, they also have the capability of shaping our norms, values, attitudes, and perception of life. Through the media of film, one can find stories of practically anything imaginable and some things unimaginable. Movie-makers use their art to entertain, to promote political agendas, to educate, and to present life as it is, was, or could be. They can present truth, truth as they interpret it, or simply ignore truth altogether. A movie can be a work of fiction, non-fiction, or anything in-between. A film is an artist’s interpretation. What one takes away from a film depends upon how one interprets what has been seen and heard. Understanding film is indeed difficult.

Through exposure, the role of women as a visible visual icon, such as cinematic mechanisms fetishism serves to convince the position of the male audience as an absolute subject.

When one hears the terms “violence” and “horror,” one typically imagines horrible crimes and serial killers; rarely would one think of everyday suburban life. However, this is the exact landscape of violence depicted in Charles Burns’ Black Hole. In Black Hole Burns draws attention to the implicit assumptions about “normal” and “other” made in everyday life by exposing the objectification of women and through the male gaze. The male gaze is a phrase used in film and gender studies to describe the lens through which audiences view popular culture from a heterosexual male perspective. According to Laura Mulvey, the film theorist who coined the term, the male gaze is so ubiquitous that it often goes unrecognized and is considered the norm.

In “A Century of Cinema”, Susan Sontag explains how cinema was cherished by those who enjoyed what cinema offered. Cinema was unlike anything else, it was entertainment that had the audience feeling apart of the film. However, as the years went by, the special feeling regarding cinema went away as those who admired cinema wanted to help expand the experience.

Consequently, in film, women do not describe the world from their point of view. Instead, women learn to “submerge or renounce” their subjectivity; they find their own identity in the desires of the men to which they are attached (654). Therefore, Devereaux concludes, the issue is not whether it is a male or female who is doing the looking. Rather, the question is whether a patriarchal way of seeing the world triumphs regardless of who is behind the camera. In this sense, the discussion of the “literal” gaze becomes a discussion of the figurative gaze (654).

The cinema offers pleasure of scopophilia where ‘it can be fixated into perversion, producing obsessive voyeurs and Peeping Toms whose only sexual satisfaction can come from watching, in an active controlling sense, an objectified other.’ (Mulvey: 1988, p. 31)

The notion that film functions rhetorically is hardly novel, and, indeed, there is a long tradition of film criticism within rhetorical studies.5 Historically, the rhetorical criticism of film has tended to focus on the representational aspects of cinema, attending to how films compel audiences at a cognitive rather than corporeal level. But more recently, scholars in an array of fields (Kennedy, 2000; MacDougall, 2006; Massumi, 2002; Shaviro, 1993; Sobchack, 1995, 2004) have begun to consider how cinema appeals directly to the senses, how it sways viewers somatically as well as symbolically. Attention to the body corresponds closely to the affective (re)turn in rhetorical studies,6 for conceptualizing rhetoric as embodied necessarily “reflects a merger of reason and emotion” (McKerrow, 1998, p. 322; see also Johnson, 2007). Rhetorical

All it takes is a simple drive down the highway or a quick view of a magazine stand to see dozens of pictures of hypersexualized men and women advertising items like food or furniture or giving tips on how to be thinner, beautiful, or younger. These images have been a constant for majority of people's lives and so we as a society have become complacent to them, it is expected to only see very beautiful people on television shows, commercials, and other forms of entertainment and advertising. Even as I write this, I see a commercial for Amazon informing people that now they sell clothing, they did this through attractive women seductively delivering boxes to doors. Children toys like dolls always show beautiful women in skimpy outfits or men

In Sturken and Cartwright’s essay Modernity: Spectatorship, Power and Knowledge they discuss the gaze and that it is to “look or stare, often with eagerness or desire”(76). Sturken and Cartwright also use Laura Mulvey’s idea of the male gaze as an example. Mulvey proposed “that the conventions of popular narrative cinema are structured by a patriarchal unconscious, positioning woman represented in films as objects as a male gaze”(76). The male gaze is closely related to the stereotype of the dumb blonde. The character of the dumb blonde is always represented as highly sexual and attractive and is, therefore, the misogynistic male viewer.

As Laura Mulvey states in her article "Visual Pleasure and the Narrative Cinema", the cinema operates as an "advanced representation system" that offers pleasure in the act of looking, what she classifies as scopophilia or voyeurism (Mulvey 484). Through the cinematic experience, one may sit in a dark theatre and derive pleasure from looking without being seen. As E. Ann Kaplan describes in the introduction to her book Women and Film, within this act of gazing there are three looks: "(i) within the film text itself, men gaze at women, who become objects of the gaze; (ii) the spectator, in turn is made to identify with this male gaze, and to objectify the women on screen; and (iii) the camera's original 'gaze' comes into play in the very

Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) - Laura Mulvey. Thesis. N.d. N.p.: Laura Mulvey, 1975. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) - Laura Mulvey. NG Communications, 2006. Web. 20 Feb. 2014. .

This shows how the film industries use sexuality to gain audience, since it is fairly common in our society nowadays. For this paper, I will be focusing on how gender,

The BBFC has commissioned me to undertake research as part of a project to ascertain to what degree films can be regarded as powerful within contemporary society. In this assignment, I will comprehensively explain the relationship between audiences and films with well explained examples. I refer to the different sectors relating to the topic that include the following: