The Male GazeAsia Thomas Jennings

What is the male gaze?

The concept of gaze is one that deals with how an audience views the people presented. Feminists have divided this concept into the following three dimensions: How men look at women How women look at themselves How women look at other women

Forms of the gaze

The spectators gaze: this is whereby the director is viewing the text. The Intra-diegetic gaze: when the character gazes at an object or

another character in the text. The Extra-diegetic gaze: where the fourth wall is broken (the

character looks into the camera, looking right at the viewer. The camera gaze: this is the camera editors view The editorial gaze: emphasised a textual aspect like the cropping and

caption, which direct the viewers to that particular character.

Laura Mulvey

She was a theorist and a feminist Mulvey, came up with the concept on male gaze in 1975. Here

Mulvey wrote a very influential essay ‘Visual pleasure and Narrative Cinema’. Stating that women are used for visual pleasure- women are made to seem like sexual objects through voyeurism.

She argued that women took the passive part of a film and that all men played an active part, in her eye the women were objects

Visual pleasure and narrative cinema Women are presented as sexual spectacle (show) objects of pleasure

for the characters and audience. She believed that in films audiences have to view characters from the

perspective of a heterosexual male. Stating that the way women are viewed in cinema is ‘unequal’. The camera necessarily present women as ‘sexualised for the pleasure of men.

Men fetishes women which she referred to as ‘fetishistic scopophilia. Men have this gaze to avoid being ‘castrated’