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The Gaze


The Gaze is a psychoanalytical term brought into popular usage by Jacques Lacan. It describes the relationship of the subject with the desire to look and awareness that one can be viewed. The gaze can be motivated by the subject's desire to control the object it sees, and an object that can likewise capture and hold the subject's eye. The term 'gaze' is often defined as looking long and intently with affection at a subject. The gaze in this case is a relationship and not something that can be performed. A person who determines a sense of themselves as an individual element in the world makes up the idea of the gaze. The concept of the gaze is also a central part of theories looking within modernity. The gaze has affected historical, economical, and cultural environments.

In traditional psychoanalytic theory, the gaze is linked to fantasy and desire. The psychological effect, Lacan argues, is that the subject loses some sense of autonomy upon realizing that he or she is a visible object. This concept is bound with his theory of the mirror stage that concerns itself with the infantile psychological development.Children gaze at a mirror image of themselves (a twin sibling might function as the mirror-image), and use that image to co-ordinate their physical movements. He linked the concept of the gaze to the development of individual human agency. To that end, he transformed the gaze to a dialectic, between the Ideal–Ego and the ego ideal. The ideal-ego is the imagined self-identification image — whom the person imagines him- or herself to be or aspires to be; whilst the ego-ideal is the imaginary gaze of another person gazing upon the ideal-ego, e.g. a rock star (an Ideal-ego) secretly hoping his/her school-era bully-tormentor (ego-ideal) is now aware of his/her (the rock star) subsequent success and fame, since school times.Lacan suggests that this gaze effect can similarly be produced in relation to any conceivable object such as a chair or a television screen. This is not to say that the object behaves optically as a mirror; instead, it means that the awareness of any object can induce an awareness of also being an object. The gaze is part of a desire for completion of oneself through the other. Lacan emphasizes that the gaze is a property of the object and not the subject who is looking. The gaze is a process where the object makes the subject look. This makes the subject appear to themselves as lacking. This concept allows us to understand how the inanimate object can be involved in the process of desire.

Lacan further developed his concept of the gaze, saying that it does not belong to the subject but, rather, to the object of the gaze. In Seminar One, Lacan told the audience: "I can feel myself under the gaze of someone whose eyes I do not see, not even discern. All that is necessary is for something to signify to me that there may be others there. This window, if it gets a bit dark, and if I have reasons for thinking that there is someone behind it, is straight-away a gaze". Thus Lacan would argue that the Male Gaze exists within the mind of the person who feels it on them. The practical implications of this statement reach far, in as much as it can be interpreted to the effect that perception supersedes actuality, that schism is actuality, that actuality is false, and that the interlocutor is the only real.

History of the concept
Numerous existentialists and phenomenologists have addressed the concept of gaze beginning with Sartre. Foucault elaborated on gaze to illustrate a particular dynamic in power relations and disciplinary mechanisms in his Discipline and Punish. Derrida also elaborated on the relations of animals and humans via the gaze in The Animal That Therefore I Am.

Systems of Power and The Gaze
Michel Foucault elaborated on the gaze to illustrate a particular dynamic in power relations and disciplinary mechanisms in his "Discipline and Punish". Foucault uses the term gaze in the distribution of power in various institutions of society. The gaze is not something one has or uses; rather, it is the relationship in which someone enters. "The gaze is integral to systems of power and ideas about knowledge." Three main concepts that Foucault introduced are panopticism, power/knowledge, and biopower. These concepts all address self-regulation under systems of surveillance. This refers to how people modify their behaviour under the belief that they are constantly being watched even if they cannot directly see who or what is watching them. This possible surveillance, whether real or unreal, has self-regulating effects.

The "Male Gaze" in Feminist Theory
In Mulvey's 1975 essay, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema", Laura Mulvey introduced the second-wave feminist concept of "male gaze" as a feature of gender power asymmetry in film. The concept was present in earlier studies of the gaze but it was Mulvey who brought it to the forefront. Mulvey stated that women were objectified in film because heterosexual men were in control of the camera. Hollywood films played to the models of voyeurism and scopophilia. The concept has subsequently been influential in feminist film theory and media studies.

The male gaze occurs when the camera puts the audience into the perspective of a heterosexual man. It may linger over the curves of a woman's body, for instance. The woman is usually displayed on two different levels: as an erotic object for both the characters within the film, as well as the spectator who is watching the film. The man emerges as the dominant power within the created film fantasy. The woman is passive to the active gaze from the man. This adds an element of 'patriarchal' order and it is often seen in "illusionistic narrative film". Mulvey argues that, in mainstream cinema, the male gaze typically takes precedence over the female gaze, reflecting an underlying power asymmetry.

