Laura Mulvey and The Male Gaze ("Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema")

Classical Hollywood Narrative:

- Psychologically defined individuals

- struggle to solve a problem or achieve specific goals (often two intertwined: one romantic, one other)

- Enter into conflict with others or with external circumstances

- the character is the principal causal agency, and causality is the unifying principle

- Decisive victory or defeat: problem solved, goals attained, or not.

Psychoanalytic feminism: These universal, unconscious forces can be examined as explanations for all kinds of phenomena, including misogyny and its cultural exponents (ie Hollywood cinema)

Male Gaze, Part A: Looking at women as objects (Women as objects who's purpose is soley to be looked at, as voyeurism, as narrative suspended to enjoy women "performing") When women appear on screen as erotic objects, they often halt narrative progression, and we are encouraged to possess them with our gaze.

Male Gaze, Part B: Identifying with a male protagonist  (...or if female, Identification, rather than looking at women as objects)

The split between  spectacle and narrative supports the man's role as the active one affording the story making things happen. The man controls the film fantasy and also emerges as a representative of power in a further sense, as the bearer of the look of the spectator. This is made possible by structuring the film  around a main controlling figure, often a man, with whom the spectator can identify. (So it is crucial that we have a story that is organized around a male perspective otherwise you wouldn't  have the whole system of narration that Mulvey looks at.)

Identifies like in Lacan's Mirror Stage.. believes the image superior to its' own feeling.

Two ways that Man escapes the threat of castration signified by woman:

- Punishment of women (sadistic voyeurism)

- Over-valuation of woman (fetishistic scopophilia)

 

What is the Female Gaze?

1. Reversal hypothesis: Visual and narrative strategies for depicting men as sexual object for consumption by heterosexual female spectators (ie - Magic Mike)

2. Visual and narrative strategies that represent the visual dimensions of female desire.

3. Visual and narrative strategies that are unique to female filmmakers (directors, cinematographers, screenwriters)

4. Combos of 1-3.

Types of defined "Gazes":

Male (women)
Medical (patients)
Orientalist (Orientalized "others")
Colonial Gaze (the colonized)
Rich Gaze (poor/ working class)
Straight Gaze (LGBTQ+)
White Gaze (people of colour)

Each of these terms, each of these concepts, is trying to formulate a structure of power in which the adjective that comes before "Gaze" (Subject) names an oppressive or dominant aspect of a power structure that might be termed the subject; as opposed to the things (objects) that are oppressed or the people that are oppressed who we might call the object. Mulvey believes that the Academic Discourse of 'the Gaze' is generally about 'harmful structures of power' enacted throught the relation of looker (subject) and looked-at (object). In Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the gaze is the anxious state of mind that comes with the self-awareness that one can be seen and looked at. The psychoanalytic effect upon the person subjected to the gaze is a loss of autonomy upon becoming aware that he or she is a visible object. theoretically, the gaze is linked to the mirror stage of psychological development, in which a child encountering a mirror learns that he or she has an external appearance.

"...we can not perceive the world and at the same time apprehend a look fastened upon us; it must be either one or the other. This is because to perceive is to look at, and to apprehend a look is not to apprehend a look-as-object in the world: it is the consciousness of being looked at."

- Jean Paul Sartre, "Being and Nothingness"