'The Gaze' or 'The Male Gaze'To 'Gaze' means "to look steadily, intently, and with fixed attention."
In one sense, it is a term popularized by psychologist Jacques Lacan for the anxious state that comes with the awareness that one can be viewed. The psychological effect, Lacan argues, is that the subject loses a degree of autonomy upon realizing that he or she is a visible object. This concept is bound with his theory of the mirror stage, in which a child encountering a mirror realizes that he or she has an external appearance. Lacan suggests that this gaze effect can similarly be produced by any conceivable object such as a chair or a television screen. This is not to say that the object behaves optically as a mirror; instead it means that the awareness of any object can induce an awareness of also being an object. It has also been called an aspect of one of the "most powerful human forces"; that is, "the meeting of the face and the gaze" because "Only there do we exist for one another." |
Laura Mulvey
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Film feminist Laura Mulvey coined the term “the male gaze” in 1975. This ‘Male Gaze’ developed a way to see how looking at women can be seen from a psychological approach. Mulvey suggested that this ‘male gaze’ is easily recognised in film theory, and an example of which would be when the camera takes the audience and places them into the perspective of a stereotypical heterosexual male, therefore enabling the audience to see what and where the ‘Male Gaze’ focuses upon.
Whilst in agreement with the opinions of Berger on one hand, with the other Mulvey proposes that “in a world ordered by sexual imbalance, the pleasure of looking has been split between active/male and passive/female” (Humm, 1992: 348). However, due to her emphasis on film, Mulvey’s psychological approach to the male gaze concept would inevitably be different to others that have studied this concept. |
Mulvey’s concept of ‘The male gaze’ is better to be thought of in three different ways; one, the way men look at women, two, how women look at themselves, and three, how women look at other women. In film, and later in literature, it is more common to witness the first type of gaze, the way men look at women as this allowed writers to critique the way in which women were represented and treated in a society of patriarchy. Mulvey states that ‘ Traditionally, the woman displayed has functioned on two levels: as erotic object for the characters within the screen story, and as an erotic object for the spectator within the auditorium, with a shifting tension between the looks on either side of the screen.’ (Mulvey, L, 62:1975) What Mulvey is trying to say here is that the ‘Male Gaze’ demotes women to the status of objects, and the female viewer is forced to experience the narrative secondarily, through identification with the male.
The significance of the term ‘gaze’ is later mentioned by Schroeder in his work Visual Consumption, in which he states that ‘to gaze implies more than to look at- it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze.’(Schroeder, J, 58:2002) This statement by Schroeder would show that he is in support of the arguments put forward by Mulvey, as Schroeder also believes that the ‘Male Gaze’ represents a sense of patriarchal power.
Mulvey also talks about the pleasures that the cinema has to offer, one of those said pleasures being scopophilia. This is described as ‘Freud, in his three essays on the Theory of Sexuality (published originally in 1905), treated scopophilia, or a pleasure of looking , as a normal aspect of sexuality.’(Allison, A, 34:2000) However, Mulvey takes this ‘pleasure of looking’ further and states that, not only is there a pleasure in looking, but there is also ‘pleasure in being looked at’ (Mulvey, L, 59:1975) This pleasure of looking and pleasure of being looked at are what Mulvey used as the foundations to her concept of the Male gaze, as it is the Male who would gain pleasure from his controlling gaze over the female, yet the female would also gain pleasure from being the focus of that controlling gaze.
As the concept of the ‘Male Gaze’ began to develop interest from those outside of film criticism, Brooker suggests, in his book A Concise Glossary of Cultural Theory, that Voyeuristic looking involves some form of ‘a controlling gaze from the male partaker in which the female is surveyed but cannot look back.’ (Brooker, 1999: 83). This voyeuristic looking that Brooker talks about here is taking the original piece of film critique offered by Mulvey, and adapting it to enable its use in the world of literature. ‘The male gaze’ therefore becomes much more applicable to the literary world, as literary texts are much better at portraying this ‘Male Gaze’ than film would be, whilst also enabling criticism to advance from the psychological approach to film Mulvey offered, and adapt that into a psycho-analytical approach to literary texts.
The significance of the term ‘gaze’ is later mentioned by Schroeder in his work Visual Consumption, in which he states that ‘to gaze implies more than to look at- it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze.’(Schroeder, J, 58:2002) This statement by Schroeder would show that he is in support of the arguments put forward by Mulvey, as Schroeder also believes that the ‘Male Gaze’ represents a sense of patriarchal power.
Mulvey also talks about the pleasures that the cinema has to offer, one of those said pleasures being scopophilia. This is described as ‘Freud, in his three essays on the Theory of Sexuality (published originally in 1905), treated scopophilia, or a pleasure of looking , as a normal aspect of sexuality.’(Allison, A, 34:2000) However, Mulvey takes this ‘pleasure of looking’ further and states that, not only is there a pleasure in looking, but there is also ‘pleasure in being looked at’ (Mulvey, L, 59:1975) This pleasure of looking and pleasure of being looked at are what Mulvey used as the foundations to her concept of the Male gaze, as it is the Male who would gain pleasure from his controlling gaze over the female, yet the female would also gain pleasure from being the focus of that controlling gaze.
As the concept of the ‘Male Gaze’ began to develop interest from those outside of film criticism, Brooker suggests, in his book A Concise Glossary of Cultural Theory, that Voyeuristic looking involves some form of ‘a controlling gaze from the male partaker in which the female is surveyed but cannot look back.’ (Brooker, 1999: 83). This voyeuristic looking that Brooker talks about here is taking the original piece of film critique offered by Mulvey, and adapting it to enable its use in the world of literature. ‘The male gaze’ therefore becomes much more applicable to the literary world, as literary texts are much better at portraying this ‘Male Gaze’ than film would be, whilst also enabling criticism to advance from the psychological approach to film Mulvey offered, and adapt that into a psycho-analytical approach to literary texts.