Male Gaze

Jonathan Schroeder describes how “the gaze” is more than a visual perception; it is more than just “a look” and is construed within a relationship of power. The “male gaze” is a trope that refers to the visual power dynamics set up across a gender axis between a (male) subject or viewer and the (female) object of the gaze. The term is used to describe viewing positions in the visual arts, film, and other media.

The feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey introduced her theory of the male gaze in an influential essay, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in Screen magazine in 1975. Taking her examples from conventional Hollywood films of the 1950s, Mulvey describes cinematic viewership and discusses how subject positions are constructed. Mulvey's study is not empirically based but is derived from psychoanalysis. Mulvey argues that women on the screen are objectified and reduced to stereotypes. There are three main ways that Mulvey suggests are responsible for the objectification of women. First, the camera takes on a voyeuristic role. Since many film directors are male, the “male” camera is responsible for framing the position of women on the screen. Second, the gaze exists within the dynamics of relationships in the film itself, which demonstrate an asymmetric power relationship. The male protagonist is active and differs from the female (and passive) object of his gaze. Third, there is the gaze of the viewer, who is assumed to be male. Hence, there are three instances of the male gaze within cinematic viewing, each of which privileges the male, as the looker, over the female, who is looked at.

Mulvey's notion of the gaze is developed from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Freudian scopophilia discusses the pleasure involved in looking at other people's bodies, and Mulvey develops this idea within the confines of the darkened cinema space where audience members can look without being seen. “The gaze” is also a term that is associated with Michel Foucault's notion of surveillance (which, however, does not have the gendered connotations and refers to ways of seeing and interpreting the social realm).

Originating in Mulvey's essay, “the male gaze” refers to the representation of women by a male subject. The female body is traditionally submissive, eroticized, and objectified. Pleasure is split between the active/male and the passive/female. The viewer identifies with the male protagonist (in a process of narcissism), and the female is treated as a passive object of desire, both in the narrative of the film and in the audience. Women are disallowed from being sexual subjects, and they are defined solely by their male counterparts.

The foregoing model can be applied to other spheres of culture to explain the inequality of gender roles. Retrospectively, the male gaze can be used as a framework to interpret many revered works in the history of art, such as Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538) and Paul Gauguin's images of Tahitian women. The male gaze is also pronounced in the advertising industry, where strategies of identification and objectification appeal to both male and [Page 196]female viewers. This is an expansion of Mulvey's interpretation. In outline, the male viewer buys the product that will then help him “get the girl of his dreams,” who is featured in the advertisement (identification). The female viewer buys the product because she wants to be the female in the advertisement (she identifies with her objectification).

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