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The Male Gaze

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.

Marshall McLuhan Interview

Marshall McLuhan Interview (1977) Edward Newman interviews McLuhan on news program Speaking Freely. Newman asks McLuhan "Why is the medium the message? Why isn't the message the message?" McLuhan's answers, with very anti-televisual pacing, "What would be the message of an electric light bulb?" McLuhan goes on to discuss how "pre-literate" people (members of a culture whose major means of communication is based in orality i.e. a culture without an alphabet or print) experience space very differently from members of a print culture (whose major means of communication is based in alphabet/print). An underlying assumption of McLuhan and others of this school (Innis, Ong, Havelock, Eisenstein) is that oral cultures and alphabet/print cultures are radically different in many ways.

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Georges Bataille The Dead Man pt. 2

What gender is Bataille's excess? What sex?
About Story of the Eye Roland Barthes says "the erotic theme...is never directly phallic." And Michel Leiris writes concerning the novel's erotic activity; "innumerable possible permutations in a universe so little hierarchized that all is interchangeable there." Bataille replaces the strictures of gender, sexuality and hierarchy, with the orgy of metaphoric chains and their inexorable combinations; eye/egg/testicle.

For example, Simone's vagina transforms from the sex organ which Marcelle and the narrator adore, to the mouth that devours the bull's testicle, and then to the socket for the priest's eye that is the sad gaze of Marcelle. Vagina/mouth/ eye socket. All of the elements of the story go through these changes and experience the random mutations of the basic metaphor. Always in threes, like a perverse parody of the Holy Trinity. The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. The Eye, the Egg and the Holy Testicle. The hierarchy of gender, the dominance of the phallus broken by metaphor, by a new and obscene grammar.

The Deadman raises the question "What gender is Bataille's concept of sovereignty?" But gender is a poor word when speaking of sovereignty. Gender is a social con­struction, a figure created by the work of discourse. Sovereignty is the story of Marie's escape and transgression initi­ated by Edward's death, by his sacrifice. It is the sacrifice of Edward that opens the possibility of sovereignty and the sacred. Bataille reveals the conditions of sacrifice; "The victim dies, thus the witnesses participate in an element which his death reveals. This element is what it is possible for us, along with religious historians, to call the sacred. The sacred is precisely the continuity of being revealed to those who fix their attention, in a solemn rite, on the death of a discontinu­ous being." The Deadman records Marie's night of sovereignty, her "practice of joy before death." Her useful and everyday world crumbles away, replaced by a life rushing headlong towards death and silence. Along the way towards death preparations with drunkenness, debauchery, and the "little death" of orgasm. Burning with "la part maudite," the excremental, and the heterogeneous, Marie recaptures a life which has been forgotten, repressed by a limited econ­omy of accumulation, equivalence and project. The memory of this sovereignty would be something like the memory involved in the phantom limb of an amputee.

In The Deadman Bataille mixes mortality and dark bur­lesque; the death rattle, orgasm and wail of laughter combine to create a total abjection. Thus it is a sacred text. It is also a Hegelian text. Or rather a text that wrestles with Hegel's imperial system. If Marie is the character of sover­eignty then the Count embodies Hegel's concept of Herrschaft. A laughable, deformed figure that deserves our respect and derision, much like Hegel's system.

Georges Bataille The Dead Man pt. 1

"All it takes is to imagine suddenly the charming little girl whose soul would be Dali's abominable mirror..." If I had to imagine Bataille's
"charming little girl" she would be the blonde, demonic child that appears at the end of Fellini's short film Toby Dammit. An incarnation of Satan holding a large red ball which is really Toby's head lost in a wager. She would bear the names: Simone, Marcelle, Lazare, Dirty, Eponine, and of course Marie.

How does one explain Bataille's body of work, which like all bodies, physical and metaphorical, is assumed to be unified but contains on the one hand the jerking off of an encephalitic dwarf and on the other a critique of the Marshall Plan.

Perhaps it is necessary to reconstruct the image of the "body" of the work. In Bataille’s case we could begin by severing the Cartesian head that thinks with a "clear and assured consciousness of that which is useful in life." The body of the work no longer a seamless whole, composed of a series of discourses revealing a full positivity but a body like the image of the Acephale; headless, sacred heart in its right hand, dagger in its left, self-mutilating, a labyrinth of en­trails, the skull of genitals. The bowels are a labyrinth where food finds its soul to be shit. The night is a labyrinth where Marie...