Male gaze
In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world in the visual arts[2] and in literature[3] from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer.[4] In the visual and aesthetic presentations of narrative cinema, the male gaze has three perspectives: that of the man behind the camera, that of the male characters within the film's cinematic representations; and that of the spectator gazing at the image.[5][6]
The concept of the gaze (le regard) was first used by the English art critic John Berger in Ways of Seeing (1972), which presents analyses of the representation of women — as passive objects to be seen — in advertising and as nude subjects in European art.[7] The feminist intellectual Laura Mulvey applied the concepts of the gaze to critique traditional representations of women in cinema,[8] from which work emerged the concept and the term of the male gaze.[9]
The beauty standards perpetuated by the gaze have historically sexualized and fetishized the black female nude due to an attraction to their characteristics but at the same time punished black women and pushed their bodies outside of what is considered desirable.[10]
The psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan are the foundations from which Mulvey developed the theory of the male gaze and interpreted and explained scopophilia, the "primordial wish for pleasurable looking" that is satisfied by the cinematic experience.[11]: 807 The terms scopophilia and scoptophilia identify both the aesthetic joy and the sexual pleasures derived from looking at someone or something.[11]: 815 Concerning the psychologic applications and functions of the gaze, the male gaze is conceptually contrasted with the female gaze.[12][13]
Concepts[edit]
Scopophilia[edit]
The Freudian concept of scopophilia produced two types of male gaze: the pleasure that is linked to sexual attraction (voyeurism in the extreme), and the scopophilic pleasure that is linked to narcissistic identification (the introjection of ego ideal), and each type of male gaze shows how women have been socially compelled to view the cinema from the perspectives (sexual, aesthetic, cultural) of the male gaze. In cinematic representations of women, the male gaze denies the woman's human agency and human identity to transform her from person to object — someone to be considered only for her beauty, physique, and sex appeal, as defined in the male sexual fantasy of narrative cinema.[11]
The Black female nude[edit]
In Lisa E. Farrington's "Reinventing Herself: The Black Female Nude", Farrington said the European female nude has mostly been depicted as passive and complacent to a masculine gaze, or in special occasions has been depicted as sexually liberated and as a femme fatale that uses their sexuality to overpower men. Black women have been portrayed as overly sexual and deserving of rape and sexual violence since they were being brought across the ocean from Africa. The power dynamic between enslaved women and their captors forced women to risk death or submit to a chance of surviving till the end of the long voyage. This was used to create a narrative that black women are overtly sexual creatures with uncontrollable desires reflective of animal behavior.[10] Black male artists are also responsible for depicting sexualized black women in art and such practice has been seen abundant in recent media.
Farrington said that instead of perpetuating the gaze, women artists have the ability to reclaim dominance over their bodies by painting the female nude themselves. This counteracts the male artists who have traditionally painted women in the nude to assert their own sexual dominance over a woman subject. A woman painting a female nude completely flips the gaze because a female audience replaces the male audience.[10]
Western art has lacked representation in all areas and it historically fails to portray black female bodies in the same context European women have been depicted. While this is a race issue, it is also a gender issue and highlights the intersectionality that black women navigate, because when they are shown in art, they are sexualized and put in submissive positions like their white counterparts, plus any racialized bigotry towards their race. It puts black women in a position that marks them as "others" in a group they identify as. It also means black women are being considered as undesirable because they are not seen the same as other women who were shown to be the epitome of beauty in the art world.[10] Though there is a small portion of media and art that depicts black women in romanticized versions of femininity, imagery like that leads back to gender stereotypes that apply to all depictions of women.
Theories of the gaze[edit]
Matrixial gaze[edit]
To address the psychological limitations of the male gaze, the philosopher Bracha Ettinger proposed the matrixial gaze, wherein the female gaze and the male gaze constitute each other from their lack of the other; Lacan’s definition of the gaze.[30] The matrixial gaze concerns trans-subjectivity and shareability based upon the feminine-matrixial-difference, which is produced by co-emergence by avoiding the phallic opposition of masculine–feminine. Parting from Lacan's later work, Ettinger's analyses the psychological structure of the Lacanian subject, whose deconstruction produces the feminine perspective by way of a shared matrixial gaze.[31]
In the essay, "Is the Gaze Male?" (1983), E. Kaplan said that the male gaze constructs a false, hypersexualized feminine Other in order to dismiss the sensual feminine within every person innately connected to a maternal figure.[32] That "the domination of women by the male gaze is part of men's strategy to contain the threat that the mother embodies, and to control the positive and negative impulses that memory traces of being mothered have left in the male unconsciousness."
That the mutual gaze, which seeks neither subordination nor domination of the gazer and the gazed-upon person originates in the mother-child relationship,[32] because Western culture is deeply committed to the ideas of "the masculine" and "the feminine" to demarcate differences between the sexes based upon the complex social apparatus of the gaze; and second, that said sexual demarcations are based upon patterns of dominance and submission. Such a demarcation of difference between the representations of the sexes privileges the male gaze (voyeurism and fetishism) because men's desires include the power of action, whereas the desires of women usually do not include the power of acting upon their desires.[32]