In simple terms the concept of the male gaze states that representations of women in film (but the concept can be applied to representations across a whole range of media) become eroticized objects or images for male consumption and pleasure. This theory was first formulated by feminist film scholar Laura Mulvey in an essay entitled Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema published in 1975. Mulvey theorizes a series of male looks or gazes operating within Classical Hollywood cinema (Hollywood roughly between 1930 to 1960): the spectator in the theater looks, the camera/projector looks (records/projects) and the male characters within the film narrative look. This series of interrelated looks or gazes has as its object the female character which fulfills a similar role for each of the looks. For Mulvey the series of gazes is always marked as male because classical Hollywood cinema operates within and reproduces a patriarchal order. This male gaze creates for male pleasure representations of women that are highly eroticized and therefore desirable. Mulvey's notion of the male gaze can be used in the analysis of all sorts of representations of women.
What is important for Mulvey is the appeal that the classical Hollywood film makes to the male viewer. Within the conventions or codes of the cinema, the image of the woman exists to be looked at and to be desired by the male spectator who possesses the gaze (along with its controlling power). While male viewers desire the female characters, another drive that appeals to male viewers, that of identification, compels the male spectator to identify with the male characters on the screen. The ideology of heterosexual patriarchy that works within classical Hollywood film prohibits male characters to be constituted as erotic objects. The male spectator (and gaze) cannot look at the male character in the same way as the female characters. As Mulvey states; "the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionistic like... A male movie star's glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, ideal ego." Thus the male spectators do not sexually desire the male screen character but desires to be like the male character. The male character on the screen represents a more perfect and complete image of masculinity which the male spectator can identify with but not sexually desire.
You may be thinking to yourself that there are also female viewers in movie audiences and these spectators are not mentioned above. And that is precisely Mulvey's point; the male gaze privileges male viewers over female viewers and serves the interests of patriarchal ideology. For female spectators the male gaze supports patriarchal ideology; if women identify with female representations they are identifying with representations that reduce women to sexual objects. By internalizing these representations women, so the argument goes, are participating in their own oppression. They define themselves as objects to be looked at by men. This point explains the wide range of ads (and representations in general) where women are concerned even anxious about their appearance.
Mulvey asserts that because cinematic representations of women are produced by a male dominated system there is no viewing position for women that is comparable to the male gaze. In other words there is no female gaze working for women within patriarchal ideology and practices.
What is important for Mulvey is the appeal that the classical Hollywood film makes to the male viewer. Within the conventions or codes of the cinema, the image of the woman exists to be looked at and to be desired by the male spectator who possesses the gaze (along with its controlling power). While male viewers desire the female characters, another drive that appeals to male viewers, that of identification, compels the male spectator to identify with the male characters on the screen. The ideology of heterosexual patriarchy that works within classical Hollywood film prohibits male characters to be constituted as erotic objects. The male spectator (and gaze) cannot look at the male character in the same way as the female characters. As Mulvey states; "the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionistic like... A male movie star's glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the gaze, but those of the more perfect, more complete, ideal ego." Thus the male spectators do not sexually desire the male screen character but desires to be like the male character. The male character on the screen represents a more perfect and complete image of masculinity which the male spectator can identify with but not sexually desire.
You may be thinking to yourself that there are also female viewers in movie audiences and these spectators are not mentioned above. And that is precisely Mulvey's point; the male gaze privileges male viewers over female viewers and serves the interests of patriarchal ideology. For female spectators the male gaze supports patriarchal ideology; if women identify with female representations they are identifying with representations that reduce women to sexual objects. By internalizing these representations women, so the argument goes, are participating in their own oppression. They define themselves as objects to be looked at by men. This point explains the wide range of ads (and representations in general) where women are concerned even anxious about their appearance.
Mulvey asserts that because cinematic representations of women are produced by a male dominated system there is no viewing position for women that is comparable to the male gaze. In other words there is no female gaze working for women within patriarchal ideology and practices.
all true of the original thesis however I think that mulvay herself responded to the criticism by refining her opinion later on into something a bit more amenable to nuance and since then the developement of gaze theory by other feminist and queer theorists- disidentification, masochistic cinema, race as interlocuter have really transformed (or should have transformed) not just the conception of male gaze but the way gaze has been used in other theoretical domains-post-colonial, pyschoanalytical, body politics etc.
ReplyDeletethis is igather by the way
ReplyDeleteigather, it’s nice to see you over on this side of the blogosphere.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you. The above post is my rudimentary working out of Mulvey’s thesis pretty much for myself. (i know why did I post it?) Indeed Mulvey’s original statement has been revised, expanded and reworked in all sorts of directions. And you mention some of the most compelling and radical.
At this point I would say spectatorship theory is a kind of zombie theory. (Having said that I recognize Mulvey’s contribution.)
I would even critique Mulvey from within the very act of film reception. I find it very problematic that traditionally spectatorship theory (including the male gaze) has reduced the forms of exhibition to essentializes assumptions about archetypal modes of exhibition. This “typical” condition of exhibition is the silent darkened movie theater where spectators gaze in a captivated state akin to a dream. It is certainly within this space that the forms of identification that Mulvey assumes take place.
Certainly a corollary to this notion of the exhibition space is the notion of the film itself being a discrete object that exists in a specific time and space: the space of the theater and the time of the film showing. This ideal-theoretical abstraction leaves out other modes of exhibition, and consequently other modes of reception (based on class, race, gender, sexuality?) that would run counter to Mulvey’s notion of identification and hence to the male gaze.
And certainly the textual determinism implicit in the male gaze is highly problematic. From within my research on fan cultures (horror fandom) I found all sorts of practices, modes of reception and forms of appropriation within fan culture that wildly go beyond the restrictions of Mulvey’s male gaze.
More later.
this is all very interesting- I have never implicitly thought about the forms of exhibition or rather the intervention of the physical space, although I should have because this also intersects with queered notions of the gaze in which the setting and medium matter quite a bit-family room t.v. viewing etc. And certainly fandom intersects with that a bit as does the theory of kitsch which essentially could be theorised as a form of fandom. I am not sure I would say that spectorship theory is a zombie theory except that it has become slightly disengaged from nuanced ways to relate material conditions with complex ideas about disrupture and mobile fluid identities. Which you know, is like The Big Question. But in trying to get to a point of relating the two I've found the concept of disidentification and world making from a queer and anticolonial perspective by which material opressions are not ignored or voided but instead are self-consciously and creatively worked through and dramatically re-figured so as to become not just new modes of appropriation bt powerful tools of liberation or new, more hospitable worlds.
ReplyDeleteC.J.B. Interesting! I need to formulate a thoughtful response and it is late here. More here tomorrow.
ReplyDeleteRegards.
Yes, it is very much about the contexts of viewing and always paying attention to the contexts in which we find the text. And not only physical and spatial contexts but interpersonal and intersubjective contexts. One of my main problems with screen theory and spectatorship theory was the tendency to repeatedly theorize a very solipsistic relationship between viewer and text. I am not denying the possibility of deep immersion or identification with a film or any other text but there was in spectatorship theory an unhealthy emphasis on this experience excluding all sorts of other social or collective forms of media reception. In other words I am interested in the intersubjective reception of media texts; how we talk about them, share them, appropriate them as part of our group experience. In other words how are they “cultural”
ReplyDeleteMore later on your comment.