Mulvey's essay also states that the female gaze is the same the male gaze. This means that women look at themselves through the eyes of men. . The male gaze may be seen by a feminist either as a manifestation of unequal power between gazer and gazed, or as a conscious or subconscious attempt to develop that inequality. From this perspective, a woman who welcomes an objectifying gaze may be simply conforming to norms established to benefit men, thereby reinforcing the power of the gaze to reduce a recipient to an object. Welcoming such objectification may be viewed as akin to exhibitionism. The possibility of an analogous female gaze   may arise from considering the maze gaze. Mulvey argues that "the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze…" Describing Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), by Jean Rhys, Nalini Paul indicates that the Antoinette character gazes at Rochester, placing a garland upon him, making him appear heroic: "Rochester does not feel comfortable with having this role enforced upon him; thus, he rejects it by removing the garland, and crushing the flowers".

From the male perspective, men possesses the gaze because he is a man, whereas a woman has the gaze only when she assumes the male gazer role — when she objectifies others by gazing at them like a man. Eva-Maria Jacobsson supports Paul's description of the "female gaze" as "a mere cross-identification with masculinity", yet evidence of women's objectification of men — the discrete existence of a female gaze — can be found in the "boy toy" adverts published in teen magazines, for example, despite Mulvey's contention that the gaze is property of one gender. Whether or not this is an example of female gaze or rather an internalized male gaze is up for debate. In terms of power relationships, the gazer can direct a gaze upon members of the same gender for asexual reasons, such as comparing the gazer's body image and clothing to those of the gazed-at individual.

In any study of Laura Mulvey’s essay it is important to take into account the following points stressed by Mulvey in a 2011 interview with Roberta Sassatelli; “First, that the 1975 article ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ was written as a polemic, and as Mandy Merck has described it, as a manifesto; so I had no interest in modifying the argument. Clearly I think, in retrospect from a more nuanced perspective, about the inescapability of the male gaze.”

Criticizing the Male Gaze
Bracha Ettinger criticizes this notion of the male gaze by her proposition of a Matrixial Gaze. The matrixial gaze is not operative where a "Male Gaze" is placed opposite to a "Female Gaze" and where both positive entities constitute each other from a lack (such an umbrella concept of the gaze would precisely be what scholars such as Slavoj Žižek claim is the Lacanian definition of "The Gaze.") Ettinger's proposal doesn't concern a subject and its object, existing or lacking. Rather, it concerns "trans-subjectivity" and shareability on a partial level, and it is based on her claim concerning a feminine-matrixial difference that escapes the phallic opposition of masculine/feminine and is produced in a process of co-emergence. Ettinger works from the very late Lacan, yet, from the angle she brings, it is the structure of the Lacanian subject itself that is deconstructed to a certain extent, and another kind of feminine dimension appears, with its hybrid and floating matrixial gaze.

Ways of Seeing: Viewing Women in Renaissance paintings
John Berger, in his authoritative book Ways of Seeing, stated that "according to usage and conventions which are at last being questioned but have by no means been overcome - men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at." In Renaissance images nude women were painted almost exclusively for the male viewer. Women are often depicted with their bodies' turned towards the viewer while their heads are turned away and gazing in a mirror. The woman is aware of being the object of the male gaze.

This ties into Lacan's theory of the alienation that results from the split between seeing oneself and seeing the ideal. In Renaissance nude painting this is the split that comes from being both the viewer, the viewed and seeing oneself through the gaze of others.

Women and the Gaze
Griselda Pollock, in her article, "Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity" argues that the female gaze can often be visually negated. Robert Doisneau's photo named "An oblique Look" supports this argument. In the photo, a middle-aged bourgeois couple is looking around art gallery. The spectator view of the picture is from inside the shop but the couple is looking in different places than the view of the spectator. The woman is commenting on an image to her husband, while the husband is being distracted by a nude female painting. The nude female painting is hung with view of the spectator. The woman is looking at another image, but it is out of view of the spectator. The man's gaze has found something more interesting and he has chosen to ignore the woman's comment. The woman is also in contrast to the nude female in the painting, and instead of passively accepting the male gaze, she presents herself as "actively returning and confirming the gaze of the masculine spectator".

Definitions in Cinematic Theory


The gaze is characterized by who is the gazer (viewer):


 * The spectator's gaze: that of the spectator viewing the text, i.e. the reader(s) of the text.
 * The Intra-diegetic gaze: in a text, a character gazes upon an object or another character in the text.
 * The Extra-diegetic gaze: a textual character consciously addresses (looks at) the viewer, e.g. in dramaturgy, an aside to the audience; in cinema, acknowledgement of the fourth wall, the viewer.
 * The camera's gaze: is the film director's gaze.
 * The editorial gaze: emphasises a textual aspect, e.g. a photograph, its cropping and caption direct the reader(s) to a specific person, place, or object in the text.

Theorists Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen posit that the gaze is a relationship, between offering and demanding a gaze: the indirect gaze is the spectator's offer, wherein the spectator initiates viewing the subject, who is unaware of being viewed; the direct gaze is the subject's demand to be viewed.