In this lesson, theories about the gaze, looking and visuality are explored from a feminist perspective.
The aim of this lesson is to go beyond John Berger’s influential proposition in Ways of Seeing (1972) that ‘men look, women appear’.
In 1972, John Berger produced a BBC TV series called Ways of Seeing, also produced as a book. One of these programmes was dedicated to a re-examination of the differences between how men and women are represented. The examples given focused on how “ways of seeing” evident in the development of the female nude in European oil painting (since the 16th century) had continued in the popular media i.e. contemporary advertising and soft porn (which was a relatively new feature of newspapers with the introduction of “Page 3 Girls” as well as becoming a burgeoning print media in the 1970s).
Berger’s key argument was that men were judged by their actions and their status – regardless of the representations made about them – while women were judged only or predominantly by their appearance.
“One might simplify this by saying: men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object – and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”
John Berger Ways of Seeing (1972) p.47
Berger’s argued that this structure of looking formed the dominant mode way of seeing. Further, that it permeated all ways of seeing in Western culture or advanced capitalist societies and is/was fundamental to how consumer goods and personal, social and economic services are/were sold in capitalism.
Berger’s arguments were based on a gendered distinction in representation: men and women are represented differently. He pointed to how the traditions within European oil painting (16th-20th centuries) have influenced how we continue to look at representations of people today. He drew attention to the repetition of key tropes in the presentation of women’s bodies as “a sight to be looked at“, especially where their bodies and sexual availability was prioritised either in the composition of artworks or in mainstream advertising. His argument linked popular culture and high art because it focused on how “ways of seeing” – viewpoints and compositions – reproduce, repeat and maintain the dominant cultural values and beliefs in the society which produces them.
He also made a distinction in representations between “the nude” as a recognisable and convention-bound form (i.e. reclining and supine women in contrast to active and athletic men) and images of men or women which were “naked“. Naked images revealed something about what it meant to be a human being as a sexed body possessing sexuality (i.e. nakedness avoided recognisable conventions and presented unusual or distinctive features about human beings).
The women’s liberation movement has since the 1960s been protesting against the objectification of women’s bodies – i.e. the over-sexualised use of women’s bodies to sell goods or services – and the very limited judgements this reinforces which are made about women based solely on their appearance in the workplace, schools and public life. These protests coalesced in the prominence given in the news media to feminist protests against Miss World competitions, which judged women primarily as “objects of beauty” or “sights to be looked at” for the pleasure of men and reduced the viewpoint for women only to the jealousy/admiration/aspiration of other women.
Feminist Protests against Women’s Objectification in Miss World
You can find newspaper documentation about the protests in the USA (1968) online in Duke University Library’s feminist papers Collection:
Look at some of the visual imagery reproduced: Can you find the page, for example, which has an advert for relief of menstrual pain next to the photograph of the Miss World winners and a protestor outside the Atlantic City stadium, holding a poster comparing a woman’s body to the mark up of a butcher’s carcass. The latter is described as a “meaty protest”!
Or read Robin Morgan’s 1968 analysis for Liberation (her typewriter manuscript is archived) and contrast this with Harriet van Horne’s newspaper column in which she describes her embarrassment of the “sturdy lasses in their sensible shoes” who protested against the “degrading, mindless boob-girl symbolism” – in contrast to the “lovely smiling girl in silk and lace” who was a contestant?
In 1970, protests against Miss World also took place in London, and some feminist artists were involved.
Listen to Sally Alexander’s recollections on the BBC or
Jo Robinson’s recollections recorded for the British Library
Mary Kelly also wrote a pamphlet at this time protesting Miss World and made a series of works reconstructing her own involvement in these protests in a photowork called Flashing Nipple Remix (click on the link to see a photo on her website). The work formed part of her installation Love Songs (2005-2007), shown at Documenta 12, Kassel.
