ipl-logo

The Male Gaze

483 Words2 Pages

Focusing on how the piece was filmed brings up the issue of the male gaze. Within the article “Oppressive Texts, Resisting Readers and the Gendered Spectator: The New Aesthetics” by Mary Devearaux she argues under the premise that “the male gaze is not always male, but it is always male-dominated” (Devearaux, 339). Meaning that film and other media forms will always be male connoted. “Men do not always do the looking, but they control who does” (Devearaux, 339). This is very powerful statement in this argument and says a lot about how females feel they are being viewed, as well as how much power they possess. Within this piece, Fosse sees women as merely objects from the heavy makeup masking the girls’ true form, to filming just a dancer’s …show more content…

Schultz, however, steps in to explain that these ads are simply pictures. They do not have a history with any person or anyone in that moment. Schultz explains that these ads take away the human and leave an object to observe. Similarly, Fosse takes the person out of the performer on stage and shows movement through an object or the anatomy or parts. According to Schultz the male gaze is driven by “sexual anxiety” (Schultz, 368), meaning that a male feels the need to look at a woman as an object in order to make her difference and mystery seem rational and okay in their mind. Schultz defines the “paternal superego” (Schultz, 371) as a “masculine vision” (Schultz, 371) summed up with the terms, “power, violence and control” (Schultz, 371). Schultz states this because it is important to reflect on how men see themselves and how women see men. Finally, Schultz presents the image of the strong women in comparison with “history of bodies” (Schultz, 377). Strong women are ones who stand up to the male gaze and the male patriarchy. In contrast, the idea of the “history of bodies” (Schultz, 377) contextualizes a female body so that there is depth and meaning behind her. When billboards of models in lingerie

Show More
Related
411 Words | 2 Pages

Kilbourne is aware of the varying viewpoints on these ads and seeks to be fair. She anticipated claims that she is reading too much into these ads and made sure to allow for more than one interpretation of the images. Furthermore, some critics point out that men are also objectified in ads. Kilbourne, again, reasonably acknowledges these critiques. She agrees that the objectification of anyone is not a good thing while still supporting her initial assertion that the objectification of women in ads is more harmful.

Read More
792 Words | 4 Pages

A lot of things have changed throughout the centuries. Advertisements are an everyday part of our lives, whether we look at them or not they still influence us and affect us in many ways. In many advertising, many large companies are using women in a sexual way for their advertising. And even TV shows are showing how a man is a leading character that can control women and their bodies. Ads give a message to men that if they buy their product, then they are going to have the same results as in the advertising.

Read More
865 Words | 4 Pages

In comparison to the movie, the play undermines male dominance by focusing on women’s efforts to solve their own problems. First of all, there aren’t even men in the cast of the play,

Read More
1647 Words | 7 Pages

This is suggested by Helen Simpson who stated that Carter centralises ‘latent content of fairy-tale’ is that women are objects of male desire hence patriarchal discourse establishes male supremacy to which Carter does this to challenge contemporary perspectives on the place of women by revealing the oppression that society inflicted. The Marquis is an overt example of male ownership of female bodies. Similarly, where Atwood exposes the harsh realities of oppressive patriarchy through the female body, Carter utilises the construct of the Marquis in the eponymous story ‘The Bloody Chamber’ as a grotesque embodiment of patriarchal control. In her essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ Laura Mulvey coined the feminist term ‘male gaze.’ She argues that men are the audience and women are to embody the male perspective of women as objects of satisfaction.

Read More
792 Words | 4 Pages

In today’s society, the traditional differences between genders are constantly reinforced. The male figure is usually characterized as the strong, successful, dominant gender. When advertisements create a target message for men, they exploit the male ego. This means that men are thought provoked to look or be

Read More
986 Words | 4 Pages

In the video, she is wearing a swimwear, and convincing why she should come to Harvard. This evidently fits the stereotype of male, who makes a decision and their decision is often influenced by the female’s beauty. In addition, in the movie men are shown to have the power of women, and an example of this in the movie is when Callaghan, uses Vivian as his personal slave to get him what he wants instead of a male character working for him. These examples in the movie continue to put negative ideas in the mind of people who watch the movie especially

Read More
934 Words | 4 Pages

In Laura Mulvey’s article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” she writes about the relationship between voyeurism, cinema, and gender. She begins by describing the concept of scopophilia, which means to gain pleasure from looking. She writes that scopophilia is inherently active/masculine, and that pleasure is derived from looking at other people as mere objects. On the other hand, the passive/feminine is derived from the experience of being looked at (pg.188). Mulvey sees this binary relationship between viewer and object being viewed as a part of our culture, and the greatest example of this is found in cinema.

