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Gaze

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For other uses, see Gaze (disambiguation).
The Conjurer, by Hieronymus Bosch, shows the bending figure looking forward, steadily, intently, and with fixed attention, while the other figures in the painting look in various directions, some outside the painting.

In critical theory, sociology, and psychoanalysis, the gaze (French le regard), in the philosophical and figurative sense, is an individual's (or a group's) awareness and perception of other individuals, other groups, or oneself. The concept and the social applications of the gaze have been defined and explained by existentialist and phenomenologist philosophers. Jean-Paul Sartre described the gaze (or "the look") in Being and Nothingness (1943).[1] Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), developed the concept of the gaze to illustrate the dynamics of socio-political power relations and the social dynamics of society's mechanisms of discipline. Jacques Derrida, in The Animal that Therefore I Am (More to Come) (1997), elaborated upon the inter-species relations that exist among human beings and other animals, which are established by way of the gaze.

In psychoanalysis

In Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, the gaze is the anxious state of mind that comes with the self-awareness that one can be seen and looked at. The psychological effect upon the person subjected to the gaze is a loss of autonomy upon becoming aware that they are a visible object. Theoretically, the gaze is linked to the mirror stage of psychological development, in which a child encountering a mirror learns that they have an external appearance. Lacan extrapolated that the gaze and the effects of the gaze might be produced by an inanimate object, and thus a person's awareness of any object can induce the self-awareness of also being an object in the material world of reality. The philosophic and psychologic importance of the gaze is in the meeting of the face and the gaze, because only there do people exist for one another.[2]

The gaze in systems of power

The gaze can be understood in psychological terms: "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."[3] In Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (2009), Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright said that "the gaze is [conceptually] integral to systems of power, and [to] ideas about knowledge"; that to practice the gaze is to enter a personal relationship with the person being looked at.[4] Foucault's concepts of panopticism, of the power/knowledge binary, and of biopower address the modes of personal self-regulation that a person practices when under surveillance; the modification of personal behaviour by way of institutional surveillance.[5]

In The Birth of the Clinic (1963), Michel Foucault first applied the medical gaze to conceptually describe and explain the act of looking, as part of the process of medical diagnosis; the unequal power dynamics between doctors and patients; and the cultural hegemony of intellectual authority that a society grants to medical knowledge and medicine men. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), Foucault develops the gaze as an apparatus of power based upon the social dynamics of power relations, and the social dynamics of disciplinary mechanisms, such as surveillance and personal self-regulation, as practices in a prison and in a school.

The male gaze

Main article: Male gaze

The concept of the male gaze was first used by the English art critic John Berger in Ways of Seeing, a series of films for the BBC aired in January 1972, and later a book, as part of his analysis of the treatment of the nude in European painting. It soon became popular among feminists, including British film critic Laura Mulvey, who used it to critique traditional media representations of the female character in cinema.[6]

In her 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Mulvey stated that women were objectified in film because heterosexual men were in control of the camera. Hollywood films played to the models of voyeurism and scopophilia.[7] The concept has subsequently been influential in feminist film theory and media studies.[8]

The female gaze

Main article: Judith Butler

In Judith Butler's 1990 book Gender Trouble, she proposed the idea of the female gaze as a way in which men choose to perform their masculinity by using women as the ones who force men into self-regulation. Film director Deborah Kampmeier rejected the idea of the female gaze in preference for the female experience. She stated, "(F)or me personally, it’s not (about) a female gaze. It’s the female experience. I don't gaze, I actually move through the world, feeling the world emotionally and sensorily and in my body."[9]

Imperial gaze

E. Ann Kaplan has introduced the post-colonial concept of the imperial gaze, in which the observed find themselves defined in terms of the privileged observer's own set of value-preferences.[10] From the perspective of the colonised, the imperial gaze infantilizes and trivializes what it falls upon,[11] asserting its command and ordering function as it does so.[12]

Kaplan comments: "The imperial gaze reflects the assumption that the white western subject is central much as the male gaze assumes the centrality of the male subject."[13]

White gaze

Main article: White gaze

The white gaze is the assumption that the default reader or observer is coming from a perspective of someone who identifies themselves as white, or that people of color sometimes feel need to take into account the white reader or observer's reaction.[14] Various authors of color describe it as a voice in their heads that reminds them that their writing, characters, and plot choices are going to be judged by white readers, and that the reader or viewer, by default, is white.[14][15][16][17]

Description

Toni Morrison wrote and spoke influentially about rejecting the white gaze.[18] In an analysis of whiteness in American literature, Morrison said, "What happens to the writerly imagination of a black author who is at some level always conscious of representing one's race to, or in spite of, a race of readers that understands itself to be 'universal' or race-free?"[14] In the documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, she calls it “The little white man that sits on your shoulder and checks out everything you do or say. You sort of knock him off and you’re free."[15]

