Origins and Implications of The Female Gaze
“Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies?... Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
- Margaret Atwood, The Robber Bride
Stereotypical gender-specific gazes have always been present in society's interactions regarding power and the projection of sensuality. It was not until Laura Mulvey, a film theorist, coined the term female gaze in 1975 in her essay entitled “Narrative Cinema and Visual Pleasure” to give a name to the long intuitively acknowledged power-discrepancy over action held by the dominant perspective subjecting the opposite gender to an objectified state. Anything non-male-gaze centered has been grouped with the ambiguous term of the female gaze because the female gaze has grown in the context of that of the male. The answer in its purity to what the female gaze actually is with a non-contextualized contingency is yet to be known; even so, it has not stopped writers like Susan Bowers, Patricia Vertinsky, and Brenda Cooper from delving into an analysis of the concept.
Commonly acknowledged male-influenced methods of demonstrating perspective and pleasure have dominated the portrayal of women for millennia, but examining exactly why gazes arose in the first place, and understanding the power they wield over internal and imposed identity, gives context to the unspoken catalyst of the threat/defense mechanism of objectification.
“Gaze” has been analyzed through both sexual and nonsexual perspectives. The capability for one perspective to exert voyeuristic control over the other by disregarding the other’s powers demonstrates the power of scopophilia, the pleasure of looking or being looked at, in film. Mulvey explains the grip that the male gaze has upon cinema and the difficulty it would be to revert it due to the male gaze being the default perspective of the industry. Women are rarely, if at all, main characters in the film narratives that she explores. The object loses power in the scene it is being displayed in, because its role is to be viewed or to cater to a separate character, and the value of their individuality, when stripped from the context of their male co-stars, is menial.
Objectification at the center of narratives in film, with the image of the sexualized women as the focal point of visual pleasure, has become normalized; the reverse, the sexualization of men, has not. The movie Thelma and Louise politicizes the female gaze in cinema by appropriating the stereotypical male gaze. The storyline is a “buddy-film” with action, violence, and expressions of sexuality. Thelma and Louise broke conventional expectations that have molded and confined the idea of what a female character and femininity could be, which has remained relatively the same since Ancient Greece. In the 20th century, more and more female authors and poets rediscovered the original aspects of the myth of Medusa, and after becoming aware of the reality of her complex character, and tragic history, they viewed the gorgon goddess as identifiable to most women. While her legacy has changed from the worshiped pinnacle of femininity to a monster to be feared, the way society chooses to redefine and remember her legacy shapes culture-based concepts for women to identify with.
The power of aesthetic-physicality through a gaze is not purely sexual, and understanding this key nuance widens what can be included within a gaze outside of stereotypical narrow sexual perspectives being professed. Medusa was feared and respected for her matriarchal nature of being both life-giving and life-taking. There is a duality in her nature that is not acknowledged in later cultures, including post-Olympian mythology, where femininity becomes one-dimensionally defined as far more passive than the dynamic Medusa.
After her image was immortalized through a bastardized depiction of her as a monstrous beast to be slain by Perseus (i.e. Caravaggio’s Medusa), the origins of Medusa’s gorgon-like visage were forgotten. Medusa, before acquiring a head of snakes, was raped by Poseidon, and then punished by Athena for the inadvertent attention that was drawn to the event. Medusa was characterized as a sexually desirable object, and to punish the way she was being looked at, Athena made her “look” petrifying and something to avoid.
Objectification gives power to the viewer and strips it from the subject because an object’s role is to be viewed and not to do the viewing. When Mulvey coined the term female gaze in her essay “Narrative Cinema and Visual Pleasure '', the term arose out of the missing acknowledgment of the non-homogeneous perspective within media, specifically film. The male gaze in film was considered the default and “self-defining”, where “a woman then stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing on the silent image of the woman still tied to her place as the bearer of meaning, not the maker of meaning”. The activity of a character objectified is not considered activity within the plot, because the imposing gaze, in this case the male gaze, has the voyeuristic control, and their fantasies become the activity. Therefore, the object’s movement on screen is merely a manifestation of fantasy, where the male audience’s gaze motivates the activity.
The power of voyeurism in media stems from the importance of self-image and representation, and the employment of outward images (film/media) to fulfill psychological cravings. Scopophilia motivates the common “gaze” narratives in cinema where the sexual perspective most often objectifies women. Therefore, patriarchal perspectives have coded themselves into media, giving it a specific erotic overtone in mainstream sources. The ramifications of the narrow expression of sexual perspective in film, according to Mulvey, is that only counter-cultural indie-type films will be able to be made with the female gaze (or non-male-gaze) because they will not be accepted by mainstream media outlets until conventional codes and structure are broken down.
The female gaze, in the absence of a pure definition, has grown to represent the rebellion against the male gaze. The visual nature of man implies that objectification is a natural process. By not normalizing a specific gender to exert that same natural ability to objectify from their perspective outward in popular media, this introduced the contentious, yet often subconscious, power play of gaze. The movie Thelma and Louise represented the cathartic rebellion against patriarchal norms, and it was well received by female audiences who quickly were able to identify with the characters as they navigated friendship, sexual harassment/assault, and sexuality. This film was not only important because it represented women in a “buddy-film,” a genre typically filled by men, but because of how political the film was.
Some critics were horrified and believed that the movie would make women hate all men, but women felt empowered. Why was there such a stark difference? The reason is that there is a threatening aspect of objectification. Men were the supporting roles in Thelma and Louise and were peripheral. The movie appropriated the stereotypical male gaze and used it to portray the objectification of men and a female-driven plot line based upon rebelling against men. The irony of Thelma and Louise is that it is an appropriation of the blueprint of a male-gaze film. Therefore, the horrified movie critics demonstrate this irony that Thelma and Louise represented–the inequality of “gaze” representation–, where one gaze, the female gaze, would be for a niche audience, while the other is normalized as if it had been a male gaze “buddy-film.” Objectification is naturally perceived as threatening because the direction of one’s image is stripped from their control. This once again demonstrates the great irony of “gaze” in media, where there is an impulse to objectify, but a hesitance to be objectified.
