User:Wildflower74/Female gaze

Application in Media
American writer and director Joey Soloway has addressed additional components of the female gaze in film and media. In her 2016 Toronto International Film Festival Masterclass, Soloway outlined three key concepts in her theory of the female gaze: "feeling seeing," "the gazed gaze," and "returning the gaze." In film and media, 'feeling seeing' refers to a process of filmmaking that makes the camera subjective. The 'gazed gaze' creates the perspective of being "in" rather than overlooking the character's experiences, allowing the audience to understand the character's inner thoughts, feelings, and emotions. The television show Fleabag utilizes this trope through direct eye contact with the camera lens. In Fleabag, written and directed by Phoebe-Waller Bridge, the unnamed protagonist breaks the fourth wall during moments when she is not revealing the full extent of her beliefs or emotions to other characters within the show, instead relaying her inner thoughts, feelings, and emotions to the audience through eye contact directly in the camera lens.

The 'gazed gaze' refers to a connection with the audience, aimed at conveying the ideal conceptions of being desired and as the object of one's affection. The film Pride and Prejudice directed by Joe Wright displays this concept during a scene in which the protagonist, Mr. Darcy, admits timidly with hesitance to Elizabeth Bennet his captivation and affection for her in a manner that is contrary to the grandeur professions of love seen in the romance genre. During his declaration of love, the camera's angle makes the viewer appear as the subject of Mr. Darcy's love confession. The direct camera angle allows us, the audience, to know what it may feel like to be the object of his gaze.

To address the rise of rejecting and returning the gaze in film and media Joey Soloway conceptualizer 'returning the gaze ,' referring to switching the roles between the audience and the subject of objectification. This return or rejection occurs in film and media as the acknowledgement of the objectification of female protagonists, and instead turns thegaze back onto the viewer. Depicted in writer and director Greta Gerwig's Barbie. The film follows Margot Robbie's Barbie as she becomes sentient, leaving Barbieland to go to the 'real world,' where she experiences for the first time the patriarchy and sexual objectification. In the film, Margot Robbie's Barbie realizes the full extent of what it means to be seen as an object and the implications of living in a patriarchal society, something absent in the utopia of Barbieland. During a scene when Barbie is crying after realizing the full extent of what it means to live in a patriarchal world, the narrator breaks the fourth wall by addressing how, during this scene of vulnerability and defeat experienced by Barbie, the audience instead readily acknowledges how beautiful Margot Robbie looks while crying before they will recognize her character's feelings. Rejecting, or similarly recognizing, the audience will acknowledge her beauty before empathizing with her struggles as a woman through the verbal assertion made by the film's narrator.