The Male Gaze

The Male Gaze is a concept coined by feminist film critic Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay entitled "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (Mulvey, 1975) ,It depicts the way that visual media is tailored to a heterosexual male perspective in that the world is shown specifically for a male viewer and man is often the dominant character through male gaze while woman are portrayed as passive. Lora

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).

Renowned feminist film theorist, Laura Mulvey, explores how classic Hollywood cinema is shown through a masculine perspective that fetishisizes women as objects of desire. This perspective is also known as the “male gaze”, which creates a voyeuristic and scopophilic layer to the viewing of film. According to Mulvey, “in their traditional exhibitionist role women are simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.” One of the staples of classic Hollywood cinema is women consistently being put or made into a visually erotic role for both the male characters on screen, and the audience. This staple is of course found in the

Before talking about the gendered gaze, it is first, most important to familiarize ourselves with the parent concept and original ideas of the term: the gaze. It is used in many art historical contexts and focuses primarily on the act of looking, however, the gaze in this matter goes beyond the simple look or stare. It displays a looking that combines pleasure and knowledge, a made up fantasy like narrative often placing those themes all together in a negative matter, a context of desire, manipulation and power of the opposed gender defined by the several readings and ideas that will be discussed within my research. This discourse of ‘the gaze’ is merely in the contextualized form of feminism theories in paintings, which signifies visual

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.

Several film theorists have used a variety of tactics and view points to analyze feature films since their inception. One of the most prominent theorists of those that analyze films from a feminist perspective is Laura Mulvey. Mulvey is famous for her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” which presents an array of theories involving the treatment of women in films. Arguably the most notable idea presented in Mulvey’s work is the existence of the “male gaze” in films. This essay will examine Mulvey’s theory of the male gaze in relation to Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Vertigo. Vertigo does not fit the criteria of a film that

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

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.

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

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

For definition of the male gaze, this area of the exhibit will focus on Laura Mulvey’s “Woman as Image, Man as Bearer of the Look.” In this piece, Mulvey discusses two theories: voyeurism and fetishistic scopophilia. To briefly explain, voyeurism involves deriving pleasure from the assertion of control, usually done by a male. On the other hand, fetishistic scopophilia transforms the female entity into an object whose sole purpose is to pleasure. An area of this exhibit include an arcade machine of the game “Mortal Kombat” to depict the difference in the way males and females are drawn and portrayed in video games. Male characters within this game are provided armor, or clothing at the least, that covers their vital organs and suits their fighting style. It is obvious the intention of the male characters’ clothing is functionality. However, the same can not be said about their female counterparts. Not only is their clothing minimal, their fighting style is also hypersexualized. This video game is almost the epitome of Mulvey’s fetishistic scopophilia. Next to this will be side-by-side showcasing of famous superhero costumes such as Wonder Woman vs. Superman and Catwoman vs. the Joker. Again, these costumes reinforce fetishistic scopophilia as female characters are purposely clothed with minimal armor that accentuates a female’s breasts and butt. Music videos are another reliable source for elaborating on fetishistic scopophilia. For instance, the popular rock band Van Halen’s “Hot for Teacher” reduces the band’s teacher to nothing but a sexual object to whom they sexually fantasize about instead of respect and learn from. Moreover, the famous “Stacy’s Mom” by Fountains of Wayne reduces the band’s friend’s mom to a sexual object for visual pleasure. The novel “Lolita” by Vladimir Nabokov will be used to further detail how males view women, even young teens, as subjects for their pleasure,

Theorist, E. Ann Kaplan in her work, “Is the Gaze Male?”, analyses the portrayal of women in film using Laura Mulvey’s “Gaze’ theory and psychoanalysis. In addition, Kaplan states that historically, females have been the central focus on only the melodrama genre, and while melodrama exposes the constraints and limitations that the family places on women, at the same time, gets women to accept those constraints as inevitable and normal. Kaplan argues that our culture is deeply rooted in “masculine” and “feminine, and dominance-submission patterns. In the end, she concludes that the exclusion from male culture provides an avenue to affect change in film and society. I partially agree with Kaplan that some women take pleasure from being the object of the male gaze as I think that is not entirely true, and specifically, this generalization does not apply to lesbians.

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 male gaze was introduced by Laura Mulvey in her 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" and is “a feature of gender power asymmetry in film”. Mulvey explained, “Women were objectified in film because heterosexual men were in control of the camera”. The male gaze is when the audience views the scene of object –in this case the woman- from the prospective of a man. This may occur if the camera lingers over a woman’s curves for a while displaying her as an erotic object rather than a human being, making her a victim of sexualisation. The woman is usually unaware of this gaze, which brings patriarchy to the situation. Her essay also explains that the ‘female gaze’ is similar except it is like women looking at themselves through a male’s eyes. This can have a negative effect on real life women because they are being told what they should look like in order to be noticed by men and what men want to see. Feminists

Male Gaze: In the picture we can see a male boy eating a big hamburger with a big smile which demonstrates to young’s male’s audience that they can eat this fat food without risk. This commercial tries to convince male kid’s that they eating these huge hamburgers will not cause any health issues, since this is purpose of this male gaze.