The gaze (French: le regard), in the figurative sense, is an individual's (or a group's) awareness and perception of other individuals, other groups, or oneself. Since the 20th century, the concept and the social applications of the gaze have been expanded by phenomenologist, existentialism, and post-structuralist philosophers. Jean-Paul Sartre described the gaze (or the look) in Being and Nothingness (1943).[Jean-Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness, Part 3, Chapter 1] Michel Foucault, in (1975), developed the concept of the gaze to illustrate the dynamics of socio-political power relations and the social dynamics of society's mechanisms of discipline. Jacques Derrida, in The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Come) (1997), elaborated upon the inter-species relations that exist among human beings and other animals, which are established by way of the gaze.
Psychoanalysis
In Lacanian psychoanalytic theory,
Jacques Lacan's view on the gaze changes throughout the course of his work. Initially, the concept of the gaze was used by Lacan through his psychoanalytic work on the
mirror stage.
The mirror stage occurs when a child encountering a mirror learns that they have an external appearance. Theoretically, this is where the child begins their entrance into culture and the world.
The child enters language and culture through establishing an ideal image of themself in the mirror. This image is someone the child can aspire to be like and work towards.
The role of the ideal ego or self can also be filled by other people in their lives such as parents, siblings, teachers etc.
In his later essays however, Lacan refers to the gaze as the anxious feeling that one is being watched. More specifically, it is when the object that one is viewing is somehow looking back at the subject on its own terms.[Knausgaard, Karl Ove. "The Inexplicable", The New Yorker, 25 May 2015, p. 32.]
Systems of power
The gaze can be understood in psychological terms: "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."
In
Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (2009),
Marita Sturken and
Lisa Cartwright said that "the gaze is conceptually integral to systems of power, and to ideas about knowledge"; that to practice the gaze is to enter a personal relationship with the person being looked at.
[Sturken, Marita; Cartwright, Lisa. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford University Press, 2009. p. 94, 103.] Foucault's concepts of
panopticism, of the power/knowledge binary, and of
biopower address the modes of personal self-regulation that a person practices when under
surveillance; the modification of personal behaviour by way of institutional surveillance.
[Sturken, Marita; Cartwright, Lisa. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford University Press, 2009. pp. 106-108.] In 'The politics of the gaze: Between Foucault and Merleau-Ponty', Nick Crossley (1993) argued that Foucault's account of the Panopticon and Panoptic power has deficiencies that
Merleau-Ponty's philosophy allows us to overcome.
In The Birth of the Clinic (1963), Michel Foucault first applied the medical gaze to conceptually describe and explain the act of looking, as part of the process of medical diagnosis; the unequal power dynamics between doctors and patients; and the cultural hegemony of intellectual authority that a society grants to medical knowledge and medicine men. In (1975), Foucault develops the gaze as an apparatus of power based upon the social dynamics of power relations, and the social dynamics of disciplinary mechanisms, such as surveillance and personal self-regulation, as practices in a prison and in a school.
Male gaze
The concept of the "male gaze" was first used by the English art critic
John Berger in
Ways of Seeing, a series of films for the
BBC aired in January 1972, and later a book, as part of his analysis of the treatment of the nude in European painting. Berger described the difference between how men and women view and are viewed in art and in society. He asserts that men are placed into the role as the watcher and women are to be looked at.
, a British film critic and feminist, similarly critiqued traditional media representations of the female character in cinema.
[ A Companion to Women in the Ancient World, edited by Sharon L. James, Sheila Dillon, p. 75, 2012, Wiley, , 9781444355000]
In her 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Mulvey discusses the association between activity and passivity to gender. Essentially, Mulvey argues that masculinity is related to the active, whereas femininity is related to the passive.[Sturken, Marita and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: an introduction to visual culture. Oxford University Press, 2001. p. 76.] The concept has subsequently been influential in feminist film theory and media studies.[Sassatelli, Roberta. Interview with Laura Mulvey: Gender, Gaze and Technology in Film Culture. Theory, Culture & Society, September 2011, 28(5) p. 127.] Berger, Mulvey as well as Foucault also all linked the looming act of the gaze inextricably to power.
Female gaze
The term "female gaze" was created as a response to the proposed concept of the male gaze as coined by Laura Mulvey. In particular, it is a rebellion against the viewership censored to an only masculine lens and feminine desire regardless of the viewer's gender identity or sexual orientation.
In essence, the forced desire of femininity enacts in the erasure of female desire and sexuality. In
Judith Butler's 1990 book
Gender Trouble, she proposed the idea of the female gaze as a way in which men choose to perform their masculinity by using women as the ones who force men into self-regulation. Film director Deborah Kampmeier rejected the idea of the female gaze in preference for the female experience. She stated, "(F)or me personally, it's not (about) a female gaze. It's the female experience. I don't gaze, I actually move through the world, feeling the world emotionally and sensorily and in my body."
Objectifying gaze
The feminist Objectification theory was first proposed by Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts in 1997. Objectification theory is a framework that attempts to bring to light the lived experiences of women in particular that are under the lens of sexual objectification. The theory is primarily focused through a heterosexual perspective. According to Fredrickson and Roberts, sexual objectification occurs as the experience of being treated as "a body (or collection of body parts) valued predominantly for its use to (or consumption by) others."
