Post Two - The Male Gaze

As a child I was often reprimanded for bad behavior, as most people. Whether a poor grade in school, bullying my younger sister, sneaking a snack before dinner, whatever the case may be my actions were always meet by my mother and a some kind of punishment. My mom had this routine were she would explain to me what I had done wrong and why she was so upset. As she tried to get me to comprehend her fury, I squirmed in place and kept my eyes on the ground. “Look at me,” she would say, bringing my chin up with her hand so our eyes could meet. And that was always followed by, “wait till you dad gets home.” The moment our eyes meet could my mother strongly deliver my fate that my dad was coming home to “deal” with me. It gave her the power. The moment she looked me in the eye, she had the control.

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As Bell Hooks’ states “there is a power in looking” (Hooks 115).  The gaze is simply not just an observation, but a strategic action. And the male gaze particularly is a demonstration of male power that dominates our media, art and culture. For the male gaze exemplifies how popular culture is sculpted around the heterosexual male viewer. The images that we consumed are catered to this heterosexual male appetite. Thus is why we see women being objectified in everything from a silly advertisement, to a children’s movies, even to the historic art we praise.

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But how does this affect us as women? According to John Berger “a woman must constantly watch her self” (Berger 46). He makes the claim in this society, men act while women appear (Berger 47).  Women are placed into the role of submission. He references art through the years that feature the “nude.” How the women seen in these images are always lying down and are passive. The women is no longer even a women, but an object to be prized by the male viewer. She is not nude, but naked, and these ideas about women have materialized into societies views on women.

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Shamed must she be if a woman has a high sexual appetite. She should not have agency. She must not do an action for the sake of it, but to be seen doing the action. Now, image if that women were to be a women of color. Not only is she an object but she is also a minority. Her place in these images is absent. She doesn’t see her self in the film, tv, advertisements or anything. Bell Hooks addresses this, “there was clearly no place for black women” (Hooks 120).

Yet she challenges this lack of representation of black womanhood with the oppositional gaze. She demands that we reclaims the gaze, and says that black women must “look.”  That we must critique what we see and vocalize these critiques. She encourages not only black women, but that all women recognize and understand the “politics of race and racism” (123). Bell Hooks take the arguments of Berger and Laura Mulvey who coined the term male gaze, and makes the feminist argument acknowledged the black female.

Works Cited

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: British Broadcasting, 1972. 

Hooks, Bell.  Black Looks: race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.