The Male and Oppositional Gaze - June Marie Davis

The Male Gaze is a theory that defines a woman’s role as merely being an object for male spectatorship.  John Berger put it simply, “men act and women appear…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”.  I can recall growing up my grandmother saying to me, “you need to know how to cook, clean and always look your best and keep your husband happy”.  I find it interesting just thinking about my upbringing, I was already being molded into Berger’s theory.  The phrase that comes to mind, “you are meant to be seen, not heard”, my brother and I heard that a lot growing up, but reading Berger’s work I find it very apropos to the point he is making about women being objects.

Modern Day  - The Judgement of Paris???

 

Popular culture has become pervasive because most of what we consume is of sexual content.  We are visual beings and we have been seduced by social media to believe that women are objects.   Pervasiveness is what we as a soiety consume on a daily basis, it's in food, art, etc.  Mulvey’s reading discusses this very thing, that there is pleasure in looking.  She talks in length about Freud’s theory on scopophilia, which holds true especially alongside these images I’ve uploaded.

Hmmm...What is this really saying?

 

Really?

 

FOR MEN! of course!

 

 

The Oppositional Gaze, article by Bell Hooks discusses black representation in cinema and other media outlets.  More specifically, Hooks breaks down the way black women have viewed themselves in media as the spectator.  Not only is this article about the “negation” of black representation in media, but it is also an article about the development of black cinema; you cannot discuss one without the other.  The lines that stick out for me when reading this article is when Hooks says, “black female spectators have had to develop looking relations within a cinematic context that constructs our presence as absence, that denies the “body” of the black female so as to perpetuate white supremacy and with it phallocentric spectatorship where the woman to be looked at and desired is “white.”  What????  I must have read these lines more than 5 times.  Black women were not to be desired, only white women.  Black women were depicted as nothing more than servants.  What I found most interesting was Miss Pauline’s comment, that viewing the white films were a form of escapism from the reality of being black. 

 

 

 

 

In reading Berger, Mulvey and Hooks it makes me think about what my place is within social media and the role I play in perpetuating the cycle set on women today.  http://www.nwhm.org/online-exhibits/film/index.html