‘Is the gaze only male?’
Women are spectators too. Women look at art, at the media, watch films, read magazines, look at photos. What happens when women look at art/visual culture?
So does “the gaze” have a gender, and is it divided male/female?
- Is all looking overdetermined by the idea of the male as always the controlling subject and is the female always the passive object?
- Is looking always related to passive/active subject positions?
- And are these ideas of passivity/activity “automatically gendered” into what is male/female, masculine/feminine?
Women are not only spectators, they are also cultural producers of art, of film/photography, of visual culture, of craft, of images. Do the images that women artists produce possess a different way of looking at the world which disrupts/transgresses or challenges or do they too participate in its reproduction/maintenance and endless circulation of the “male gaze”?
Most women artists, especially photographers or filmmakers, are introduced as offering a “feminine” or “different” perspective as if this was expected or related to their sex.
This link between the gender of the artist and any concept of a female gaze is often presented as a “puzzle” that the writer/critic must explore through the differences between women and/or the “types” of photography they produce. This “puzzle” echoes the “dark continent” of femininity which Freud could not understand or explain.
If you want some recent examples of this:
Look at the link to a book report on 10 Female Fashion photographers.
http://www.artspace.com/magazine/art_101/book_report/10-female-fashion-photographers-54172
or this article on fine art photographers: https://mic.com/articles/124598/15-mindblowing-female-photographers-redefining-contemporary-femininity#.of7h35sfU
In spite of her much-quoted essay on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” (not the male gaze), very few people refer to Mulvey’s second essay on the female gaze in Hollywood cinema. Here she argued that the female spectator does not simply adopt a masculine reading position but is always involved in a ‘double-identification’ with both the passive and active subject positions and fetishistic and narcissistic pleasures in looking.
Women spectators, she suggests, “identify” with the activity/viewpoint of the male hero as the narrative progresses and see the world from this subject’s point of view (because the film encourages this viewpoint in how it is made) and they may or may not “identify” with and project themselves into an “identification” with being the object of desire represented in/through the female lead.
This double-identification and/or shifting set of identifications between hero/female lead create the pleasure that films or mainstream mass culture provides for women and this is different from the structure identified as the “male gaze“.
It is the film which encourages these identifications in how it is constructed through point-of-view shots, the staging of scenes and the time spent looking at primarily women in terms of the visual pleasures that their images produce. These features of film-making are also and quite literally constructed by the collapse between the camera’s viewpoint and the male lead’s point of view so that what is shown expresses their perspective within the film.
Can’t we read against the grain of this dominant way of seeing?
What happens when women look?
Is there really such a polarisation between the male and female gaze?
‘Do women necessarily take up a feminine and men a masculine spectator position?’
Jackie Stacey and Christine Gledhill (Editors) Feminine Fascinations : Forms of Identification in Star/Audience Relations, (Routledge, 1991)
Indeed, are there only unitary ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ reading positions?
What of gay (male) spectators? Or lesbian spectators?
How is heterosexual and/or homosexual desire structured in relation to images of women?
How does class, race and ethnicity impact upon the structure of heterosexual and homosexual desire and the representations of masculine or feminine – determining who has the power to look and how other people are looked at?
What happens when the dominant gaze is “reversed“, when women look at men? Will a reversal of power really occur?
Can women objectify men?
Or will any reversal just expose the huge imbalance between representations of men and women?
There are plenty of examples of women artists placing men in the “object position” that women have occupied in the tradition of oil painting.
This was initially recognised as “role reversal” and a feminist strategy for subverting the relations between (male) subject/ (female) object.
Reversing the gender of images of men / women highlights the many assumptions held about the “natural” order of looking which is in fact highly structured by conventions or in common sense terms, something expected, even habitual, familiar or obvious. It is the “shock” of reversing these expectations that feminist work on role reversal is most associated with.
Either this will return us to John Berger’s ideas of “men act, women appear” or women as producers of images of men (the opposite sex) will be celebrated for “exposing” men to the same attention that women have received as objects of desire.
Look for Sylvia Sleigh’s painting The Turkish Bath (1976). When she was in her 80s/90s, she was filmed reflecting on the critics’ responses to this work and her reasons for making them, 40 years before.
