Male Gaze

Laura Mulvey's “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (1975) was one of the first scholarly attempts to reference male gaze, the visual and controlling viewpoint associated with hegemonic masculinity and male dominations. Mulvey's pioneering work fused feminist and psychoanalytic theory with theories of film spectatorship as she examined the progression of “looks” in classical narrative cinema. In her classic model of the gaze, Mulvey considered gendered identity and “sexual looking” as elements of “woman as spectacle” for the pleasure of men (p. 10). First, she suggests that the controlling look of the camera itself is voyeuristic and male because most directors are men. Second, the looks exchanged between cinematic characters are structured so that the male characters most often look while the female characters are looked at. Finally, spectators respond to the standpoints of the camera and characters by identifying with the male and his gaze.

Utilizing Freud, Mulvey also contends that the male unconscious seeks two forms of scopophilia (visual pleasure). Voyeurism, the first of these, seeks to exercise power over its object by marking “her” as “the bearer of guilt” (Mulvey 1975:11). Fetishism, the second form of visual pleasure, marks the female as object of desire at the level of spectacle. A masculine subject emerges through a narcissistic identification with male characters and an objectification of female characters. Thus, woman as passive spectacle and object and man as active voyeur and subject together constitute a proprietary “male gaze.”

While Mulvey is credited with the phrase “male gaze,” the concept of the gaze is drawn from the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. Lacan's gaze acknowledges that “things look at me, and yet I see them” (1977:109). The Lacanian gaze both projects itself onto objects and reads those objects for their meanings. The notion of gaze also informs the thought of Jean-Paul Sarte. As he noted, the look of the Other is the domain of domination and possession.

By aligning knowledge with power, Michel Foucault presented a model for discussing objectification without drawing on existentialism or psychoanalysis. According to Foucault, power constitutes the very subjectivity of the subject. Vision, as a means to objectify, may reinforce as well as help produce patriarchal power relations. In Discipline and Punish ([1975] 1995), Foucault discusses Jeremy Bentham's “panopticon,” the prison where inmates are continually observable. He treats the panopticon as an example of the controlling gaze, which guards use as a means of constant surveillance. If inmates know that they can be observed at any time, then discipline becomes internalized as they become self-policing subjects. Foucault highlights the power that lies at the root of the gaze. In The Birth of the Clinic ([1963] 1994), he declares that “the gaze [Page 468]that sees” through active vision becomes a “gaze that dominates” (p. 39).

Theorists often distinguish between the look (associated with the eye) and the gaze (associated with the phallus). Of all the sensory organs, vision most readily confirms the separation of subject from object. The spatial dynamics of vision allow for considerable distance, whereas a relative contiguity is usually required between subject and object with all of our other senses.

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