In 1975, film critic Laura Mulvey coined the term ‘the male gaze’. It refers to the presentation of women in visual arts and literature from a male, heterosexual perspective where women are depicted as sexual objects for the pleasure of the male viewer . Men have agency; women are passive and dehumanised.
How do you define male gaze?
noun. Often the male gaze . the assumption in visual and creative arts that the default or desired audience consists of heterosexual males, and inclusion of women in narrative or art should seek to please this audience with the objectification or sexualization of these depicted women.
What is the male gaze in simple terms?
In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world , in the visual arts and in literature, from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer.
What is the female gaze in art?
The “female gaze” is a term used in recent years to describe art that subverts the ubiquitous male perspective . Like many buzzwords, it is often misapplied – but not so in the case of Portrait of a Lady on Fire, which is unmistakably made from a female vantage point and with a feminist sensibility.
What is the male gaze vs female gaze?
The female gaze is a feminist film theoretical term representing the gaze of the female viewer. It is a response to feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey’s term “the male gaze”, which represents not only the gaze of a heterosexual male viewer but also the gaze of the male character and the male creator of the film.
What is the male gaze examples?
Examples of the Male Gaze
Extraneous nudity by female characters . Slow camera pans of women’s bodies . Women wearing tight or occasion-inappropriate clothing when male characters are appropriately dressed. Framing women, so their cleavage stays in the frame.
Where does the term male gaze come from?
Filmmaker and theorist Laura Mulvey first coined the term “the male gaze” in her seminal 1973 paper Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema .
Does the male gaze still exist?
The Male Gaze Still Dominates In Movies Around The World , New Study Shows. ... It found that the women portrayed in leadership positions were more likely to depicted as sexual objects or with nudity, compared with their male counterparts, representing how movies are often told from the “male gaze.”
What is the male gaze according to Mulvey?
The “male gaze” invokes the sexual politics of the gaze and suggests a sexualised way of looking that empowers men and objectifies women . In the male gaze, woman is visually positioned as an “object” of heterosexual male desire. ... As Mulvey wrote, women are characterised by their “to-be-looked-at-ness” in cinema.
What does Scopophilia mean?
SCOPOPHILIA: Literally, the love of looking . The term refers to the predominantly male gaze of Holloywood cinema, which enjoys objectfying women into mere objects to be looked at (rather than subjects with their own voice and subjectivity).
What is the gaze in art?
November 19, 2019. The gaze – or the male gaze, more specifically – is a discourse that disects how we look at visual representations in film, advertising and art .
What is the gaze theory?
In Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the gaze is the anxious state of mind that comes with the self-awareness that one can be seen and looked at . The psychological effect upon the person subjected to the gaze is a loss of autonomy upon becoming aware that they are a visible object.
When was female gaze coined?
John Berger described the concept in Ways of Seeing in the 1970s , analysing the treatment of nude women in European oil paintings.
What is the opposite of the male gaze?
The female gaze was the term created by feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey, who used it to counter the male gaze in movies. As you can imagine, the female gaze in the films was quite the opposite of the male gaze.
Why does a man stare at a woman?
How a man’s gaze roams over a woman’s body can tell you how into sex he is — a new finding that doesn’t play out when the genders are swapped. Men’s gaze reflects their underlying sexual motivation , the researchers found. A woman’s gaze, on the other hand, does not seem to match her sexual thoughts as clearly.
How do you use male gaze in a sentence?
Examples of male gaze
I would argue that ideas of the male gaze have little to do with the ways in which these images were crafted or received . Her female ‘captives’ signal a profound lack of personal liberty, whereas freedom is equated with masculinity and the penetrating force of the male gaze.