Penguin Blacktop children's writer L. J. Alonge described it in terms of writing "a scene about two kids trying to dine-and-dash, something I'd done, and stop to wonder if I was playing into narratives about 'black criminality.' I'd try to write a scene about a kid getting into a fight, something else I'd done, and feel like I was fuelling ideas about 'black-on-black violence.'"[14]

Representations

The Pulitzer prize-winning play Fairview, by Jackie Sibblies Drury, focuses on the white gaze; the play's title is a play on the phrase.[19] Hannah Miao, reviewing it, describes the White gaze as "being watched from a lens of otherness that is sometimes violently obvious, and sometimes so subtle that you find yourself wondering whether you made it up entirely. It is fetishization and repulsion, appropriation and persecution, misrepresentation and erasure, all at once."[20][21]

A 2018 exhibit at California Institute of Integral Studies called White Gaze investigated "the role of photography, and specifically the images of National Geographic, in reinforcing racist hierarchies in the cultural imaginary of the West".[22]

In the US vs. in Africa

Dana Williams, president of the Toni Morrison Society, noted that the concept was a Western construct, and that in the mid-20th century African writers wrote stories on their own terms.[15] In the US at the same time, according to Williams, black writers writing about black subjects "were always thinking about it in the context of race and white people reading".[15]

See also

References

  1. ^ Jean-Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness, Part 3, Chapter 1
  2. ^ Knausgaard, Karl Ove. "The Inexplicable", The New Yorker, 25 May 2015, p. 32.
  3. ^ Schroeder, Jonathan (1998). "Consuming Representation: A Visual Approach to Consumer Research". Representing Consumers: Voices, Views and Visions. New York: Routledge. p. 208. ISBN 978-0415184144. SSRN 1349954.
  4. ^ Sturken, Marita; Cartwright, Lisa. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford University Press, 2009. p. 94, 103.
  5. ^ Sturken, Marita; Cartwright, Lisa. Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture. Oxford University Press, 2009. pp. 106-108.
  6. ^ A Companion to Women in the Ancient World, edited by Sharon L. James, Sheila Dillon, p. 75, 2012, Wiley, ISBN 1444355007, 9781444355000
  7. ^ Sturken, Marita and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: an introduction to visual culture. Oxford University Press, 2001. p. 76.
  8. ^ Sassatelli, Roberta. Interview with Laura Mulvey: Gender, Gaze and Technology in Film Culture. Theory, Culture & Society, September 2011, 28(5) p. 127.
  9. ^ Martin, Rebecca. "Deborah Kampmeier's 'Tape' explores the gray areas of #MeToo through sharing one woman's powerful story". Cinema Femme. Retrieved 9 January 2021.
  10. ^ Bill Ashcroft et al, Post-Colonial Studies (2000) p. 187
  11. ^ Vijay Mishra, Bollywood Cinema (2002) p. 245
  12. ^ E. H. Yekani, The Privilege of Crisis (2011) p. 100
  13. ^ Quoted in Patricia Waugh, Literary Theory and Criticism (2006) p. 514
  14. ^ a b c d "Writing Past The White Gaze As A Black Author". NPR.org. Retrieved 2020-09-13.
  15. ^ a b c d "Go beyond Toni Morrison with these 7 books that stare down the white gaze". PBS NewsHour. 2019-07-12. Retrieved 2020-09-14.
  16. ^ Demirtürk, E. Lâle (2009-12-01). "Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race". MELUS. 34 (4): 221–222. doi:10.1353/mel.0.0061. ISSN 0163-755X. S2CID 162349036.
  17. ^ Wallowitz, Laraine (2008). "Chapter 9: Resisting the White Gaze: Critical Literacy and Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye"". Counterpoints. 326: 151–164. ISSN 1058-1634. JSTOR 42980110.
  18. ^ "Morrison speaks on evil, language and 'the white gaze'". Cornell Chronicle. Retrieved 2020-09-14.
  19. ^ Holdren, Sara (2018-06-17). "Reviewing Fairview, a Play That Almost Demands That I Not Do So". Vulture. Retrieved 2020-09-14.
  20. ^ Miao, Hanna (17 October 2019). "'Fairview' and tackling the white gaze". The Chronicle. Retrieved 2020-09-14.
  21. ^ "Fairview review – a daring challenge to the white gaze". the Guardian. 2019-12-05. Retrieved 2020-09-14.
  22. ^ "WHITE GAZE: Michelle Dizon". www.ciis.edu. Retrieved 2020-09-14.

