The Male Gaze

Laura Mulvey
she believes that female characters in films are simple objects to be enjoyed by male viewers. They are used to satisfy the male viewers, the male gaze. Women are to be looked art by men.
Scopophilia is the pleasure gained from viewing something.
Cinema provides a form of voyeurism.

Bechtel Test
1. 2+ female characters
2. Do they converse with each other
3. Do they talk about the male lead character.

3 Looks:
The camera looking to record the film
The audience looking to view the film
The look of the characters in the film

The theory suggests the audiences respond to films in the same way.
Ignores the female gaze
Kathleen Rowe suggests that being the object of the gaze is a position of power.

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In music videos; women are figuratively cut up to show off parts of her body.

Richard Dyer when talking generally about media representation said:
What sense of the world does it make?
What's the implication?
Who is it speaking for/to?
What does it represent and why?

Nothing represented to us is real

Representation is the how the media tells the audience about society. This is through mediation/re-representation
For representation to be meaningful there needs to be a shared opinion of society.

Marxism - The medias role is seen as the circulation and reinforcement of dominant ideologies.

David Gauntlett - "Identities aren't given, they're constructed and negotiated", Identity is complicated. Everybody thinks they have one. Artists play with the idea of identity in modern society."

Am I challenging or enforcing dominant ideologies?

Feminism - Masculinity and Femininity are constructed by society.
O' Sullivan et al said that "Ideas about gender are produced and reflected in language."

Jib Fowle argues that; "in advertisement males gaze and females are gazed at"

Paul Messaris argues that "female models addressed to women appear to imply a male point of view"
In the media there seems to be some sort of value to sexualization in advertisement where expensive items can have sexually suggestive advertising but cheap items offend female viewers.

Post-modernism - the breakdown of barriers.
I can come between high and low arts, Organic or artificial things or males and females.

Jean Baudrillard argues that society relies so much on representations that we have  ;lost our connection with whats real, Theres no distinction between whats real and the representations of what's real, there is only simulacrum.

A simulacrum is a copy that is now more realistic than the original thing its copying.
Creating a simulacrum: Start with the real object
It becomes a representation
The representation becomes more important and real than the original object, this is hyperrealism.
This means the original has been fundamentally destroyed with everything becoming a copy.
Future representations are simply copies of the first copy.

Baudrillard has a problem with representation; it implies there was an original in the first place, but from his point of view, how does one represent something that doesn't exist?
I say, you copy the copy.