The "Gaze"

Identify issues if gaze within your own artwork

The idea of the gaze in my artwork is very important as I will be using the idea of sexuality and empowering the female subject through their sexuality, something that has been often been viewed through a male lens and catered towards a male gaze. In my artwork I will need to make sure that I don't cater towards this male gaze and instead I am subverting it, allowing the female to gain control over her sexuality. This means incorporating things such as the Extra-diegetic gaze Where the person depicted in the text looks at the spectator, such as in an aside, or an acknowledgement of the fourth wall, which I have included within my work so that the nude women is confronting rather than submissive.

What is an Example of "male gaze" in current culture?

(Women In Social Media, 2019)

An example of this is an American apparel ad which shows the women as not a person but an object, represented as a pair of disembodied legs, while the man in the image is disembodied aswell as the women the man still has the power in the image being placed at the very top of the image, spreading the legs of the women beneath him. This ad in particular could be seen as using rape to sell its product as the male at the top prys the women's legs open.

What is an example of the "female gaze" in current culture?

An example of the female gaze in current culture would be the film magic Mike, however I don't believe the severity the female gaze is on the same level as the male gaze in terms of harm. In the case of Magic Mike one could defiantly argue that the men present are objectified however you could also argue that they are idealized. When the female gaze is used its often used to show how ridiculous the representation of women is, such as using a nude women to sell perfume, burgers, and video games, using a nude man would make people realize how silly it actually is.

Laura Mulvey 

Mulvey's main argument in "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" is that Hollywood narrative films use women in order to provide a pleasurable visual experience for men. The narrative film structures its gaze as masculine. The woman is always the object of the reifying gaze, not the bearer of it (this has something reminiscent of John Berger's "Ways of Seeing") 

The cinematic gaze is always produced a masculine both by means of the identification produced with the male hero and through the use of the camera. Mulvey identifies two manners in which Hollywood cinema produces pleasure, manners which arise from different mental mechanisms. The first involves the objectification of the image, and the second one the identification with it. Both mechanisms represent the mental desires of the male subject. The first form of pleasure relates to what Freud termed as scopophilia or the pleasure derived from subjecting someone to one's gaze. 

Within Mulveys essay the term "Male Gaze" is bought up very few times throughout the essay and the way she discusses makes it very clear that this essay is both a theoretical work and a historical piece. The work is very much set in its time, however the idea and theoretical basis of the "male gaze" can be applied to recent media.

Women In Social Media. (2019). American Apparel Sexist Ad. [online] Available at: https://gzenna.wordpress.com/2013/09/19/american-apparel-sexist-ad/ [Accessed 8 Apr. 2019].