Saturday 4 May 2013

The 'Male' Gaze

The male gaze derives from feminist theory that started in the 1970's by film psychologist Laura Mulvey, however, in recent years the theory has been applied to arts and literature. The male gaze looks at the ways in which women are presented as the object of desire through the perspective of a male spectator. Women's bodies are displayed as an art form in which they must allow men to inspect their bodies for their own sexual pleasures. Traditionally the woman looks away and avoids eye contact with her male spectator, while he controls a direct gaze upon her body. The term has now become "...a feminist cliché for referring to the voyeuristic way in which men look at women" (Chandler, 2000: lines 4-5). This voyeuristic approach is something that Mulvey expands on in her essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”. In this blog I will explore this idea in further depth in my discussion of Mulvey’s approach as well as other key theorists of the gaze. 

When the concept was brought into the field of literature many feminist writers, such as Jeannette Winterson, Michèle Roberts and Angela Carter introduced this into their work. This allowed writers to criticise the representations and treatment of women in patriarchal societies. In this blog I focus my attention on the influential work of Angela Carter and her collection of short stories in The Bloody Chamber. Here I will investigate the techniques that Carter uses in order to make an argument about the male gaze from a feminist perspective. 


The argument of this blog discusses the following quote and responds to the ideas projected in this paragraph:

“A woman must continually watch herself. She is almost continually accompanied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father; she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping” (Berger). Critically analyse the formal, thematic and theoretical (re)deployment of the ‘male gaze’; ‘voyeuristic’ or ‘fetishistic looking’; mirrors and surfaces; performance and spectacle; and/or the figure of the flaneur/euse in the literary works of at least TWO woman writers or texts studied on the module.