Or look at the work of Tania Antoshina on her website, specifically the project Museum of a Woman (1997), where she reverses the women and men in many classical paintings.
Do these images reverse the balance of power or do they highlight how gender operates in images to produce power/desire/knowledge?
Reversing subject/object relations was about giving voice to women’s experiences and viewpoints in the world.
When women artists produce images of men, do they successfully subvert the viewpoint of men (male artists) in terms of how they produce images of women?
Women’s contribution to art is not limited to the question of representation, nor to representations that invert the male gaze.
Annette Kuhn wrote a list of the key questions in her book The Power of the Image (1985) about representation, power and sexuality. Her book analysed examples of representations in commercial mass media: Hollywood films and soft pornography. These are her questions:-
‘What relation, for instance, does spectatorship have to representations of women? What sort of activity is looking? What does looking have to do with sexuality? With masculinity and femininity? With power? With knowledge? How do images of women, in particular, “speak to” the spectator? Is the spectator addressed as male/female, masculine/feminine? Is femininity constructed in specific ways through representation? Why are images of women’s bodies so prevalent in our society?’
Annette Kuhn The Power of the Image (1985)
Kuhn argued that the meaning of images does not reside in the image alone, we need to pay attention to how images are circulated, reproduced and repeated and at a triangle of meanings produced between the representation, the spectator (those who look) and social formation (society: its values, ideas and beliefs in social, economic and political terms).
Kuhn’s argument emphasised how the circulation of images meant it was important to consider not simply the ideas embedded in ‘the isolated object of analysis’ (the single image) but the broader politics of production and consumption. A central concept in her analysis was ‘hegemony’ – this drew on the Marxist idea of analysing ‘leading and dominant’ formations of power in order to discover how power operates and how to challenge it. As she points out, ‘hegemony’ is never totalising, nor does it exist without contradictions or challenges to its ways of seeing. Understanding this is part of understanding how change can occur and ultimately making change happen.
Another influential part of the analysis of hegemony which has often been used or cited came from Raymond Williams’ work. Williams was interested in exploring how culture as a whole operates, not in the form of a totality, but in how certain patterns emerge and are naturalised as “ways of life”. He suggested that alongside leading and dominant ideas in culture, there exist simultaneously residual and emergent patterns. Residual ideas contain the results of past struggles, but continue in traditions people work to maintain. Emergent ideas may or may not be progressive or avant-garde in any culture, they may have appeal only to a minority but they have the aspiration to become ‘leading and dominant’. Clearly not all emergent ideas in any culture at any moment will succeed. However, the existence of residual and emergent cultures, unsettle and force accommodations or adjustments in/amongst the ‘leading and dominant’ forces, who may once have been emergent and may in time become residual. The competition between these 3 formations/tendencies is why culture is not static or fixed, but dynamic and changing.
The question of the female gaze also concerns how women look at themselves.
What is a woman to herself?
What and how does she speak to convey a sense of her own being in the world, her own existence?
Wouldn’t this be an “original” vision?
Something we have not seen yet?
Would we/you/I be able to recognise this – and would it be a distinct quality in the artwork, its vision or the perspective within the work?
The two links above represent two different perspectives on women looking at girls and women online. The first is a major photography project that collates images that girls and young women take of themselves (large based in the UK).
The second is a video link to a conference panel in Australia where feminists today reflect on their own activities from the 1970s in terms of women’s representation of their situation and politics and how their work challenged accepted conventions of looking/film-making.
Part 3 > will look at the question of feminism in other theories about women’s self-representation and “visuality”
#GirlGaze project on instagram, started by Amanda de Cadenet now claims to have accumulated 450,000 images of girls/women by women.
The full project, GirlGaze TV, involves an exhibition, publication and grants for young photographers as well as a larger team of women among them, artists Collier Schorr and Sam Taylor-Wood.
Women’s Gaze and the Feminist Film Archive from Margot Nash/As If Productions on Vimeo.
A panel in the Contemporary Art and Feminism (CAF) Future Feminist Archive Symposium, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 6 April 2015, with filmmakers Martha Ansara, Margot Nash and Jeni Thornley, Natalie Krikowa. Chair: Sarah Attfield discuss primarily 1970s feminist filmmakers and recent practice, as well as an archive for future feminists in Australia.
