The Gaze

The Gaze

It's been a while since I've posted anything but I've decided to go ahead and do some catch up! We spoke about The Gaze in a previous lecture. The Gaze is a theory that woman are objectified and purely presented to the male viewing audience for sexual and visual stimulation. I found lecture to be one of the most interesting lectures so far.

"While the ideas behind the concept were present in earlier uses of the gaze, the introduction of the term “the male gaze” can be traced back to Laura Mulvey and her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” which was published in 1975. In it, Mulvey states that in film women are typically the objects, rather than the possessors, of gaze because the control of the camera (and thus the gaze) comes from factors such as the as the assumption of heterosexual men as the default target audience for most film genres. While this was more true in the time it was written, when Hollywood protagonists were overwhelmingly male, the base concept of men as watchers and women as watched still applies today, despite the growing number of movies targeted toward women and that feature female protagonists" http://finallyfeminism101.wordpress.com/2007/08/26/faq-what-is-the-%E2%80%9Cmale-gaze%E2%80%9D/

I've done some very brief reading about a film maker and director known as Laura Mulvey. She wrote an essay on the male gaze and I was only able to find a few pieces of her essay for some reason. Here's a very interesting quote that I recently found:

"Woman displayed as sexual object is the leit-motif of

erotic spectacle: from pin-ups to striptease, from Ziegfeld to Busby Berkeley, sheholds the look, plays to and signifies male desire. Mainstream film neatly combined

spectacie and narrative"

She explains that men have become the main target audience for film and women have almost become part of the props in cinema. I agree with her theory that women are objectified. I'm hoping to base my research on this theory for my essay. 

(update)

After some thorough search, I found the original essay by Laura Mulvey titled, Visual Pleasures & Narrative Cinema.