Male Gaze and Oppositional Gaze

After reading Berger, hooks, and Mulvey my understanding of how women are seen though the media and film has completely changed. Of course, I knew that men look at women to fulfill this wanting desire. Women are the same as well. Although its not entirely men’s fault, they were just taught over the years of what to see and desire. However I never knew that people coined the term ‘male gaze’ to describe how men, or others spectators, see and view women. It is true, men do see women as some type of object for sexual pleasure. But through different forms of media, women are misrepresented and are objectified in the eyes of the surveyor.

The way women reveal themselves to the public also determines how the male gaze dictates over them. Everyday, women are put in this position where they have to decide how they must dress to be accepted and to be noticed by others and by themselves. “She has to survey everything she is and everything she does because how she appears to others, and ultimately how she appears to men..”(Berger, 46) Subconsciously women always have to watch how they dress in public, because of how much people judge them. A majority of women are very insecure about themselves, however women wouldn’t be so self-conscious of themselves if it wasn’t for the how media portrayed them.

“She turns herself into an object and most particularly an object of vision: a sight.”(Berger, 47) Women do have a part in making themselves into an object, but media and film has a big part to it. For example, music videos like Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke, Anaconda by Nicki Minaj, Booty by J-Lo, Work by Iggy, and Wrecking Ball by Miley Cyrus show how women become this erotic vision and object. Through Blurred Lines you see how the camera frames them, how these women are posed as in front of camera, and what they are treating themselves as. It sad to say that these music video are created to not only satisfy these spectator desires, and males fantasies, but to profit from it. Through John Berger's Ways of Seeing, we read how nudes "have been and judged as sights." But what’s interesting about this, is that the woman who is being painted knows is aware of being seen. "She is not naked as she is. She is naked the spectator sees her."(Berger, 50) The way women have been explicitly presented comes from how media identifies them.

In the movie The Other Women, we are aware of how Kate Upton is displayed. Through one of the scenes, as Kate Upton gets up from her beach chair and runs down the beach we see how Upton is sexualized as the camera focus on certain parts of her body. In addition, this always shows how the audience and the other cast members spectate Upton. Just like this scene, there are other movies that show scenes of women being presented as erotic objects, for example The Blue Angel. The leading women character of The Blue Angel, Lola Lola, was not only depicted as this erotic object for her appearance but even shows her awareness of men watching her, too.

“.. mass of mainstream film, and the conventions within which it has consciously evolved, portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic phantasy.“(Mulvey,835) In other words, these films have an influence on the audience by giving them the power of seeing these women characters as just objects. The impact "subjects them to a controlling and curious gaze", and by indirectly possessing them. In movies, we projects ourselves on certain characters that show certain traits that we associate with. However males tend to identify themselves with the main character, usually, and by doing so they feels as though they has some control and some sense of omnipotence over the erotic look.Thats why the male gaze is a pervasive form of vision in popular culture, because it encourages spectators to fantasize and highly eroticized women. This why we must start have deeper understanding of media towards women and end these associations with the erotic visualizations. By “..analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it.”(Mulvey, 835)

“That all attempts to repress our/black peoples’ right to gaze had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze”(hooks, 116)

Through bell hooks reading, we understand that black women aren't fully represented in the cinema. We notice that black women in particular, are considered as spectator because of how they were seen within society as well as in film. This is why the male gaze is the challenged by the oppositional gaze. The oppositional gaze is basically a form of resistance, of rebellion. “The extent to which black women feel devalued, objectified, dehumanized in this society determines the scope and texture of their looking relations. Those black women whose identities were constructed in resistance, by practices that oppose the dominated, were most inclined to develop an oppositional gaze.”(hooks, 127) This idea oppositional gaze that hooks discusses throughout her book, indicates that black women spectators should understand how they are neglected and misrepresented within the media and in the cinema. However, as indicated in hooks's book their was this "prolong silence of black women as spectators" who had no response to this to "cinematic negation”. They never bothered to question the fact certain films stereotyped them, or that they weren't enough films to represent them. “Even when representation of black women were present in film, our bodies and being were there to serve- to enhance and maintain white womanhood as object of the phallocentric gaze. (hooks, 119) This is true, because usually white women were always subjected to be seen as a object of the surveyor.

Work Cited:
• Berger, John (1972). Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books
• hooks, bell (1992) Black Looks: Race and Representation, Chapter 7 “The Oppositional Gaze”
• Mulvey, Laura (1975) “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Film Theory and Criticism