The Male Gaze - On Being-In-Myself-for-Myself

Excerpts from video:

Sartre thinks there are three main ways that beings manifest in the world through being- for- itself, being- in- itself, and being- for- others.

And being- for- others is inaugurated by the look. Sartre concludes from this, that we can only ever experience ourselves as subjects or as objects at a given time. And so we're constantly oscillating between feeling ourselves as subjects and feeling ourselves as objects.

Sartre thinks, for instance, that if we're gazing into another person's eyes, we are either seeing them as an object. We're seeing their eyes. We're looking at them, we're beholding them, or we are feeling seen by them. And we are experiencing their subjectivity in a way that we're at the receiving end of it, rather than looking at them.

This is something that subsequent phenomenologists have taken issue with, including Beauvoir and Merleau-Ponty. They disagree with Sartre that we can't experience ourselves as both subjects and objects at the same time.

For Sartre, the gaze of the other involves the death of my possibilities. I no longer feel that I have this unlimited orientation to the world that I'm able to transcend it, but rather my possibilities feel as if they fall into probability.

And this follows directly from his contention that when we experience the look, we experience ourselves as reduced to a facticity. And this idea has actually been one of the key points of the look that folks have used since in developing concepts around gender and race, such as the male gaze or the white gaze. Frantz Fanon, in chapter five of Black Skin, White Masks, suggest that Sartre's view of the look actually needs to be taken a step further to account for what he calls the racial- epidermal schema, or the ways that Black bodies in white space are perceived as fundamentally, always already, the objects of the look, rather than the lookers.

He says that the Black man living in a white supremacist society is constantly thrust into this feeling of being an object to such a degree, that there may not even be an oscillation between the first and second moments of the look.