This document discusses the concept of the male gaze and how it is defined through three dimensions: how men look at women, how women look at themselves, and how women look at other women. It outlines different types of gazes including the spectator's gaze, intra-diegetic gaze, extra-diegetic gaze, camera gaze, and editorial gaze. It then discusses Laura Mulvey's influential 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" which argued that women are presented as objects of visual pleasure through voyeurism in cinema and are viewed from the perspective of the heterosexual male gaze. Mulvey described three types of looking - that of the camera, audience, and characters on screen.

1. The MALE
Gaze

2. What is it?
The concept of gaze is one
that deals with how an
audience views the people
presented.
Feminists have divided this
concept into the following
three dimensions:
 How men look at women
 How women look at
themselves
 How women look at other
women

3. Forms
The spectators gaze:
this is whereby the
director is viewing
the text.
The Intra-diegetic
gaze: when the
character gazes at
an object or another
character in the text.
The Extra-diegetic gaze:
where the fourth wall is
broken (the character
looks into the camera,
looking right at the
viewer.
The camera
gaze: this is the
camera editors
view
The editorial gaze:
emphasised a textual aspect
like the cropping and caption,
which direct the viewers to
that particular character.

4. Visual pleasure and Narrative
cinema
 Women are presented as sexual spectacle (show) objects of pleasure
for the characters and audience.
 She believed that in films audiences have to view characters from the
perspective of a heterosexual male. Stating that the way women are
viewed in cinema is ‘unequal’. The camera necessarily present
women as ‘sexualised for the pleasure of men.
 Men fetishies women which she referred to as ‘fetishistic scopophilia.
 Men have this gaze to avoid being ‘castrated’.

5. Laura Mulvey:
 She was a theorist and a
feminist
 Mulvey, came up with the
concept on male gaze in
1975. Here Mulvey wrote a
very influential essay ‘Visual
pleasure and Narrative
Cinema’. Stating that women
are used for visual pleasure-women
are made to seem
like sexual objects through
voyeurism.
 She argued that women took
the passive part of a film and
that all men played an
active part, in her eye the
women were objects

6. Mulvey’s three types of ‘looking’
 The look of the camera as it records
the filmic event.
 The look of the audience as it watches
the final product.
 The look of the characters at each
other in the visual images of the screen
illusion.
 She says these looks are linked to the
issue of genre because many relations
of looking in the cinema are informed
and disrupted by sexual desire and the
erotic contemplation of the female
form.