What is Male Gaze?

The concept behind The Feminist Gaze

Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) in Titanic, drawing the nude portrait of Rose (Kate Winslet)

To know the concept behind this publication and its name, you first need to know about male gaze.

What is male gaze?

The phenomenon that has spanned for centuries in the patriarchal world, objectifying, sexualizing, and demeaning young girls and women in art, advertisement, films, shows, and books. It refers to how females are portrayed to please and arouse the heterosexual, male viewer.

The term was coined by filmmaker and theorist Laura Mulvey in her seminal 1973 paper Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.

A prime example would be how the camera in a film fixates on the body of a woman, trying to show her in angles that arouse a man and discomfort a woman.

Sam (Shia LaBeouf) in Transformers, staring at Mikaela (Megan Fox)

How the focus is on the woman’s body rather than her acting. On her dolled-up figure in skimpy attire rather than her personality. How a lot of products use the female body to advertise, even though the product has nothing to do with her long legs or her bare back.

Art by Kevin Bolk. What if male superheroes were made to pose like female superheroes? The original poster showed Black Widow with her back to the camera.

The phenomenon is so widespread that it is accepted as something normal. Like item songs in Indian cinema and background pole dancers in music videos.

Katrina Kaif in the item song Sheila Ki Jawani

And this acceptance means even women tend to objectify other women in the content they create, and they objectify themselves to please the men in their lives.

So, I started The Feminist Gaze to criticize the male gaze when I see it and to passionately talk about film, society and literature in general.

To read more about me, my works, or to simply connect, head to bavishyatai.com