The Male Gaze / Oppositional Gaze

  The Male Gaze / Oppositional Gaze 

Compare the two bottom images below and ask yourself the following question. Which are you most most likely to see in a film or television show of car wash scene? Will you find yourself seeing something similar to Jessica Simpson or more like someone who looked like Alan Garner? Unless we are watching the Hangover, most will end up seeing and enjoying the light skin, blond, almost naked, flirtatious girl in a scene that is often in slow motion to dramatize the moment. The message in hand is very clear, sex certainly sells. The constant bombarding of this type of images are forcing us to think that this is the conventional way of portraying females in a way that it is more visually engaging for men but more frustrating for women who are constantly under the scope and scrutiny. Because of this kind of issues the concept of the Male Gaze comes to life which in short terms can be seen as the power men have and the use of that power to portray images of the opposite sex in desirable and demeaning manner. 

                          Jessica Simpson 

                              

                                     Alan Garner lookalike

Before discussing the male gaze concept in the area of film and television, I would like to bring to light the earliest form of objectification that existed. In "Ways of Seeing" we discover that back in history during the Renaissance in numerous  European oil paintings women were portrayed in the nude and were there "to feed an appetite, [and] not to have any of their own" (55)  What does a female painting have to do with the male gaze? To every painting there is a perspective and to that perspective there is an artist and because we find out that during that time most of these painters were men, in result women were victims of their subjectivity. This was of seeing women has not changed much today, lets explore more familiar grounds. 

When film was first introduced, females behind the camera lens were being portrayed in ways in which only men desired to see a woman; for instance scenes when a woman entered the room would often start with a slow motion panning up her body showing off her figure, and in some films a romantic tune would start playing to set the moment of fantasy not only within the movie but also for the audience member. The trend became that men were being portrayed in very heroic forms while women would have to stand there and look sexy as an object of admiration, the idea was that men were generally admired and woman were desired. Bell Hooks mentions in her book as she speaks about her students, that we "learn more about race, sex, and class from movies than from theoretical literature" (3) Essentially we learn how to act, behave and talk based on what we see on film, and this is why the male gaze is an issue at hand that needs to be resolved for the sake of treating women with the respect that they deserve. 

                                                                                                             

The Male Gaze: Camera lens panning up and down on Megan Fox's body. 

The Oppositional Gaze 

"Not only will I stare. I want my look to change reality" (Hooks 116)

Different mechanisms  of oppression have emerged primarily by man who from the beginning of media have had a powerful and dominant influence mainly because they own and hold the big title positions in corporate media. We learned that because of the Male Gaze consumer perceptions are shifted to form, define and confine a specific gender or race. The oppositional gaze is somewhat similar to this idea but instead of dealing solely with gender we start to deal with race and representation of African Americans in popular media. 

For African American culture the lack of representation and misrepresentation in media was a rough start, and to an extent they still have a negative representation today in popular films like The Hunger Games, where all black characters are present to serve the white female protagonist in some type of way and in cases resulting in their death. In response to this form of portrayal, the oppositional gaze formed as a vehicle of change in attempt to resist the negative and ugly images that were being shown in the media. For African Americans looking became more than just a gaze, It was a form of rebellion against those who oppressed them and made them feel inferior. Hooks mentions that "When black people in the United States first had the opportunity to look at film, they did so fully aware that mass media was a system of knowledge and power reproducing and maintaining white supremacy" (117). They were fully aware of the power television had and its ability to shape public opinion, and they knew that this mass machine worked in their disadvantage, in the same reading we discover that one of the ways for African American men rebelled against this was by engaging in "phallocentric politics of spectatorship" (118). The consequences they suffered for simply staring were grave and as a result attending films in these dark show rooms they had the ability to unleash the repressed gaze,in the  same reading we learn that "In their role as spectators, black men could enter an imaginative space of phallocentric power that mediated racial negation"  (118). 

For African American women they had to come to an understating that in media the desired feminine image was that of a white female, In the chapter of race and representation, we learn that most black women went to see films without high expectations of being represented acutely to the while female image.  In the Oppositional Gaze, Black Female Spectators Bell Hooks states that when representation of black woman were present in film, they bodies and beings were present to maintain white womanhood. The only way to avoid these messages Hooks says that woman should not identity with any of the characters and to shut down any critique.  All I know is that if it had been me watching these films I would probably would have gotten up and reacted just as Tasha from Orange is the New Black did in this scene. 

The two videos below show a perfect example of 

African American representation in media back then and today. 

Example of how very little their representation has changed. 

       

Oppositional Gaze : African American women were mostly represented

 as servants also know as "the help". Tasha stands up for herself in this scene.

Works 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