Assignment for media studies on Male gaze theory

1. LAURA
MULVEY: MALE
GAZE THEORY
BY : S A I R A , R O O H I M A & D U A

2. INTRODUCTION
•The female gaze is a feminist film theoretical
term representing the gaze of the female
viewer. It is a response to feminist film
theorist Laura Mulvey's term, "the male gaze,"
which represents not only the gaze of the
male viewer but also the gaze of the male
character and the male creator of the film.

3. IDEA OF MALE GAZE
• The “male gaze” invokes the sexual politics of the gaze and suggests a sexualised
way of looking that empowers men and objectifies women. In the male gaze,
woman is visually positioned as an “object” of heterosexual male desire. Her
feelings, thoughts and her own sexual drives are less important than her being
“framed” by male desire.
• A key idea of feminist film theory, the concept of the male gaze was introduced
by scholar and filmmaker Laura Mulvey in her now famous 1975 essay, Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.
• Adopting the language of psychoanalysis, Mulvey argued that traditional
Hollywood films respond to a deep-seated drive known as “scopophilia”: the sexual
pleasure involved in looking. Mulvey argued that most popular movies are filmed in
ways that satisfy masculine scopophilia.
• Although sometimes described as the “male gaze”, Mulvey’s concept is more
accurately described as a heterosexual, masculine gaze.

4. CRITICISMS
• Matrixial gaze[edit]
• Bracha Ettinger criticizes this notion of the male gaze by her proposition of a matrixial gaze.[17] The matrixial gaze is not
operative where a "male gaze" is placed opposite to a "female gaze" and where both positive entities constitute each other
from a lack (such an umbrella concept of the gaze would precisely be what scholars such as Slavoj Žižek claim is the
Lacanian definition of "The Gaze"). Ettinger's proposal doesn't concern a subject and its object, existing or lacking. Rather, it
concerns "trans-subjectivity" and shareability on a partial level, and it is based on her claim concerning a feminine-matrixial
difference that escapes the phallic opposition of masculine/feminine and is produced in a process of co-emergence. Ettinger
works from the very late Lacan, yet, from the angle she brings, it is the structure of the Lacanian subject itself that is
deconstructed to a certain extent, and another kind of feminine dimension appears, with its hybrid and floating matrixial
gaze.[18]
• Women and the gaze[edit]
• Griselda Pollock, in her article, "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity" argues that the female gaze can often be visually
negated.[21] Pollock claims Robert Doisneau's photo Sidelong Glance supports this argument.[22] In the photo, a middle-
aged bourgeois couple are looking around an art gallery. The spectator view of the picture is from inside the shop but the
couple are looking in different places than the view of the spectator. The woman is commenting on an image to her
husband, while the husband is being distracted by a nude female painting. The nude female painting is hung within view of
the spectator. The woman is looking at another image, but it is out of view of the spectator. The man's gaze has found
something more interesting and he has chosen to ignore the woman's comment. According to Pollock, "She is contrasted
iconographically to the naked woman. She is denied the picturing of her desire; what she looks at is blank for the spectator.
She is denied being the object of desire because she is represented as a woman who actively looks, rather than returning
and confirming the gaze of the masculine spectator".[21]

5. QUOTES BY LAURA MULVEY
• “In a world ordered by sexual imbalance, pleasure in looking has been split between
active/male and passive/female. The determining male gaze projects its phantasy on to the
female form which is styled accordingly. In their traditional exhibitionist role women are
simultaneously looked at and displayed, with their appearance coded for strong visual and
erotic impact so that they can be said to connote to-be-looked-at-ness.”
• ― Laura Mulvey, Visual And Other Pleasures
“Woman, then, stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other, bound by a
symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and obsessions through linguistic
command by imposing them on the silent image of a woman still tied to her place as the
bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning.”
• ― Laura Mulvey, Visual And Other Pleasures