n 1975 Laura Mulvey wrote
her essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"; in this
essay she described her “Male Gaze” theory.
The
concept of the “gaze” refers to how an audience views the people
presented.
The
male gaze occurs when the camera puts the audience into the
perspective of a heterosexual man. It may linger over the curves of a
woman's body, for instance. The woman is usually displayed on two
different levels: as an erotic object for both the characters within
the film, as well as for the spectator who is watching the film. The
man emerges as the dominant power within the created film fantasy.
The woman is passive to the active gaze from the man.
Mulvey's essay also states
that the female gaze is the same as the male gaze. This means that
women look at themselves through the eyes of men. The male gaze may
be seen by a feminist either as a manifestation of unequal power
between gazer and gazed, or as a conscious or subconscious attempt to
develop that inequality. From this perspective, a woman who welcomes
an objectifying gaze may be simply conforming to norms established to
benefit men, thereby reinforcing the power of the gaze to reduce a
recipient to an object. Welcoming such objectification may be viewed
as akin to exhibitionism.
Jonathan Schroeder (1998)
“To gaze implies more than to look at – it signifies a
psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior
to the object of the gaze.”
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