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The concept of gaze (often also called the gaze or, in French, le regard), in analysing visual culture, is one that deals with how an audience views other people presented. The concept of the gaze became popular with the rise of postmodern philosophy and social theory and was first discussed by 1960s French intellectuals, namely Michel Foucault's description of the medical gaze and Lacan's analysis of the gaze's role in the mirror stage development of the human psyche. This concept is extended in the framework of feminist theory, where it can deal with how men look at women, how women look at themselves and other women, and the effects surrounding this. Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ...
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Image File history File links Download high-resolution version (2024x2469, 388 KB) File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file (pages on other projects are not listed): Gaze ...
Image File history File links Download high-resolution version (2024x2469, 388 KB) File links The following pages on the English Wikipedia link to this file (pages on other projects are not listed): Gaze ...
Hieronymus Bosch; alleged portrait (around 1560) Hieronymus Bosch, (also Jeroen Bosch or Jerome Bosch) (c. ...
Visual culture is a field of study within cultural studies focusing on aspects of culture that rely on visual images. ...
An audience is a group of people who participate in and experience or encounter a work of art, literature, theatre, music or academics in any medium. ...
Postmodernity (also called post-modernity or the postmodern condition) is a term used by philosophers, social scientists, art critics and social critics to refer to aspects of contemporary art, culture, economics and social conditions that are the result of the unique features of late 20th century and early 21st century...
The 1960s decade refers to the years from January 1, 1960 to December 31, 1969, inclusive. ...
An intellectual is a person who uses his or her intellect to study, reflect, and speculate on a variety of different ideas. ...
Michel Foucault (IPA pronunciation: ; English-speakers pronunciation varies) (October 15, 1926 – June 25, 1984) was a French philosopher. ...
The medical gaze is a term coined by French philosopher and critic, Michel Foucault in his 1976 book, The Birth of the Clinic, to denote the often-dehumanizing method by which medical professionals separate the body from the person (see mind-body dualism). ...
Jacques Lacan Jacques Lacan (April 13, 1901 – September 9, 1981) was an influential French psychoanalyst as well as a structuralist who based much of his theories on Ferdinand de Saussures theories on language. ...
Jacques Lacan tells of the mirror stage in his essay The Mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience, which was published in English in Écrits: A Selection, first by Alan Sheridan in 1977, and more recently by Bruce Fink in 2002. ...
The neutrality of this article is disputed. ...
Feminism is a collection of social theories, political movements and moral philosophies, largely motivated by or concerned with the liberation of women. ...
A man is a male human. ...
Diverse women. ...
Forms of gaze The gaze can be characterized by who is doing the looking: Download high resolution version (745x978, 135 KB)Theodore Gericaults Insane, PD from ibiblio (http://www. ...
Download high resolution version (745x978, 135 KB)Theodore Gericaults Insane, PD from ibiblio (http://www. ...
Théodore Géricaults Insane Théodore Géricault (September 26, 1791 in Rouen, Normandy - January 26, 1824) was a famous French painter, known for The Raft of the Medusa and other paintings. ...
- the spectator's gaze: the spectator who is viewing the text. This is often us, the audience of a certain text,
- intra-diegetic gaze, where one person depicted in the text who is looking at another person or object in the text, such as another character looking at another,
- extra-diegetic gaze, where the person depicted in the text looks at the spectator, such as an aside, or an acknowledgement of the fourth wall, or
- the camera's gaze, which is the gaze of the camera, and is often equated to the director's gaze.
These are not the only forms of gaze. Other forms include the gaze of an audience within a "text within the text", such as Lisa Simpson and Bart Simpson watching the cartoon-within-a-cartoon Itchy and Scratchy on The Simpsons, or editorial gaze, whereby a certain aspect of the text is given emphasis, such as in photography, where a caption or a cropping of an image depicting one thing can emphasize a completely different idea. According to Gerald Prince in A Dictionary of Narratology, diegesis is (1) The (fictional) world in which the situations and events narrated occur; (2) Telling, recounting, as opposed to showing, enacting. ...