The value in analyzing the clear contrast in the reception of the film noted by Vertinsky is to notice the diverging point of stereotypical gazes between men and women. The male gaze had not aligned with the female gaze’s expectations of the trajectory that a woman’s life should follow. Therefore, the women watching the film felt that they were escaping the trap of “happily ever after.” The women spectators felt freed from the expectations and limitations of the fairy tales women are taught to make of their lives. Analyzing the reception of this film demonstrates that naturally there can be a difference in identity from contrasting sets of expectations between men and women, especially through patriarchal values, where the perspective that set societal expectations emphasized a manner of objectification that was constraining upon female expression.
Symbols of femininity and masculinity are culture-oriented. The power to be feared used to be a strongly feminine attribute of goddesses, while the male physique encapsulated peak masculinity as a visual focal point to be worshiped by other men in Ancient Greece. The aesthetic dominance of the idealized male body in ancient Greece deprioritized the female body as it related to wielding power. Patricia Vertinsky begins her essay “The Erotic Gaze, Violence and ‘Booters with Hooters’” by discussing how powerful men in Ancient Greece would worship the philosophy of Eros through their love of the idealized male form–Eros being the Greek philosophy of passion and sensuality. The Eros worshiped in this instance was “The pleasure with which the Greeks lingered on a highly articulated physique [that] was related to an admiration of warriors and their keen interest in the struggle (agon) with their preference for the “hard” (rulers/male/European) over the “soft” (slaves/female/Asians).” The image of the female body was, therefore, subject to male-contextualized consideration, being seen as weak and soft, and therefore less than. An extension of the Western male gaze expressed in Ancient Greece is the modern-day European beauty standard that discriminates against non-male/non-white individuals. Gaze in this form developed because of the belief that their culture was superior.
This perception of what femininity encapsulated for Medusa before history changed the way she was remembered, including but not limited to her nurturing capabilities (as is stereotypically acknowledged as being a defining female attribute). Her identity was composed of characteristics that stereotypically today would appear to be juxtaposed, because “Medusa was a powerful goddess at a time when female authority was dominant and the power to be feared was feminine.” The internal identity of women can be revealed through an analysis of the feminist significance of Medusa’s history, which reveals the power of female sensuality (female Eros), which was taken as a threat by the patriarchal systems that characterized women as unable to be both sensual and motherly, both life-giving and life-taking.
Whether or not acknowledged, gaze has existed wherever perspective has. Gender stereotypes and culture have affected the evolution of both female and male gazes, and in the modern era of media, increasingly female writers and directors are introducing in-depth points of view of women that for so long have been considered peripheral in their relevance to mainstream media, especially blockbuster films.
The male gaze only is what it is considered to be today because of the time and attention it has received to allow a solid stereotype to form. Consequently, the female gaze has not had the same platform, presence, and time to allow for as solid of a stereotype to form; thus, leaving it as the term that will define itself with time, and, following the same historical process expressed in the legacy of Medusa, it will redefine over time as well. The perspective of women does not lessen when their platform does; likewise, the culture of rebellion that has characterized the modern evolution of the female gaze should not be diminished just because it has self-defined as a mockery of sexism and machismo.
The impulse to express perspective, aesthetic or sexual, leads to the search for a creative outlet because of its affirming abilities to the development and validation of identity. While gazes do evolve to fit the culture, gaze is both created and revealed by individuals and through the evolution of the collective perspective within a society. Individual voices share unique perspectives, but large stereotypical gazes (like that of the female and male gazes) only form fully if enough individuals have the platform to create.
One dimensionality of perspective is not only irritating to those excluded from the inclusion of perspective but alters the evolution of how individuals are accustomed to viewing each other/themselves when a specific manner of objectification is normalized from media sources. Identity is formed by what individuals expect to be presented to them, and how they expect to be received outwardly (i.e.: apprehension from expecting to be sexualized). The Narcissism of the ego of patriarchal film circularly influences film gazes, which in turn maintains societal expectations. These expectations rule how society continues to uphold and form personal identities, emphasizing the importance of what type of media a society chooses to partake in, because they form the overarching structure of our culture and identity.
Works Cited
Cooper, Brenda. "Chick Flicks As Feminist Texts: The Appropriation of the Male Gaze in
Thelma and Louise." Contemporary Literary Criticism, edited by Tom Burns and Jeffrey W. Hunter, vol. 183, Gale, 2004. Gale Literature Criticism, link.gale.com/apps/doc/HQOCZA871092649/GLS?u=west23105&sid=bookmark-GLS&xid=6ef72864. Accessed 8 Nov. 2021. Originally published in Women's Studies in Communication, vol. 23, no. 3, Fall 2000, pp. 277-306.
Mulvey, Laura. "Visual pleasure and narrative cinema." Visual and other pleasures. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 1989. 14-26.
Susan R. Bowers. “Medusa and the Female Gaze.” NWSA Journal, vol. 2, no. 2, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990, pp. 217–35, http://www.jstor.org/stable/4316018.
Vertinsky, Patricia. “The Erotic Gaze, Violence and ‘Booters with Hooters.’” Journal of Sport
Vertinsky, Patricia. “The Erotic Gaze, Violence and ‘Booters with Hooters.’” Journal of Sport History, vol. 29, no. 3, University of Illinois Press, 2002, pp. 387–94, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43611608.