Objectification and Stereotyping
The links between women’s protest at their sexual objectification in beauty contests, when combined with arguments about the stereotyping and very restricted or limited forms of representation of women in the media, in film, in advertising, in pornography have been the subject of many feminist articles, books, exhibitions, TV programmes and films.
Criticism of stereotypes about images of women has been central to the development of work in several disciplines, feminist film studies, feminist work in cultural studies, visual culture theory, post-colonial theory, queer theory and feminist critiques of psychoanalysis.
The emphasis in feminist analysis is upon how women are “objectified” i.e. made into an object, judged on appearance alone and according to specific (and often-male-defined) standards of beauty. Their actions/ being and thought, by contrast, are disregarded. Feminist criticism of this process of turning women into objects is that it “degrades” people’s (men’s and women’s) perceptions of who women are and can be.
The elaborate work which goes on to support these shifting standards by women and men – evident in cosmetics, grooming, the beauty industry, the fashion industry has at different times also been scrutinised for the negative effects it produces on women who are damaged or harmed by “trying” to conform to these standards and in terms of the limited recognition for women who do not wish to “conform” to these standards or “fail to fulfil” them.
Objectification is about being made into an object which someone else enjoys and a process over which the person photographed has no control or ownership. The end result is not for the gratification or pleasure of the person turned into the object, it is for “others” to enjoy, look and even make a profit from this image.
Creating yourself as a “sight-to-be-looked-at” for one’s own pleasure or to be looked at by others in public in new, extreme, exciting or even erotic ways should not be confused with the repetitious ever-present objectification of women as a feature of contemporary media culture which is limiting or constraining on who women are, might become or can be.
Women’s individual agency (i.e. their own control and ownership) in how they dress, look or the choices they make about their own appearances is ever present. Evaluating the level of control women have over their own appearance should not be about judging them according to their conformism to this dominant standard, nor can a lack of conformism always be seen or assessed as an indication of freedom or resistance.
Feminism is not about liking or disliking “fashion” or “dressing up“.
Feminism is also not about “calling out” or judging women on the basis of how they look. Why would feminists wish to reinforce all the negative judgements like this which are already in circulation?
Feminism is about changing the basis on how we relate to eachother in terms of our social relations: how we behave towards eachother. What we look like is not relevant to this. If a person’s looks or their appearance represent an unsurmountable barrier to speaking to other people, human society will remain hierarchical, divided and inhumane.
These feminist protests against “objectification” continue in campaigns against Page 3 (the phenomenon of publishing soft porn photographs of women in newspapers) and in the requests to remove pornography magazines from supermarkets or campaigns to restrict pornography to the top shelf in newsagents or remove the front covers of soft porn or “lad’s mags” from view in public places.
In Britain, the campaigns against Page 3 were led by MP Claire Short in 1986 in questions in Parliament. Other more recent campaigns (2012-2016) were led by No More Page 3 (who have a Facebook page) / Sexist News or protests against Lad’s Mags’ by Cat Banyard at UK Feminista
Theories of the Gaze
Discussion about women’s images has been dominated by theories about the male gaze. This was first defined by Laura Mulvey in her essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, published in a film theory journal called Screen. The essay was written as a provocation and explores a set of questions in relation to mainstream Hollywood cinema, using kinship theory and psychoanalysis.
You can read the full essay online:
This is published by Amherst College
This version is published by Lux Online (a film distribution company in the UK)
This essay is probably the most quoted essay in the world on the subject of the male gaze.
Here are some distinctive features of this essay:
Laura Mulvey uses psychoanalysis to consider a dominant form of spectatorship in mainstream Hollywood cinema. Most of the examples she discusses are from the late 1950s. The subject of the essay is how these films are structured in both their plot and visual appearance (i.e. how the people in the film are shown to the audience through different viewpoints established by the camera angles) in a manner which appeals to and provides the means for an audience to establish their identification with the story through the actions and viewpoint of a male character. She identifies two modes of pleasure in looking for the (male) spectator because the identification is set up for primarily his relationship to the male character. These are fetishistic scopophilia and narcissistic scopophilia (scopophilia = pleasure in looking). Fetishism objectifies women as the object of male pleasure (i.e. we become aware of his desires); narcissism provides pleasure through self-identification (with the hero and his actions). She argues that the “male gaze” is established within the way the film is made and it oscillates between narcissistic identification with the typical male hero of a film who also has fetishistic identifications with the female leads (who are often the object of the hero’s love-interest). The “male gaze” constructed as the “way of seeing” within the film is set up to appeal to men’s identification with the film as members of the audience.