The fourth wall is the imaginary invisible wall at the front of the stage in a proscenium theatre, through which the audience sees the action in the world of the play. ...
It has been suggested that Lisas sax solo gags on The Simpsons be merged into this article or section. ...
Bartholomew Bart Jo Jo Simpson is a main character in the animated television series The Simpsons, voiced by Nancy Cartwright. ...
Itchy and Scratchy The Itchy & Scratchy Show is a fictional television cartoon show within the television cartoon show The Simpsons (see show-within-a-show). ...
Simpsons redirects here. ...
Other theorists such as Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen provide the idea of the gaze as a relationship between offering and demanding gaze: indirect gaze is an offer by the spectator, where we initiate the gaze, and the subject is not aware of this, and direct gaze is a demand by the subject, who looks at us, demanding our gaze.
Gaze can also be further categorized into the direction of the gaze, where the subjects are looking at each other, apart, at the same object, or where one is gazing at another who is gazing at something else.
Effects of gaze Gazing and seeing someone gaze upon another provides us with a lot of information about our relationship to the subjects, or the relationships between the subjects upon whom we gaze, or the situation in which the subjects are doing the gazing.
The mutuality of the gaze can reflect power structure, or the nature of a relationship between the subjects, as proposed by Catherine Lutz and Jane Collins, where this "tell[s] us who has the right and/or need to look at whom". Jane Collins is a fictional character in popular BBC soap opera EastEnders. ...
Gazing can often reflect emotion without speech - in Western culture, continued staring upon another can be quite unsettling upon the subject.
Although it may appear that "gaze" is merely looking at, Jonathan Schroeder tells us that "it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze". The gaze characterizes and displays the relationships between the subjects by looking.
This idea forms a basis of feminist analysis of texts.
Gaze and feminist theory Some feminists have viewed the gaze as a power asymmetry by hypothesizing about what they call the "male gaze," in which a man gazes at a woman. Such feminists believe that in instances wherein a man gazes at a woman, the man exhibits power over the woman. Notably, there is little literature on the female gaze. Image File history File links Circle-question-red. ...
Image File history File links Unbalanced_scales. ...
Some theorists also have noted the degrees to which persons are encouraged to gaze upon women in advertising by placing sexualized women therein.
Responses to "male gaze" Male gaze in relation to feminist theory presents asymmetrical gaze as a means of exhibiting an unequal power relationship; that is, the male imposes an unwanted gaze upon the female. However, this may not necessarily be the case; many societies have women who enjoy being gazed upon, models and beauty pageants in Western society for example seem to welcome the male gaze. Some second-wave feminist viewpoints would argue whether these women are actually willing, noting that they may be merely seeking to conform to the hegemonic norms constructed to the benefit of male interests that further underline the power of the male gaze. Evolutionary biological explanations for the male gaze also exist.[citation needed] Image File history File links Circle-question-red. ...
Image File history File links Unbalanced_scales. ...
Art modeling involves the posing of a model to as an aid in creating a work of art. ...
A beauty contest, or beauty pageant, is a competition between people, based largely, though not always entirely, on the beauty of their physical appearance. ...
The question of whether a female gaze exists in contrast to the male one arises naturally in considering the male gaze. Mulvey, the originator of the phrase "male gaze", argues that "the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze...". Nalini Paul describes Wide Sargasso Sea, where the character Antoinette views Rochester and places a garland upon him to appear as a hero, and "Rochester does not feel comfortable with having this role enforced upon him; thus he rejects it by removing the garland and crushing the flowers."
In the perspective of male gaze as merely possessing a gaze, the position of a female possessing the gaze is then the female assuming the male gaze. Eva-Maria Jacobsson supports this by describing a "female gaze" as "a mere cross identification with masculinity".
