Male and Female Gaze

What is Male Gaze?

Male Gaze in Cinema

The male gaze is a feminist theory that states that cinema

narratives and portrayals of women in cinema are constructed in
an objectifying and limiting manner to satisfy the psychological
desires of men, and more broadly, of patriarchal society.

The "male gaze" is apparent in media that objectifies women and

defines their identity in relation to a male character.

The theory was developed by filmmaker and theorist Laura

Mulvey as a critique of commercial film, but is also applicable to
the analysis of art, literature, and other media.
 Male Gaze in Cinema: Mulvey

• The theory considers the ways that three different perspectives, or looks, are combined in cinema
to sustain a symbolic order that privileges men.
• The perspective of the camera - the initial inclusion, exclusion, and framing of scenes, characters,
and other visual elements onto film as determined by a director or camera person (roles that are
disproportionately carried out by men in the film industry).
• The perspective of the audience - the viewing of the final cinema product by spectators.
Traditionally, the viewing of cinema was carried out in dark theatres that encouraged spectators to not
interact with each other in order to lose themselves in the story and take on the perspective of the
camera.
• The perspective of the characters - the experiences of the characters in the film that allows them to
interact, gather information, and gain understandings that are then available to the audience. Very
often, the camera mimics the perspective of specific characters, effectively allowing the audience to
"see" through their eyes.
 Pleasure in Looking

• Mulvey maintained that visual pleasure in narrative film is built

around two contradictory processes:
1. Objectification of the image
2. Identification with it
1. Objectification: Scopophilia
• the pleasure involved in looking at other people’s bodies as
(particularly, erotic) objects.
• Active looking  looking at: Men
• Passive looking  being-looked-at: Women
 Pleasure in Looking

• Followed in the cinema hall: In the darkness of the

cinema auditorium it is notable that one may look
without being seen either by those on screen by other
members of the audience.
• The construction of woman as spectacle is built into the
apparatus of dominant cinema, and the spectator
position which is produced by the film narrative is
necessarily a masculine one.
• This “distance” between spectator and screen
contributes to the voyeuristic pleasure of looking in on a
private world.
 Pleasure in Looking

2. Identification: Narcissism
• The opposite process  an identification with the image on
the screen “developed through narcissism and the
constitution of the ego”.
• Lacan  Mirror image  when a child recognises its own
image in the mirror is crucial for the constitution of the ego.
• In Cinema Hall  It offers the spectator the pleasurable
identification with the main male protagonist, and through
him the power to indirectly possess the female character
displayed as sexual object for his pleasure.
 Male Gaze in Cinema

• This means that the male viewer is the target audience, therefore their
needs are met first and that this problem stems from an old fashioned, male-
driven society.
• Women  “the bearer of meaning and not the maker of meaning,”
• Women are not placed in a role where they can take control of a scene,
instead they are simply put there to be observed from an objectified point of
view.
• The cinematic codes of popular films ‘are obsessively subordinated to the
neurotic needs of the male ego’.
• The male gaze cannot be occupied by women.
• Schroeder notes, “to gaze implies more than to look at – it signifies a
psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the
object of the gaze”.
 Looking: A Psychoanalytic Approach

• Mulvey distinguishes between two modes of looking for the

film spectator: voyeuristic and fetishistic, which she presents
in Freudian terms as responses to male ‘castration anxiety’.
• Voyeuristic looking involves a controlling gaze and Mulvey
argues that this has has associations with sadism: ‘pleasure
lies in ascertaining guilt - asserting control and subjecting the
guilty person through punishment or forgiveness’.
• Fetishistic looking, in contrast, involves ‘the substitution of a
fetish object or turning the represented figure itself into a
fetish so that it becomes reassuring rather than dangerous.
 Looking: A Psychoanalytic Approach

• This builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into

something satisfying in itself.
• The erotic instinct is focused on the look alone’.
• Fetishistic looking leads to overvaluation of the female image and to
the cult of the female movie star.
• Fetishistic scopophilia  Not capable of enhancing the narrative
• Sadistic Voyeurism  capable of enhancing the narrative
 Looking: A Psychoanalytic Approach

• This builds up the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into

something satisfying in itself.
• The erotic instinct is focused on the look alone’.
• Fetishistic looking leads to overvaluation of the female image and to the
cult of the female movie star.
• Fetishistic scopophilia  Not capable of enhancing the narrative
• Sadistic Voyeurism  capable of enhancing the narrative
• It becomes important to make movies from the perspective of male
characters.
• Pleasure in itself is embedded in patriarchal framework.
• In order to get out of it, pleasure itself has to be destroyed.
 Female Gaze?: Mulvey

Can we replace male gaze with female gaze?

 Female Spectatorship

• How can women occupy the place of a spectator?

• Can women occupy the central place of the narrative?
• Female as spectators and central characters:
• For Freud, femininity is complicated by the fact that it emerges out of a crucial
period of parallel development between the sexes; a period he sees as masculine,
or phallic, for both boys and girls.
• Women oscillating between two positions: active male and passive female
• Division between the symbolic (social integration and marriage) and nostalgic
narcissism.
• Women as central characters  meodrama
• Women cannot occupy the same place.
 E. Ann Kaplan on Gaze

• Kaplan states that historically, females have been the central

focus on only the melodrama genre, and while melodrama exposes
the constraints and limitations that the family places on women,
at the same time, gets women to accept those constraints as
inevitable and normal.
• Kaplan argues that our culture is deeply rooted in “masculine” and
“feminine”, and “dominance-submission patterns”.
 Can there be a female gaze?

• Replacing the male with female? (Mardaani)

• Focusing on women’s desire? (Fashion, Raaz)
• Destroy the pleasure in cinema itself?
• Deconstruct the notion of gaze itself?
• Making women’s film? (Melodrama)
• Inclusion of more women directors and all?
• Counter-cinema?