Quotable Quote by Mulvey in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’.
‘The paradox of phallocentrism in all of its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world.’
Simplified: ‘Isn’t it funny that a culture obsessed with masculinity needs images of women, and their absence of masculine characteristics, to give it meaning?’
(This quote is found online here – in a popular digest guide to this essay)
If you want to check that you really understand this essay, try Routledge’s online textbook quiz on this subject.
Many undergraduate courses in art departments, visual culture, film studies teach using this essay, analyse it briefly and then ask students to apply the ideas about “the male gaze” to their own reading of contemporary culture, generally images from commercial mass media, especially the music industry and contemporary films.
The male gaze sounds like it is a theory but it is not, it is just a catchphrase used as a shorthand term to study a dominant mode of looking in mainstream culture, which can be applied to many Hollywood films today, especially movies with “heros” and strong male leads.
This dominant mode of “looking” defined in the male gaze does not determine all films being made today. Nor is the situation simply reversed in mainstream films with a strong female lead or with a man dressed as/playing a woman.
Laura Mulvey is a filmmaker and two years after writing her essay on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, her own experimental film, made with Peter Wollen, Riddles of the Sphinx was launched. Read her British Film Institute interview about Riddles of the Sphinx here: this film is one of the few feminist films distributed by the British Film Institute on DVD. In this film, there is a deliberate attempt through different uses of the camera and point of view shots to block and challenge the model of the male gaze that she discusses in the essay.
Berger’s and Mulvey’s essays were published in 1972-1973. Over 40 years of research into the gaze, visuality, theories of representation, representation and political culture, cultural studies and visual culture have taken place since then. Many other questions about representation and the visual economies in which images circulate have been explored and the use of psychoanalytic theory in conjunction with theories of ideology has been transformed by many other approaches.
For a reconsideration of the value of these ideas 40 years after it was first published, read:
Chronicle’s Special Report ‘The Male Gaze in Retrospect’
where Jack Halberstam, Susan Bordo, Toby Miller, Sharon Marcus and Laura Mulvey discuss the significance of the essay.
Berger and Mulvey remain important starting points for debate about women’s images in art and culture but they leave many questions unanswered.
While her essay about the male gaze is endlessly quoted (in part) – and often reduced to ‘a theory of the male gaze’, Mulvey also wrote about the construction of the female spectator’s gaze in a later essay.
Part 2 of this lesson will consider the question of the gaze further.
Is there a female gaze?
What happens when women look not only at themselves, but other women, and men?
How has contemporary feminist art subverted, challenged or changed this politics of the gaze?
You can view John Berger Ways of Seeing Episode 2 (1972, 30 mins)
Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille Paglia on the “male gaze” | VIEWPOINT
Published on 23 Jun 2016
Christina Hoff Sommers and Camille Paglia question the feminist theory of the “male gaze” as a misdirection in contemporary analysis and discuss how they see the differences between objectification and admiration in art appreciation.
This essay on how Cindy Sherman’s film stills (1977-1980) typically subverts the male gaze is a well-written and accomplished use of Laura Mulvey’s work to read a contemporary woman artist. Written by Stefania Sorrentino, 24 years old, originally from Rome (Italy), 7 November 2014.
It is an example of how Laura Mulvey’s ideas are used and applied to read artworks in the last 20 years. Cindy Sherman’s work is most commonly associated with theories of the male gaze and probably the most cited example of work in art/art history degree courses on visual representation.