Stripping one of their own bodily agency and sexuality, as well as humanity.
Fredrickson and Roberts stated that sexual objectification or the objectifying gaze occurs in three arenas: Interpersonal or social encounters, visual media that depicts social encounters, and lastly visual media that depict bodies.
Objectification theory and the objectifying gaze also enables a state or trait of self objectification. Self objectification occurs when one adapts to living in a world where the objectifying gaze is constantly put on them and normalized.
Although the original objectification theory mainly focuses on the implications and theories surrounding women in the spotlight of the objectifying gaze, with the use of mass media men are becoming increasingly objectified as well.
Imperial gaze
E. Ann Kaplan has introduced the
Postcolonialism concept of the imperial gaze, in which the observed find themselves defined in terms of the privileged observer's own set of value-preferences.
[Bill Ashcroft et al, Post-Colonial Studies (2000) p. 187] From the perspective of the colonised, the imperial gaze infantilizes and trivializes what it falls upon,
[Vijay Mishra, Bollywood Cinema (2002) p. 245] asserting its command and ordering function as it does so.
[E. H. Yekani, The Privilege of Crisis (2011) p. 100]
Kaplan comments: "The imperial gaze reflects the assumption that the white western subject is central much as the male gaze assumes the centrality of the male subject."[Quoted in Patricia Waugh, Literary Theory and Criticism (2006) p. 514]
White gaze
Oppositional gaze
In her 1992 essay titled "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectatorship",
counters
Laura Mulvey's notion of the
Male gaze by introducing the oppositional gaze of Black women. This concept exists as the reciprocal of the normative white spectator gaze. As
Laura Mulvey's essay
contextualizes the
Male gaze and its objectification of white women, hooks' essay
opens "oppositionality as a key paradigm in the feminist analysis of the 'gaze' and of
scopophilia regimes in Western culture".
The oppositional gaze remains a critique of rebellion due to the sustained and deliberate misrepresentation of Black women in cinema as characteristically Mammy archetype, Jezebel or Sapphire.
Postcolonial gaze
First referred to by Edward Said as "orientalism", the term "post-colonial gaze" is used to explain the relationship that colonial powers extended to people of colonized countries.
Placing the colonized in a position of the "other" helped to shape and establish the colonial's identity as being the powerful conqueror, and acted as a constant reminder of this idea.
The postcolonial gaze "has the function of establishing the subject/object relationship ... it indicates at its point of emanation the location of the subject, and at its point of contact the location of the object".
In essence, this means that the colonizer/colonized relationship provided the basis for the colonizer's understanding of themselves and their identity.
[ The role of the appropriation of power is central to understanding how colonizers influenced the countries that they colonized, and is deeply connected to the development of post-colonial theory. Utilizing Postcolonialism allows formerly colonized societies to overcome the socially constructed barriers that often prohibit them from expressing their true cultural, social, economic, and political rights.][
]
Male tourist gaze
The tourism image is created through cultural and ideological constructions and advertising agencies that have been male dominated. What is represented by the media assumes a specific type of tourist: white, Western, male, and heterosexual, privileging the gaze of the "master subject" over others.
See also
Further reading
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Carol Armstrong and de Zegher, Catherine, Women Artists at the Millennium. MIT Press, October Books, 2006.
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de Zegher, Catherine, Inside the Visible. MIT Press, 1996.
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Ettinger, Bracha, "The Matrixial Gaze" (1995), reprinted as Ch. 1 in: The Matrixial Borderspace. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
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Felluga, Dino. "Modules on Lacan: On the Gaze." Introductory Guide to Critical Theory — see external links.
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Florence, Penny and Griselda Pollock, Looking back to the Future. G & B Arts, 2001.
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Gardner-McTaggart, A. (Forthcoming), International Capital, International Schools, Leadership and Christianity, Globalisation Societies and Education. Taylor and Francis.
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Jacobsson, Eva-Maria: A Female Gaze? (1999) — see external links.
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Kress, Gunther & Theo van Leeuwen: Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. (1996).
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Lacan, Jacques: Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. NY & London, W.W. Norton and Co., 1978.
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Lacan, Jacques: Seminar One: Freud's Papers On Technique (1988).
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Catherine Lutz & Jane Collins: The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes: The Example of National Geographic (1994). In: Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990–1994. Edited by Lucien Taylor. New York: Routledge. pp. 363–384.
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Laura Mulvey: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975, 1992).
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Notes on The Gaze (1998) — see external links.
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Griselda Pollock, Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity. Routledge, 1988.
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Pollock, Griselda (ed.), Psychoanalysis and the Image. Blackwell, 2006.
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Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: an introduction to visual culture. Oxford University Press, 2009. p. 94, 103.
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Paul, Nalini: The Female Gaze — see external links.
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Schroeder, Jonathan E: SSRN.com Consuming Representation: A Visual Approach to Consumer Research.
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Theory, Culture and Society, Volume 21, Number 1, 2004.
External links
