Laura Mulvey (1975)
What is the Gaze?
The concept of the gaze is one that deals with how an audience views the people is presented.
Feminists view this in 3 different ways :
- How men look at women
- How women look at themselves
- How women look at other women
Laura Mulver invented the term 'The Male Gaze' in 1975 and she believes that media is produced in the view from the perspective of a heterosexual male.
Features of the Male Gaze
Camera lingers on the curves if the females body and events that follow a presented based on the males reaction to these events.
Use of the theory in everyday life
Some theorists have noticed the sexualizing of the female body even in situations where the sexualizing of females has nothing to do with the product being advertised.
Criticism of Theory
- Beauty Pageants
- Can be directed towards members of the same gender, such as comparison of body image and/or clothing.
Categorizing Facial Expressions
Women
- Chocolate Box (Giving expression)
- Invitational (Welcoming)
- Super Smiler
- Romantic/Sexual
Majorie Fegurson (1980)
Men
- Carefree
- Practical
- Seductive
- Comic
- Catalogue (blank expression)
Trevor Millum (1975)
Key Theorists beliefs
Johnathon Schroeder (1998) "To gaze implies more than a look - it signifies psychological relationship of power in which the gaze is superior to the object of the gaze
Homework
The main reason that we couldn't answer the questions at the end of the video, was because the whole video was mainly focused on the girl. For men the first thing that we noticed in the video was the womens face, throughout the whole video we only noticed her face, meaning that we didnt take notice of the clothes she was wearing or the colour of her eyes etc.
WWW: You have explained the theory using notes and resources from the lesson. You recognised the way in which the audience focused on the woman in the music video and explained why the audience would be unable to answer questions unrelated to the woman.
ReplyDeleteEBI: You had linked the homework to the theory. How is the theory shown in the task? How is it related? You also need to fully explain certain parts of your write up as at the moment it is in note form. What has ‘beauty pageant’ got to do with criticism of theory? Why do you think men and women are represented differently when looking at their facial expressions?
SBT