However, disregarding the viewpoint of gendered possession of gaze as proposed by Mulvey above, there is evidence to support a view of a female gaze - at least as an objectification of men - in texts such as advertisements and teenage magazines. The view that men are somehow reluctant to be gazed upon was also not necessarily supported, for example, at an exhibition called The Female Gaze, where female artists studied the male form. Therese Mulligan mentioned "[t]o get these men who had leered at her on the street to strike these poses was amazing. And you could tell that they loved being looked at by her. These guys aren't attractive, but they sure think they are."
The gaze can also be directed toward members of the same gender for several reasons, not all of which are sexual, such as in comparison of body image or in clothing.
Gaze and psychology The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, an early and influential theorist of child development, found the concept of the gaze important in what he termed "the mirror stage", whereupon children gaze at a mirror image of themselves (usually an image of themselves in an actual mirror, but a twin brother or sister can also function as a mirror image) and use this image to derive a degree of coordination over their physical movements. Lacan therefore linked the concept of the gaze to the development of individual human agency. To this end, he transformed the concept of the gaze into a dialectic between what he called the ideal-ego and the ego-ideal. The ideal-ego is the image of imaginary self-identification - in other words, the idealized image that the person imagines themselves to be or aspires to be; whilst the ego-ideal is the imaginary gaze of another person who gazes upon the ideal-ego. An example would be if a famous rockstar (a category of identification which would function as the ideal-ego) secretly hoped that the school bully who tormented them as a child was now aware of his or her subsequent success and fame (with the imaginary, fantasmatic figure of the bully functioning as the ego-ideal). Jacques Lacan Jacques-Marie-Émile Lacan (April 13, 1901 – September 9, 1981) was a French psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, and doctor. ...
This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...
Human agency is the capacity for human beings to make choices and to impose those choices on the world on a collective basis, usually through democratic means. ...
Rock and roll (also spelled Rock n Roll, especially in its first decade), also called rock, is a form of popular music, usually featuring vocals (often with vocal harmony), electric guitars and a strong back beat; other instruments, such as the saxophone, are common in some styles. ...
Lacan later developed his concept of the gaze even further, claiming that the gaze does not belong to the subject but, rather, the object. In his Seminar One, he told his 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" (Lacan, 1988, p. 215).
References - Felluga, Dino. "Modules on Lacan: On the Gaze." Introductory Guide to Critical Theory - see External links.
- Jacobsson, Eva-Maria: A Female Gaze? (1999) - see External links
- Kress, Gunther & Theo van Leeuwen: Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. (1996)
- Lacan, Jacques: Seminar One: Freud's Papers On Technique (1988)
- Lutz, Catherine & Jane Collins: The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes: The Example of National Geographic. (1994)
- Mulvey, Laura: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975, 1992)
- Notes on The Gaze (1998) - see External links.
- Paul, Nalini: The Female Gaze - see External links
- Schroeder, Jonathan E: Consuming Representation: A Visual Approach to Consumer Research.
See also Film theory debates the essence of the cinema and provides conceptual frameworks for analyzing, among other things, the film image, narrative structure, the function of film artists, the relationship of film to reality, and the film spectators position in the cinematic experience. ...
Feminist film theory is theoretical work within film criticism which is derived from feminist politics and feminist theory. ...
An eye tracker is a device for measuring eye positions and eye movements. ...
Eye contact is the event when two people look at each others eyes at the same time[1]. It is a form of nonverbal communication, and can be an intense or emotional occurrence or a soon-forgotten event. ...
John Phillip, The Evil Eye (1859), a self-portrait depicting the artist sketching a Spanish gypsy who thinks she is being given the evil eye The evil eye is a widely distributed element of folklore, in which it is believed that the envy elicited by the good luck of fortunate...
An illustration depicting a typical staring contest A staring contest is a competitive game in which two people stare into each others eyes and attempt to maintain eye contact for a longer period of time than their opponent. ...
There are several varying theories about the audiences role in any kind of communication exchange. ...
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