Writes Lauren Michele Jackson in "The Invention of 'the Male Gaze'/In 1973, the film theorist Laura Mulvey used concepts from psychoanalysis to forge a feminist polemic and a lasting shorthand for gender dynamics onscreen" (The New Yorker).
The Mulvey essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," popularized the term "male gaze." We were expected to understand the process of looking as a process of projecting — the "gaze projects its fantasy onto the female figure, which is styled accordingly."
Mulvey sought to break down the mechanics of looking to expose how cinematic conventions reinforce patriarchal fantasy, a task that she believed “called out for the vocabulary and the concepts of psychoanalysis.” At the time, the work of the mid-century French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was de rigueur in cinema studies. His concept of the gaze posited that the act of looking was fundamental to the development of one’s identity. An infant, during what Lacan calls the “mirror stage,” achieves self-mastery by communing with his or her own reflection; in the cinema, the theory went, something similar happened as spectators formed a sense of identification with the figures that they watched onscreen. Before Lacan, Sigmund Freud had argued in his essays on infantile sexuality that looking conferred a voyeuristic pleasure, Schaulust (or, in its Greek approximation, “scopophilia”). These two ways of looking seemed in some senses at odds: in the former case, the subject understands herself via the image reflected back at her; in the latter, she takes pleasure objectifying whatever, or whomever, she sees....
Perhaps you studied that in college. If so/if not, are you interested in more detail connecting it up to the race and gender material that preoccupies some people these days? There is much more at the link.
I'll just add that Cate Blanchett's fascinating mishearing:
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23 comments:
Americans have way too much time on their hands.
The eyes are the windows of the soul. What shines through is either authentic or vapid.
Feminists bitching about men. Omigawd. Must be a day ending in ‘Y’!
I didn't take the time to read the article. It might take time away from my shoegaze.
"Americans have way too much time on their hands."
No. The New Yorker has nothing momentous to publish that isn't poisonous to the Democrats, ergo rubbish like this keeps the adverts from filling the page.
Gaze mistaken for gays -- gay is an adjective that's been corrupted. To speak and think clearly avoid euphemisms and you won't come off like a mindless automaton like Kate Blanchett.
Research nearly as old as the term “male gaze” shows that putatively straight women look other women up and down, sexually, the same way straight men look women up and down, sexually — therefore the more appropriate term would seem to be “human gaze.”
Satire table of contents in modern academics
N!ai The First Tribal Cinema
Bayly Spawforth-Jones Can Tribal Cinema Stabilize San Culture?
Marie Desséchée The Male Gaze in Tribal Cinema
Cate couldn't keep her special interests straight.
Such a boring world to be stuck in!
Is this 'New Word Meaning Revisions' Games? Does there now have to be some kind of malign aspect indelibly associated with the word, malign in the sense of the social scolds, implying sexual intolerance or Wrong Think? Or am I allowed to still 'gaze longingly' at the chocolate cake, or 'gaze thoughtfully' at the sculpture, or 'gaze kindly' at the urchin with the runny nose?
There can be only one!
"Male gaze" = "You're looking at me!" And is related to "I don't like your tone!" which is a favorite ploy used by personality disorder sufferers to derail a conversation that has taken an unwanted turn.
Blanchett, like many thespians, can act smart onscreen.
Speaking of male gaze and Cate Blanchett, now there is a handsome woman.
Light proceeds from the tits to the eye, not vice versa. The lady is the one broadcasting.
rhhardin said...
"Satire table of contents in modern academics:
N!ai The First Tribal Cinema
Bayly Spawforth-Jones Can Tribal Cinema Stabilize San Culture?
Marie Desséchée The Male Gaze in Tribal Cinema"
The Academics Must Be Crazy
rhhardin said...
"Light proceeds from the tits to the eye, not vice versa. The lady is the one broadcasting."
A burqa can "fix" that.
Blogger mikee said...
Blanchett, like many thespians, can act smart onscreen.
Thespians?! I thought you said lesbians.
The "male gaze" was designed by nature and is fundamentally important in nature's plan. It is perfectly normal, and exactly as it should be. It's not nice to fool (with) Mother Nature.
Arghhhhhhh! Last week it was "liminal," this week it's "the gaze," and all its mutant bastard offspring: "the male gaze," "the transgressive gaze," "the pan-optic gaze"It's true: every vapid, third-tier, pseudo-profound "idea" from bad '90s Lit Crit is being recycled into the (somewhat) popular culture. Next week it will be "Spectacle" always with a capital letter, or all the media parrots will start repeating "ludic."
Every day there is more evidence for the hypothesis that social media is the vector by which freshmen college students transmitted the dumb ideas of their third-rate graduate student English (or worse, Cultural Studies) T.A.s back to the vulnerable minds of high-schoolers—possibly through those petri-dishes for pathogenic memes-evolution, Tumblr and/or various TV "fandom" discussion-boards).
The worst thing about these "ideas" is that although they are logically incoherent and mutually contradictory, they are extremely good at replicating themselves in people who are desperate to be perceived as being "smart" or "educated," but who haven't had the time (there's a reasons sophomores are called that) or aren't willing (a shockingly high number of grad students do not want to spend even 40 hours per week studying their topic) to do all the difficult grunt work of actually learning things.
Once your brain is infected with these things, they very aggressively block your learning anything real. It's a pseudo-religious discourse, like that of a cult--a less-useful but just-as-dangerous version of Samuel R. Delany's Babel-17.
Not having followed the twist of this particular argument, I can't help but note the "white" "male" "straight" emphases.
Am I supposed to believe that Hollywood aesthetics is primarily driven by straight white men? Or maybe to believe that the crowd actually running the show uses these "gazes" to appeal to a specific audience? (And that they understand that audience?)
Facts not in evidence.
(Re: Lacan - what's his theory about how or if children developed a self-identity without access to mirrors? Which was, after all, the default condition of most children throughout history.)
"He's looking at me!"
"Don't make me pull this car over."
Academia, devolving past middle school and into early elementary school. But with big words.
The best part of Lacan's work is the "equations" or "mathemes" he puts in that don't even work as equations, much less relate to anything in the actual world.
Here's Lacan's "matheme" for "fantasy: $<>a
"$" refers to the subject as split into the subject of utterance and uttered subject "a" stands for the object-cause of desire
"<>" stands for the relationship between the two.
I'm sparing myself trying to type out the "formulae of sexuation," but if you want a laugh (or a cry) you can find it here: https://nosubject.com/Formulae_of_sexuation
I will admit that sometimes it was fun to listen to Lacanians argue about gibberish. I once heard someone YELL "You are confusing the penis with the phallus!" at a conference.
The world's "Leading scholar of Lacan" was department chair at Mizzou when I was there in the '90s. She was a complete lunatic, not just in the metaphoric sense of believing in Lacan, but in the literal sense of apparent mental illness. (A truly frightening percentage of English professors at major universities appear to struggle with moderate to severe mental illness; I am not exaggerating or making that up).
Looking at women offers one of the most delightful moments in life.
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