Read More
1154 Words | 5 Pages

The Secret Weapon Women’s bodies have been oversexualized since the emergence of the patriarchal society. Women were expected to breed and raise children; they were seen as tools rather than individuals. This perception of women affected the magnitude and rate of the development of feminine power and pride. Women believed that it was their duty to enter constraining relationships in order to fulfill their societal obligations as domestic housewives. Wives were sexually exploited to breed children, making raising a family their only purpose in life.

Read More
964 Words | 4 Pages

Framing the Female Gaze Through Patriarchy: Scopophilia in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo When the male gaze drives a film, especially when that gaze derives pleasure from participating in watching a woman, one must ask what agency the woman has in the film and what her gaze is. Throughout this essay, I will investigate the effects of scopophilia, or the act of looking, on Madeline’s in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In her essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Laura Mulvey aims to expose and dismantle the patriarchy that is prevalent in cinema. She begins her argument with stating that cinema exists in an already patriarchal society, as the world of cinema exists much like the real world and the subject of the film, man, is existing in a place that has been crafted for him.

Read More
1194 Words | 5 Pages

Outdated mindset that prevents women from being treated as equals to their male counterparts, which is the main culprit behind crimes being committed against women in our country. The male gaze puts emphasis on the idea of scopophilia, which is deriving pleasure from looking. The look of the camera is supposed to be neutral, but since most films are written and directed by males, the camera usually views the narrative through a male perspective. The gaze of men in the narrative views the women in the narrative as objects that embody “to-be-looked-at-ness” (aka nude or almost nude).

Read More
1087 Words | 5 Pages

It is startling to find that in the United States and around the world, children are still being abused and miss used for the monetary benefit of individual’s, to improve business profits or as a means to an end for impoverished families. In Enders Game children were being used to fight alien invaders that adults fear will come back someday, the character Colonel Graff summed it up when he stated “Human beings are free except when humanity needs them.” (Card 35) It is not only the character Colonel Graff that seems to believe this but in the real world as well. According to the International Labor Organization they found that one-quarter of all children ages 5-14 are working, with many of them doing hazardous jobs.

Read More
1710 Words | 7 Pages

The advertisements are simply sexual just to be sexual. Many of the advertisements seem to just attract people to look at the models, not really to look at the clothes. According to the case study, American Apparel shoppers felt out of place when shopping in the store. The customer mentioned that the company “reeked of sexual sin”. The consumer said most of the items were “cute” but that some of the items were a bit too suggestive.

Read More
1153 Words | 5 Pages

With her article on visual pleasure in Hollywood cinema, Laura Mulvey shares her idea that part of the appeal of films is that it satisfies voyeurism and scopophilia. Deriving pleasure from watching characters who are “unaware” that they are being watched produces a voyeuristic look that can be broken down into three different looks. The first one is of course the look of the camera as it records the characters. The second look is the audiences’ look as they watch the characters, and the third look is the characters’ look as they watch each other. In Hollywood, men are portrayed as active and bearers of the look, while women are passive and the objects of the gaze.

Read More
1521 Words | 7 Pages

The construction of a self-conscious female gaze is the prime objective of feminist theatres everywhere. British feminist theatre practice as elsewhere is an attempt made by women to claim their rightful space in the creative realm of theatre that was deliberately denied to them by patriarchy. The public gaze on women was always the male gaze, one that always wished to see women as objects. It was an ideological position that patriarchy sanctioned as the normal way of looking at women. Women were always the secondary sexual objects for the gratification of male sexual fantasies.

Read More
1109 Words | 5 Pages

Laura Mulvey’s article Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema was published in 1975, has set out the concept of visual pleasure and explains it under a system looks in cinema. Her theory points out that men looked at women, men are the subjects of women, and to look at the object position; (women) accept their role of being looked at and creating visual pleasures for men as well as in the social reality. Her approaching is to use the same “political weapon” (“psychoanalytic theory”) that “the unconscious of patriarchal society has structured film form” (the way men used to oppress women) (Mulvey 483), with the hope to leave “the past behind without rejecting it” (Mulvey 485). To analyze that the main bias of cinema lies in the obsessive psychological

Read More

More about The Male Gaze

Related Topics

Open Document