Gaze
Since the 20th century, the concept and the social applications of the gaze have been defined and explained by phenomenologist, existentialist, and post-structuralist philosophers.
[2] The psychological effect upon the person subjected to the gaze is a loss of autonomy upon becoming aware that they are a visible object.
"[4] In Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (2009), Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright said that "the gaze is [conceptually] integral to systems of power, and [to] ideas about knowledge"; that to practice the gaze is to enter a personal relationship with the person being looked at.
In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), Foucault develops the gaze as an apparatus of power based upon the social dynamics of power relations, and the social dynamics of disciplinary mechanisms, such as surveillance and personal self-regulation, as practices in a prison and in a school.
The concept of the "male gaze" was first used by the English art critic John Berger in Ways of Seeing, a series of films for the BBC aired in January 1972, and later a book, as part of his analysis of the treatment of the nude in European painting.
[8] Laura Mulvey, a British film critic and feminist, similarly critiqued traditional media representations of the female character in cinema.
[9] In her 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Mulvey discusses the association between activity and passivity to gender.
In particular, it is a rebellion against the viewership censored to an only masculine lens and feminine desire regardless of the viewer's gender identity or sexual orientation.
Self objectification occurs when one adapts to living in a world where the objectifying gaze is constantly put on them and normalized.
[17] From the perspective of the colonised, the imperial gaze infantilizes and trivializes what it falls upon,[18] asserting its command and ordering function as it does so.
[27] The oppositional gaze remains a critique of rebellion due to the sustained and deliberate misrepresentation of Black women in cinema as characteristically Mammy, Jezebel or Sapphire.
[28] First referred to by Edward Said as "orientalism", the term "post-colonial gaze" is used to explain the relationship that colonial powers extended to people of colonized countries.
[29] Placing the colonized in a position of the "other" helped to shape and establish the colonial's identity as being the powerful conqueror, and acted as a constant reminder of this idea.
What is represented by the media assumes a specific type of tourist: white, Western, male, and heterosexual, privileging the gaze of the "master subject" over others.
[32] This is the representation of the typical tourist because those behind the lens, the image, and creators are predominantly male, white, and Western.
Through these influences female characteristics such as youth, beauty, sexuality, or the possession of a man are desirable while the prevalence of stereotypes consisting of submissive and sensual women with powerful "macho" men in advertising are projected.
