Autumn Gaze Popular Books

Autumn Gaze Biography & Facts

In feminist theory, the male gaze is the act of depicting women and the world in the visual arts and in literature from a masculine, heterosexual perspective that presents and represents women as sexual objects for the pleasure of the heterosexual male viewer. In the visual and aesthetic presentations of narrative cinema, the male gaze has three perspectives: that of the man behind the camera, that of the male characters within the film's cinematic representations; and that of the spectator gazing at the image. The concept of the gaze (le regard) was first used by the English art critic John Berger in Ways of Seeing (1972), which presents analyses of the representation of women — as passive objects to be seen — in advertising and as nude subjects in European art. The feminist intellectual Laura Mulvey applied the concepts of the gaze to critique traditional representations of women in cinema, from which work emerged the concept and the term of the male gaze. The beauty standards perpetuated by the gaze have historically sexualized and fetishized the black female nude due to an attraction to their characteristics but at the same time punished black women and pushed their bodies outside of what is considered desirable. The psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan are the foundations from which Mulvey developed the theory of the male gaze and interpreted and explained scopophilia, the "primordial wish for pleasurable looking" that is satisfied by the cinematic experience.: 807  The terms scopophilia and scoptophilia identify both the aesthetic joy and the sexual pleasures derived from looking at someone or something.: 815  Concerning the psychologic applications and functions of the gaze, the male gaze is conceptually contrasted with the female gaze. Background The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre introduced the concept of le regard, the gaze, in Being and Nothingness (1943), wherein the act of gazing at another human being creates a subjective power difference, which is felt by the gazer and by the gazed because the person being gazed at is perceived as an object, not as a human being. The cinematic concept of the male gaze is presented, explained, and developed in the essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975), in which Laura Mulvey proposes that sexual inequality — the asymmetry of social and political power between men and women — is a controlling social force in the cinematic representations of women and men. The male gaze (the aesthetic pleasure of the male viewer) is a social construct derived from the ideologies and discourses of patriarchy. In the fields of media studies and feminist film theory, the male gaze is conceptually related to the behaviors of voyeurism (looking as sexual pleasure), scopophilia (pleasure from looking), and narcissism (pleasure from contemplating one's self). Parting from the Freudian concept of male castration anxiety, Mulvey said that because the woman has no penis, her female presence provokes sexual insecurity in the unconscious of the male, wherein women are passive recipients of male objectification. The on-screen presence of a woman's body is notable, because "her lack of penis, [implies] a threat of castration and hence unpleasure", which the male gaze subverts through the over-sexualization of femininity. As the passive subjects and objects of the male gaze, the hypersexualization of women thwarts the man's castration anxiety with the sexual practises of voyeurism-sadism and fetishization of the female body. The practice of voyeurism-sadism is the "pleasure [that] lies in ascertaining guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control and subjecting the guilty person through punishment or forgiveness", which aligns more with the structure of narrative cinema than does the fetishization component of scopophilia. Psychologically, fetishistic scopophilia reduces the man's castration anxiety — induced by the presence of women — by fragmenting the woman's personality and hypersexualizing the parts of her body. In narrative film, the visual perspective of the male gaze is the sight-line of the camera as the perspective of the spectator — a heterosexual man whose sight lingers upon the features of a woman's body. In narrative cinema, the male gaze usually displays the female character (woman, girl, child) on two levels of eroticism: as an erotic object of desire for the characters in the filmed story; and as an erotic object of desire for the male viewer (spectator) of the filmed story. Such visualizations establish the roles of the dominant male and dominated female, by representing the female as a passive object for the male gaze of the active viewer. The social pairing of the passive object (woman) and the active viewer (man) is a functional basis of patriarchy, i.e., gender roles that are culturally reinforced in and by the aesthetics (textual, visual, symbolic) of the mainstream, commercial cinema; the movies of which feature the male gaze as more important than the female gaze, an aesthetic choice based upon the inequality of sociopolitical power between men and women.: 14 : 127  As an ideological basis of patriarchy, sociopolitical inequality is realized as a value system by which male-created institutions (e.g. the movie business, advertising, fashion) unilaterally determine what is "natural and normal" in society. In time, the people of a community believe that the artificial values of patriarchy, as a social system, are the "natural and normal" order of things in society because men look at women and women are looked at by men. The Western hierarchy of "inferior women" and "superior men" derives from misrepresenting men and women as sexual opponents, rather than as sexual equals. Concepts Scopophilia The Freudian concept of scopophilia produced two types of male gaze: the pleasure that is linked to sexual attraction (voyeurism in the extreme), and the scopophilic pleasure that is linked to narcissistic identification (the introjection of ego ideal), and each type of male gaze shows how women have been socially compelled to view the cinema from the perspectives (sexual, aesthetic, cultural) of the male gaze. In cinematic representations of women, the male gaze denies the woman's human agency and human identity to transform her from person to object — someone to be considered only for her beauty, physique, and sex appeal, as defined in the male sexual fantasy of narrative cinema. Spectatorship Two types of spectatorship occur while viewing a film, wherein the spectator consciously and unconsciously engages in the societally defined-and-assigned roles of men and women. Concerning phallocentrism, the spectator views a film from the perspectives of three different looks: the first look is that of the camera, which photographs and records the events of the filmed story; the second look, which describes the nearly voyeuristic act of the audience as they view the f.... Discover the Autumn Gaze popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Autumn Gaze books.