Male gaze

Mulvey's theory draws on historical precedents, such as the depiction of women in European oil paintings from the Renaissance period, where the female form was often idealized and presented from a voyeuristic male perspective.

[10] The beauty standards perpetuated by the male gaze have historically sexualized and fetishized black women due to an attraction to their physical characteristics, but at the same time punished them and excluded their bodies from what is considered desirable.

[15] In Laura Mulvey's 1975 essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema",[12][16][17] she presents, explains, and develops the cinematic concept of the male gaze.

[12] The on-screen presence of a woman's body is notable, because "her lack of penis, [implies] a threat of castration and hence unpleasure", which the male gaze subverts through the over-sexualization of femininity.

[12] As the passive subjects and objects of the male gaze, the hypersexualization of women thwarts the man's castration anxiety with the sexual practises of voyeurism-sadism and fetishization of the female body.

[12] The practice of voyeurism-sadism is the "pleasure [that] lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness", which aligns more with the structure of narrative cinema than does the fetishization component of scopophilia.

[12] Psychologically, fetishistic scopophilia reduces the man's castration anxiety — induced by the presence of women — by fragmenting the woman's personality and hypersexualizing the parts of her body.

The social pairing of the passive object (woman) and the active viewer (man) is a functional basis of patriarchy, i.e., gender roles that are culturally reinforced in and by the aesthetics (textual, visual, symbolic) of the mainstream, commercial cinema; the movies of which feature the male gaze as more important than the female gaze, an aesthetic choice based upon the inequality of sociopolitical power between men and women.

[12]: 14 [13]: 127 As an ideological basis of patriarchy, sociopolitical inequality is realized as a value system by which male-created institutions (e.g. the movie business, advertising, fashion) unilaterally determine what is "natural and normal" in society.

[12] Two types of spectatorship occur while viewing a film, wherein the spectator consciously and unconsciously engages in the societally defined-and-assigned roles of men and women.

[12] Based upon that patriarchal construction, the cinematic narrative presents and represents the women characters as objects of sexual desire possessed of a physical "appearance coded for strong visual and erotic impact" upon the male spectator.

[11] Western art has lacked representation in all areas and it historically fails to portray black female bodies in the same context that European women have been depicted.

These social graces for girls include postural expectations,[c] to speak politely and not coarsely, and to groom and dress themselves in consideration of the opinions of other people.

Parting from Lacan's later work, Ettinger's analyses the psychological structure of the Lacanian subject, whose deconstruction produces the feminine perspective by way of a shared matrixial gaze.

That the mutual gaze, which seeks neither subordination nor domination of the gazer and the gazed-upon person, originates in the mother-child relationship,[33] because Western culture is deeply committed to the ideas of "the masculine" and "the feminine" to demarcate differences between the sexes based upon the complex social apparatus of the gaze; and second, that said sexual demarcations are based upon patterns of dominance and submission.

[13] The unequal social power of the male gaze is a conscious and subconscious effort to develop, establish, and maintain a sexual order of gender inequality in a patriarchal society.

Using the example of the photograph Sidelong Glance (1948), by Robert Doisneau, Pollock describes a middle-aged bourgeois couple viewing artworks in the display window of an art gallery.

Such psychological distance — despite physical proximity — is denied to the female spectator because of the "masochism of over-identification or the narcissism entailed in becoming one's own object of desire" — the opposite of what Mulvey said prevented the cinematic objectification of men.

The Medusa theory proposes that the psychological phenomenon of being looked-at begins when the woman who notices that a man is gazing at her deconstructs and rejects his objectification of her.

Using the illustration Sex Murder on Ackerstrasse (1916–1917), by Georg Grosz, Bower's shows how "without a head, the woman in the drawing can threaten neither the man with her, nor the male spectator, with her own subjectivity.

[40] Beyond the exclusivity of the social signifiers of sex and sexuality as difference, through the theory of the oppositional gaze hooks said that the power in looking also is defined by racism.

[40] In the course of being interviewed by hooks, a working-class black woman said that "to see Black women in the position [that] white women have occupied in film forever" is to witness a transference without transformation; therefore, in the real world, the oppositional gaze includes intellectual resistance and understanding and awareness of the politics of race and of racism by way of cinematic whiteness, inclusive of the male gaze.

It is harder to approach racial and ethnic division in such a straightforward manner because of the lack of complete separation between groups; there is too much crossover due to influence of colonialism and migration.

[21] In lesbian cinema, the absence of male-gaze social control voids the cultural hegemony of patriarchy; women are free to be themselves, personally and sexually.

[42] In the essay "Masculinity, the Male Spectator and the Homoerotic Gaze" (1998),[42] Patrick Shuckmann said that homoerotic-gaze theory reframes sexual objectification into the practice of othering men and women to deflect attention from the homoeroticism inherent to male relationships; thus, the gaze of the cinema camera renders women characters into both objects of desire and objects of displaced desire.

[42] The first plot is an action film featuring two men in close-quarters combat; their violence is their implicit engagement with the homoeroticism inherent to physical contact, and use their male-gaze-objectification of the women characters as the "safety valve" that displaces the unspoken, emotional conflict of homoerotic attraction.

By way of allusive jokes and humour, the homoerotic tension is sublimated into the objectification of the heterosexual (man-woman) relationship that each man lives when off the job.

In the genre film Point Break (1991), the female gaze of the woman director presents and analyses homoerotic attraction between the policeman protagonist and the bank-robber antagonist.

I've been very vocal about my opposition to the simplistic theory of the male gaze that is associated with Laura Mulvey (and that she, herself, has moved somewhat away from) and that has taken over feminist film studies to a vampiric degree in the last twenty-five years.

[45] Thus for the female, the objection to the male gaze serves not only to reject undesirable men and thus facilitate sexual selection and mate choice, but also to counter the feelings of personal insignificance arising out of narrow conceptions of self.