Further reading

The oppositional gaze

In her 1992 essay titled "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectatorship",[1] bell hooks counters Laura Mulvey's notion of the (male) gaze by introducing the oppositional gaze of Black women. This concept exists as the reciprocal of the normative white spectator gaze. As Mulvey's essay[2] contextualizes the (male) gaze and its objectification of white women, hooks' essay[1] opens "oppositionality [as] a key paradigm in the feminist analysis of the 'gaze' and of scopophilic regimes in Western culture".[3]

The oppositional gaze remains a critique of rebellion due to the sustained and deliberate misrepresentation of Black women in cinema as characteristically Mammy, Jezebel or Sapphire.[4]

Postcolonial gaze

First referred to by Edward Said as "orientalism", the term "post-colonial gaze" is used to explain the relationship that colonial powers extended to people of colonized countries.[5] Placing the colonized in a position of the "other" helped to shape and establish the colonial's identity as being the powerful conqueror, and acted as a constant reminder of this idea.[6] The postcolonial gaze "has the function of establishing the subject/object relationship ... it indicates at its point of emanation the location of the subject, and at its point of contact the location of the object".[7] In essence, this means that the colonizer/colonized relationship provided the basis for the colonizer's understanding of themselves and their identity.[6] The role of the appropriation of power is central to understanding how colonizers influenced the countries that they colonized, and is deeply connected to the development of post-colonial theory. Utilizing postcolonial gaze theory allows formerly colonized societies to overcome the socially constructed barriers that often prohibit them from expressing their true cultural, social, economic, and political rights.[6]

The male tourist gaze

The tourism image is created through cultural and ideological constructions and advertising agencies that have been male dominated. What is represented by the media assumes a specific type of tourist: white, Western, male, and heterosexual, privileging the gaze of the "master subject" over others.[8] This is the representation of the typical tourist because those behind the lens, the image, and creators are predominantly male, white, and Western. Those that do not fall into this category are influenced by its supremacy. Through these influences female characteristics such as youth, beauty, sexuality, or the possession of a man are desirable while the prevalence of stereotypes consisting of submissive and sensual women with powerful "macho" men in advertising are projected.[8]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b hooks, bell. "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectator". The Feminism and Visual Cultural Reader. New York: Routledge, 2003: Amelia Jones. pp. 94–105.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
  2. ^ Mulvey, Laura. "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema". Media and Cultural Studies: Keywords. 2001; Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006: Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas Kellner. pp. 342–352.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
  3. ^ Griffin, Gabriele, and Rosi Braidotti. Thinking Differently: A Reader in European Women's Studies. London: Zed, 2002.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  4. ^ M., West, Carolyn (2012-01-01). "Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire, and Their Homegirls: Developing an "Oppositional Gaze" Toward the Images of Black Women". {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help)CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
  5. ^ Said, Edward (1978). Orientalism. Vintage Books.
  6. ^ a b c Beardsell, Peter (2000). Europe and Latin America: Returning the Gaze. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.
  7. ^ Beardsell, Peter (2000). Europe and Latin America: Returning the Gaze. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press. p. 8.
  8. ^ a b Pritchard and Morgan, Annette and Nigel (2000). "Privileging the Male Gaze". Annals of Tourism Research. 27 (4): 884–905. doi:10.1016/s0160-7383(99)00113-9.

Further reading

  • Armstrong, Carol and de Zegher, Catherine, Women Artists at the Millennium. MIT Press, October Books, 2006.
  • de Zegher, Catherine, Inside the Visible. MIT Press, 1996.
  • Ettinger, Bracha, "The Matrixial Gaze" (1995), reprinted as Ch. 1 in: The Matrixial Borderspace. University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
  • Felluga, Dino. "Modules on Lacan: On the Gaze." Introductory Guide to Critical Theory — see external links.
  • Florence, Penny and Pollock, Griselda, Looking back to the Future. G & B Arts, 2001.
  • Gardner-McTaggart, A. (Forthcoming), International Capital, International Schools, Leadership and Christianity, Globalisation Societies and Education. Taylor and Francis.
  • 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 XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. NY & London, W.W. Norton and Co., 1978.
  • 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). In: Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from V.A.R. 1990-1994. Edited by Lucien Taylor. New York: Routledge. pp. 363–384.
  • Mulvey, Laura: Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975, 1992).
  • Notes on The Gaze (1998) — see external links.
  • Pollock, Griselda (ed.), Psychoanalysis and the Image. Blackwell, 2006.
  • Sturken, Marita and Lisa Cartwright. Practices of Looking: an introduction to visual culture. Oxford University Press, 2009. p. 94, 103.
  • Paul, Nalini: The Female Gaze — see external links.
  • Pollock, Griselda, "Modenity and the Spaces of Femininity". Routldge, 1988.
  • Schroeder, Jonathan E: SSRN.com Consuming Representation: A Visual Approach to Consumer Research.
  • Theory, Culture and Society, Volume 21, Number 1, 2004.
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