What is Male Gaze?
The concept behind The Feminist Gaze
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.
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.
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.
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
Which movies/series employ the feminist gaze in the most subversive manner?
The photo of the over-sexualized male members of The Avengers has me wheezing on the floor, dying.